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-Mike Gosling. Abreu has a career ERA+ of 59, and a 2009 ERA+ of 43. Gosling on the other hand has a 2009 ERA+ of 67, but a career mark of 95. In 3 of the previous 4 seasons, he was basically a league average reliever. He’s probably not worth taking a chance on, but of all the players mentioned here he could actually help a team down the stretch.
and 28 year old. Abreu has a career ERA+ of 59, and a 2009 ERA+ of 43. Gosling on the other hand has a 2009 ERA+ of 67, but a career mark of 95. In 3 of the previous 4 seasons, he was basically a league average reliever. He’s probably not worth taking a chance on, but of all the players mentioned here he could actually help a team down the stretch. On July 30th, the Atlanta Braves released 29 year old RHP-Jeff Bennett, but he didn’t go long without a job. On Saturday August 1st he was signed by the Tampa Bay Rays. Most of his numbers are terrible; 9.2 H/9 and 4.0 BB/9, but Bennett has a career 3.93 ERA and 109 ERA+. Might have been worth a look considering the dreadful state of the Royals bullpen. Of course since he was released, he was free to sign with another team and given the chance to join the Rays or the Royals …
, but he didn’t go long without a job. On Saturday August 1st he was signed by the Tampa Bay Rays. Most of his numbers are terrible; 9.2 H/9 and 4.0 BB/9, but Bennett has a career 3.93 ERA and 109 ERA+. Might have been worth a look considering the dreadful state of the Royals bullpen. Of course since he was released, he was free to sign with another team and given the chance to join the Rays or the Royals … Also on July 30th, the Houston Astros released 35 year old RHP-Russ Ortiz. He had a nice run as a starter from 1998 to 2004, but since then he has been on the Sidney Ponson career path. Not surprisingly, he remains unsigned.
There is still no update on RHP-Ryan Speier who was DFA’d by the Colorado Rockies on July 24th.
I came across an interesting post on MLB Trade Rumors.com regarding players who might be moved prior to August 31st via waiver deals. This basically amounts to throwing a bunch of names against the wall to see what sticks, but since several Royals are listed I thought I would mention it. Click here and enjoy the speculation.
Finally, and I almost hate to close on this note, Dick Kaegel posted an article on MLB.com today titled, Royals plan didn’t pan out this season. Aside from the title being gross understatement, the quotes from Moore and Hillman contained within make me want to cry and vomit at the same time. My brother-in-law, BWalt, calls it “cromiting” and if a better term exists to describe my feelings, I haven’t found it. Speaking of descriptions, delusional just doesn’t do the dynamic duo of Hillman and Moore at this point. I’d react more to this article, but my brain just can’t handle it right now. Maybe in a few days …HomeAway and VRBO, which cater to vacation rentals, list about 70 properties each in the Pittsburgh area. Airbnb lists more than 300 homes, apartments and rooms for rent in the Pittsburgh area. Rooms in apartments or houses are listed for as little as $20 a night. Entire homes and townhouses rent for thousands of dollars per night.
Allegheny County's hotel tax generated $32 million in 2014, according to the county Treasurer's Office. The office doesn't know how much revenue short-term rentals through Airbnb and other services could add, but some estimates peg it at between $1,000 and $2,000 a year per property and more than $37,000 annually for Airbnb rentals alone.
Travelers from all over the world have stayed in the Dittler family’s home in the West End neighborhood of Elliott.
Some came for Steelers or Penguins games. Others stopped in Pittsburgh on cross-country trips. The latest guests left a hand-written thank you.
Barbara Dittler, 68 and her son, Derek, 40, started using Airbnb in September to rent a bedroom and bathroom attached to their home for $50 a night. They hope to continue and were OK with Allegheny County’s effort to apply the hotel tax on Airbnb and other short-term rentals.
“I think we’re all kind of all for that,” Dittler said of a group of Pittsburghers who use Airbnb to rent out houses, apartments or spare rooms. “You always hate it when government gets involved in these transactions, but I think we’ve had a free ride so far.”
A proposal that would enable booking agents Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO and others to collect the county’s 7 percent hotel occupancy tax and pay it to the county Treasurer’s Office wasn’t ready for a scheduled vote Tuesday.
Allegheny County Council members instead sent the proposal back to the Budget and Finance Committee.
Councilman Michael Finnerty, chair of the committee, said council wanted to clarify what it means to facilitate reservations, phrase used in defining booking agents such as Airbnb.
Finnerty, D-Scott, also said some parts of the ordinance make it appear that paying the tax is optional, which it is not.
“And we’ll have to add in a penalty,” Finnerty said after Tuesday’s meeting.
Extending the hotel tax to short-term rentals appears to have wide support among council members. Seven council members are co-sponsors of the legislation. It needs eight votes to pass.
Craig Davis, CEO of VisitPittsburgh, the region’s tourism promotion agency, and John Graf, owner of The Priory Hotel on the North Side and chair of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association spoke in favor of the changes, which would treat short-term rentals and hotels the same when it comes to taxes.
County Treasurer John Weinstein has said his office sought to change the hotel tax in time for fans and golfers renting homes and apartments for the U.S. Open in June at Oakmont Country Club. He said the county modeled the changes on what Philadelphia did before the Pope visited.
Enforcing the tax has raised questions about whether the rentals comply with municipal zoning rules and if they are subject to Health Department inspections. Pittsburgh officials are talking with representatives from Airbnb about changing the city’s zoning laws, said Tim McNulty, a spokesman for Mayor Bill Peduto.
“Basically right now there are no rules on Airbnbs in the city,” McNulty wrote in an email. “The city is interested in bringing some clarity and common-sense regulation to the matter, and we’ve found that both Airbnb hosts and the organization itself are interested in the same thing.”
Oakmont’s zoning code doesn’t address short-term rentals.
“The house rental has never been an issue as far as I’m aware of,” said borough Manager Lisa Jensen. “But people turning their yards into parking lots, yes.”
The zoning code prohibits using front or side yards for parking, a common problem during golf tournaments, Jensen said.
By enforcing the tax, the Treasurer’s Office does not become responsible for the cleanliness, safety or legitimacy of the rentals, said Michael McCabe, the department’s solicitor. The county Health Department inspects and permits hotels.
“It’s a different kind of animal. We currently don’t regulate those right now. It’s a new industry,” said David Namey, program manager of the department’s Housing and Community Environment Program.
Namey said if the department received a complaint about an Airbnb or similar rental property, it would investigate.
The state Department of Revenue recently sent letters to suspected Airbnb and other rental hosts to inform them of the state’s 7 percent hotel occupancy tax requirement in Allegheny County and offer an opportunity to pay back-taxes without a penalty. They must fill out a questionnaire that asks how many properties they rent and how often. Kevin Hensil, a spokesman for the department, said the state would follow up to determine if properties should be registered and how much tax might be owed.
Julie Ransom, who rents three properties in the city through Airbnb and organized a Facebook group with about 200 Airbnb area hosts, said some people filled out the form and sent it back to the state. Some even included money to pay back taxes. Others ignored it.
“It’s not clear to me what they are going to be doing with this information. Are they going to be sending people bills? I just don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see,” said Ransom.
Aaron Aupperlee is a Tribune-Review staff reporter. 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Soil Moisture Active Passive Launch PRESS KIT/JANUARY 2015 SMAP Artists Concept Media Contacts Steve Cole Policy/Program 202-358-0918 Headquarters, Management stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov Washington 202-657-2194 (cell) Alan Buis Soil Moisture 818-354-0474 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Active Passive Mission alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov Pasadena, Calif. Rani Gran Radiometer, GSFC Role 301-286-2483 Goddard Space Flight Center rani.c.gran@nasa.gov Greenbelt, Maryland Jessica Rye Launch Vehicle 321-730-5646 United Launch Alliance jessica.f.rye@ulalaunch.com Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida George Diller Launch Operations 321-867-2468 Kennedy Space Center, george.h.diller@nasa.gov Florida Contents Media Services Information...................................................... 6 Quick Facts................................................................. 7 Mission Overview............................................................. 8 Why Study Soil Moisture?..................................................... 17 The Applications Program...................................................... 20 Science Goals and Objectives.................................................. 22 Observatory................................................................ 23 Science Instruments.......................................................... 28 Program/Project Management.................................................. 31 Soil Moisture Active Passive Launch 6 Press Kit Media Services Information NASA Television Transmission NASA Television is available in continental North America, Alaska and Hawaii by C-band signal on AMC-18C, at 105 degrees west longitude, Transponder 3C, 3760 MHz, vertical polarization. A Digital Video Broadcast (DVB)-compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder is needed for reception. Transmission format is DVB-S, 4:2:0. Data rate is 38.80 Mbps; symbol rate 28.0681, modulation QPSK/DVB-S, FEC 3/4. NASA TV Multichannel Broadcast includes: NTV-1 (formally the Public Channel) and NTV-3 (formally the Media Channel) in high definition, and NTV-2 (formally the Education Channel) in standard definition. For digital downlink information for each NASA TV chan- nel, access to all three channels online and a schedule of programming for Soil Moisture Active Passive mission activities, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. Audio Audio of the pre-launch news conferences two days before launch (L minus 2) and launch coverage will be available on V-circuits that may be reached by dialing 321-867-1220, -1240, -1260 or -7135. Briefings A mission, science and applied science overview news conference is scheduled for NASA Headquarters at 2 p.m. EST on Jan. 8, 2015. The news conference will be broadcast live on NASA Television. A pre-launch readiness briefing will be held at 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EST) two days before launch in the NASA Resident Office, Building 840, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Pre-launch science and applied science briefings will be held as part of NASA Social activities at Vandenberg Air Force Base one day before launch. These briefings will be carried live on NASA Television and on http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2. Media adviso- ries will be issued in advance, outlining details of these broadcasts. Launch Media Credentials News media interested in attending the launch should contact TSgt Tyrona Lawson in writing at U.S. Air Force 30th Space Wing Public Affairs Office, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, 93437; by phone at 805-606- 3595; by fax at 805-606-4571; or by email at Tyrona. lawson@us.af.mil. Please include full legal name, date of birth, nationality, passport number and media affiliation. A valid legal form of photo identification will be required upon arrival at Vandenberg to cover the launch. News Center/Status Reports The Soil Moisture Active Passive News Center at the NASA Vandenberg Resident Office will be staffed begin- ning four days before launch and may be reached at 805-605-3051. Recorded status reports will be available beginning three days before launch at 805-734-2693. Internet Information More information on the mission, including an electronic copy of this press kit, news releases, fact sheets, status reports and images, can be found at http://www.nasa. gov/smap. Soil Moisture Active Passive Launch 7 Press Kit Quick Facts Spacecraft Dimensions: 4.9 by 3 by 3 feet (1.5 by 0.9 by 0.9 me- ters), spacecraft bus only; antenna 19.7-foot (6-meters) deployed, 1 foot by 4 feet (30 by 120 centimeters) stowed; spacecraft stowed configuration 15.8 by 5.6 by 6.3 feet (4.8 by 1.7 by 1.9 meters); deployed con- figuration without the reflector antenna 14.1 by 15.4 by 5.3 feet (4.3 by 4.7 by 1.6 meters); deployed with the reflector antenna 31.8 by 23.3 by 22.3 feet (9.7 by 7.1 by 6.8 meters) Weight: 2,081 pounds (944 kilograms), including propel- lant and instruments Power: 1,450 watts Primary Science Instruments: L-band (non-imaging) 1.2- to 1.3-gigahertz synthetic aperture radar, L-band 1.4-gigahertz radiometer Instrument Dimensions: 4.9 by 3 feet (1.5 by 0.9 me- ters) radar (mounted on anti-sun spacecraft panel); 3-feet (0.9-meter) radius by 2.6-feet (0.8-meter) height radiometer (swept volume of spun instrument assembly, including its integrated control electronics) Instrument Weights: 108 pounds (49 kilograms) radar; 66 pounds (30 kilograms) radiometer Shared Antenna: mesh deployable offset-fed reflec- tor antenna, rotating at 13 to 14.6 rpm. Its 620-mile (1,000-kilometer) measurement swath allows SMAP to cover Earths equatorial regions within three days and Earths higher latitudes within two days. The boom and antenna together weigh 127 pounds (58 kilograms) Auxiliary Payloads Educational Launch of Nanosatellite X (ELaNa X), consisting of three Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployers containing four CubeSats (three CubeSat missions), mounted on the second stage of the Delta II launch vehicle: ExoCube GRIFEX FIREBIRD-II (A and B) Mission Launch: No earlier than Jan. 29, 2015, at 6:20:42 a.m. PST (9:20:42 a.m. EST) from Launch Complex 2 West (SLC-2W), Vandenberg Air Force Base, California Launch Vehicle: United Launch Alliance Delta II 7320- 10C Launch Window: Three minutes daily Primary Mission: Three years Orbit Path: Near-polar, sun-synchronous, 426 miles (685 kilometers), with equator crossings at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. local time. The spacecraft orbits Earth once every 98.5 minutes and repeats the same ground track every eight days. Orbital Inclination: 98.1 degrees NASA Investment: $916 million (design, development, launch and operations) Soil Moisture Active Passive Launch 8 Press Kit Mission Overview The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission is NASAs first Earth-observing satellite mission designed to collect global observations of surface soil moisture and its freeze/thaw state, data that have broad applications for science and society. High-resolution space-based mea- surements of soil moisture and whether the soil is frozen or thawed will give scientists a new capability to observe and predict natural hazards of extreme weather, climate change, floods and droughts, and will help reduce un- certainties in our understanding of Earths water, energy and carbon cycles. The mission will provide the most accurate and highest- resolution maps of soil moisture ever obtained, map- ping the globe every two to three days from space for at least three years to help scientists better understand seasonal and year-to-year variations in soil moisture and its thawed and frozen states. The mission will validate a space-based measurement approach that could be used for future space missions to systematically monitor soil moisture. The value of high-resolution measurements of soil moisture has been recognized for decades. But existing ground-based measurements of soil moisture are too sparse to show detailed variations. The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission will allow global mapping of soil moisture from space with about 6-mile (10-kilometer) resolution. What the Soil Moisture Active Passive Mission Will Do The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission will produce global maps of soil moisture that scientists and policy- makers can use to track water movement around our planet. The mission will allow scientists to better understand the processes that link Earths water, energy and carbon cy- cles. Soil moisture controls the evaporation and transfer of water and heat from Earths land surface and plants to the atmosphere. Just as perspiration helps maintain our body temperature, soil moisture and its evaporation help regulate Earths surface temperature. Climate change may have profound impacts on Earths freshwater resources in the future. Understanding how climate change may affect water supplies and food production is crucial for policymakers. Current climate models produce widely differing estimates of how much water will be available regionally in the future. The SMAP mission will help bring these estimates into closer agreement, increasing our confidence in projections of regional future water availability. The mission will improve the accuracy of short-term weather forecasts and long-term projections of climate change. Variations in soil moisture affect our weather by adding moisture to the atmosphere (or limiting water added to the atmosphere), thereby enabling cloud formation or intensifying dry spells during periods of drought. Improved soil moisture information from the mission will enhance the predictive capability of comput- er models used to forecast our weather. Over the longer term, the mission will improve our understanding of climate variability and change by improving the accuracy of models used to forecast seasonal climate outlooks. Better seasonal climate predictions benefit societal activities affected by climate. The mission will advance our ability to monitor droughts and predict floods and mitigate their related impacts on peoples lives. It will allow the monitoring of regional deficits in soil moisture and provide critical inputs into drought monitoring and early warning systems used by policymakers. The missions high-resolution observa- tions of soil moisture will improve flood warnings by providing information on ground saturation conditions before rainstorms. Hydrologists will be able to model water flow down to the scale of individual river basins. The mission will allow us to improve the prediction of crop and vegetation growth on regional and global scales, permitting better estimates of agricultural pro- ductivity and potential yield. Its space-based observa- tions will transform the accuracy and completeness of this critical driver of agriculture productivity. Improved seasonal soil moisture forecasts made possible by the mission will directly benefit global famine early warn- ing systems. Regions of the world most susceptible to famine also tend to have sparse or no crop production information. It is in these areas especially that accu- rate information from satellites will likely have a strong impact. Soil Moisture Active Passive Launch 9 Press Kit Mission data on whether soils are frozen or thawed will allow scientists to detect variations in the timing of spring thaw and changes in the length of the growing season that have a major impact on vegetation productivity and whether high northern-latitude regions and their associ- ated forests are generating or storing carbon. During the growing season, these boreal forests absorb large quan- tities of carbon. Data from the mission will help scientists determine how much carbon plants take up from the atmosphere each year, improving our understanding of the global carbon cycle and predictions of future climate change. The SMAP team is engaged with early adopters " groups and individuals that foresee immediate uses for its data. Through workshops and tutorials, the SMAP Applications Working Group is partnering with these early adopters to test and integrate the missions data products into many different types of operations and de- cision support situations. Early adopters include weather forecasters from several nations and researchers and planners from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.N. World Food Programme and other organizations. To obtain a measurement with both high resolution and high accuracy, the observatory will combine data from two instruments, an L-band radar and an L-band radiometer, in a way that takes advantage of the best features of each while working around their individual lim- itations. The instruments can peer into the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) |
stronger you can make that Pokemon. You’ll receive a generic resource called stardust for actions like leveling up your trainer, catching Pokemon, discovering new Pokemon, and more. You’ll also get candies for each species of Pokemon. Stardust and candies are how you both power up your Pokemon’s CP and evolve them. For example, you’ll need 12 Pidgey candies to evolve a Pidgey to a Pidgeotto and another 50 Pidgey candies to evolve Pidgeotto to Pidgeot. This system makes every Pokemon you find worth it and keeps you from running away or skipping weaker, low-level Pokemon since you need both the candy (three per catch) and stardust (100 per catch, an extra 500 for never-before-caught Pokemon) to make your Pokemon stronger. You can also send your duplicates back to the professor for an extra candy.
You won’t find many Pokemon by just sitting around, though. Pokemon Go wants you to get out in the real world and it entices you to do so with Pokestops, points of interest in the real world that you can visit for trainer experience and items. Most Pokestops can be found in cities at places like churches, historical sites, parks, or popular bars. The area around where I work is absolutely flush with Pokestops as is the campus near my apartment, but there aren’t any in the immediate area around my apartment complex or my parents’ house. To access a Pokestop, you have to physically go there, tap it on your screen, and spin the little icon that pops up. Items like Pokeballs, potions, revives, and eggs will be given to you for doing so.
Hatching eggs works the same in Pokemon Go as it does in other Pokemon games — by moving. Eggs come in two, five, and 10km varieties. In my ~10 hatches, it seems like Pokemon rarity correlates to the distance it takes to hatch an egg, but I did hatch a Pikachu from a two kilometer egg just last night. Eggs are hatched by placing them in incubators and simply walking. You are given one incubator with infinite uses and can both find or buy extra, limited use incubators. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was at least considering buying a bike to speed up my egg hatching process.
Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned after playing for about 15 hours and going on Pokewalks™ wherever I can think of:
You can increase the chances of catching a Pokemon by throwing your Pokeball when the circle around it is smallest.
Pokemon will avoid and deflect inbound Pokeballs, usually when the circle around them is at it’s absolute smallest.
Extra trainer experience is earned by throwing curveballs. I do them by spinning the ball in a tight circle and launching it at about a 45 degree angle.
If you are running out of items, find an area with a decent amount of Pokestops that you can complete a loop of in about five minutes, which is how long it takes Pokestops to refresh
You will see a ton of other people playing. It’s an odd social experience to play a mobile game with so many strangers out in the real world.
A menu of nearby Pokemon is on the bottom right of the screen. Pokemon can be one, two, or three pawprints away. There isn’t a consensus on how far each represents, but if the number of pawprints decreases as you are walking, you are going in the right direction.
If you find a Pokemon, others near you will find the same Pokemon. This makes going on hunts with others incredibly fun. A few of my friends were tracking an Electabuzz the other day and set off in three directions to cast a wider net. One of them found it and called the other two over.
Incense lasts 30 minutes and will draw more Pokemon to you. In my experience, you’ll see about one extra Pokemon every five minutes.
Lures are placed on Pokestops and draw Pokemon to that location for you and any other trainers around you.
If you are looking to maximize your trainer experience gain, use a lucky egg to double all experience gained for 30 minutes and evolve everything you can. Keep easy-to-evolve Pokemon like Pidgeys and Weedles, which only take 12 candies per evolution, around just for this purpose.
I’m not sure if this is true, but it seems like there are both more and cooler Pokemon found around more densely packed areas of Pokestops. I’ve had a lot more luck downtown than near my apartment.
This app will chew through your battery like none other. Between the GPS, data, and 3D map, it’s no wonder. Consider bringing an external battery with you for longer play sessions.
One of the more incredible things about Pokemon Go is just how much it gets you up and moving. I walked four miles on release day that I wouldn’t have otherwise walked thanks to this app. I can’t count how many steps and miles I’ve put in since then. Today was the first day all week that I didn’t go for a few mile walk during my lunch break.
Catching and training Pokemon is one thing, but what about the glory of being a gym leader? Pokemon Go has that covered. Once you reach trainer level five, you are asked to join one of three teams: Valor (red), Mystic (blue), or Instinct (yellow). I am a proud member of Team Valor. Certain locations will be marked as gyms which can be claimed for a team by anyone. If you find an enemy gym, you can view the Pokemon defending it and attack it if you choose. Each Pokemon that you defeat in the gym will lower the prestige of the gym. Lowering a gym’s prestige to zero sets it to neutral, allowing anyone to claim it again. You can raise the prestige of a friendly gym by defeating Pokemon in the gym. The more prestige a gym has, the more Pokemon can be left to defend it. If you find a friendly gym with open space, you can leave a Pokemon there to help hold it down. That Pokemon is gone from your group until the gym is taken over by another team.
Gym battles aren’t nearly as strategic as they are in the mainline Pokemon games. Each Pokemon has a normal attack and a special attack. You rapidly tap the screen to use your normal attack over and over which slowly fills a blue bar underneath your Pokemon’s HP. Once the bar is full, you can tap and hold to use the Pokemon’s more powerful special attack. Type matchups do matter, so you might want to screenshot or bookmark a type chart if, even after nearly 20 years of playing Pokemon games, you can’t quite remember what poison types are weak to. You can also swipe left and right to avoid enemy attacks, although the most popular strategy seems to be to just tap the screen as fast as you can.
Once every 21 hours, you can claim your gym rewards. You’ll get 500 stardust and 10 Pokecoins for each gym that you are currently a part of. Gyms are in constant turmoil, so I claim my gym reward as soon as I take over one gym in a day as I don’t think it’s worth the risk of trying to capture a second or third gym before losing the first.
Pokecoins are used for, you guessed it, microtransactions. Niantic has to make money somehow and if it’s not through ads, which it thankfully isn’t, it had to be microtransactions. There is no pay-to-win strategy in Pokemon Go, though. You truly don’t need to spend a dime. You can buy things like Pokeballs, incenses, and lucky eggs. The only purchase I can see myself making is extra incubators since I am constantly holding the maximum number of eggs while a couple hatch.
A hugely important note is that Pokemon Go doesn’t have any push notifications, so you’ll need to walk around with your phone out and the screen on. This contributes to the battery drain issue I mentioned before. You can put the app into battery saver mode which dims the screen when held upside down, i.e. when you are walking, but I’ve had bad luck with the app freezing up whenever I do that. My suggestion is to set your phone to the lowest brightness you can handle and close any other running apps when you go on a hunt.
It’s no surprise that Pokemon Go is a worldwide sensation, especially when you realize that the target demographic of Pokemon when it released almost 20 years ago was my age group which are the mid-to-late 20-somethings of today’s world. I do have concerns about the game’s longevity, though. The most notable absent feature is trading, although the CEO of Niantic has said that it is “a core element” and it is being worked on. I don’t really mind if there isn’t a way to directly battle other trainers since the “tap as fast as you can” battle method reigns supreme. But, without a way to trade Pokemon or some other way to link up with your friends, maybe with a friends list or some kind of clan/guild/team system, I can see Pokemon Go fading a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s here to stay as a mobile gaming staple. But without extra features like the ones I’ve pointed out, walking around the same locations day after day may get boring for some. I think the floor for Pokemon Go is an app that people turn on when they are out and about instead of an app that they turn on as a reason to go out and use. The ceiling, though, seems to be the sky.
Pokemon Go is lighting the world on fire right now. If you’ve ever played a Pokemon game, you’ve probably wanted to go outside and catch some Pokemon for yourself. This app lets you do just that. Battles are simple and there isn’t a way to trade (yet), but I can’t help but smile when I play Pokemon Go. The old feeling of catching a Pokemon and telling your friends is just as much fun now as it was when you played Pokemon Red or Pokemon Blue. The Facebook group I use to talk to a lot of my friends has had daily threads for a week now showcasing our best finds. I’ve gone to parks and campuses with time I would have otherwise spent on the couch. Hell, I was going to write this review last night but went out with four other people to play for about two hours. Catching ’em all has never been this immersive and you’d be missing out by not at least giving Pokemon Go a shot. If you live in the Albany, NY area, maybe I’ll see you out there.MIAMI, FL - FEBRUARY 12: Shane Battier #31 of the Miami Heat controls the ball against the Portland Trail Blazers on February 12, 2013 at American Airlines Arena in Miami, Florida. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory copyright notice: Copyright NBAE 2013 (Photo by Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images)
MIAMI (CBS4) – The awards for the Miami Heat continue to pile up this season with arguably the team’s best bench player, Shane Battier, receiving the 2013 Magic Johnson Award.
The award is given by the Pro Basketball Writers Association to a player who combines excellence on the court with cooperation with the media and fans.
Battier beat out a who’s who of stars for the award including fellow Heat stars Ray Allen and LeBron James as well as Kevin Durant, Manu Ginobli, and Dirk Nowitzki to name a few. Bosh and Allen have won the award in the past.
This was the first time Battier has been selected to win the Magic Johnson Award and is the first ever in Heat team history.Getty Images
When it comes to the salary cap, there’s a widespread belief that, once the NFL unlocks millions in new TV money in 2014, the team-by-team spending limit will spike in 2015.
That belief seems to be mistaken.
Per a source with extensive knowledge of the design and implementation of the cap, the formula will experience a “smoothing” in the coming years, with no one year resulting in a dramatic leap. The thinking is that, if the cap shoots up dramatically from one year to the next, it won’t be fair to the players who signed a big contract in the year in which the cap was lower.
The smoothing phenomenon is more likely to unfold even in 2015 because, in 2012, money from future cap years was shifted to a year in which the cap was poised to drop, due to the revenue decreases from 2011, the year of the lockout. (Even though only one game was missed during to the lockout, months of uncertainty affected fan and sponsor spending during the offseason shutdown.)
This robbing of Peter to pay Paul means that the expected growth will peter out when otherwise expected to spike.
As a result, teams that deal with current cap problems by pushing money into the future under the assumption that there will be extra space at some point could be positioning themselves for a perpetual cap purgatory.The squeeze on Hillary Clinton to relinquish the Democratic presidential nomination appeared to be intensifying last night, as party officials edged towards rejecting her demand that all votes cast in the disputed primary contests in Michigan and Florida be counted.
As they did so, there came news from the campaign of Senator Barack Obama that he has resigned from his church in Chicago in the continuing aftermath of inflammatory remarks by former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. These were an issue his opponents were unlikely to have left unexploited.
But the main drama was taking place in a Washington hotel. Meeting amid high emotion under the scrutiny of demonstrators and TV cameras, members of the party’s rules and bylaws committee worked late into the evening on a compromise package that would only partially legitimise the results of the primaries in both states. At stake were 368 delegates from Michigan and Florida whose status has been in limbo because of an earlier decision to punish those states for holding their primaries too early. Before yesterday, the position was that none of those delegates would be seated at the party convention in August.
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Mrs Clinton and Barack Obama did not campaign in either state, and in Michigan, Mr Obama was not even on the ballot. A compromise deal will mean a net gain of delegates for Mrs Clinton, but it will not help significantly to dent the delegate lead already held by Mr Obama.
This was Mrs Clinton’s last best hope of stopping the Obama train, but with no sign yesterday that the rules committee was inclined to go that far, the endgame is now upon her. All that remains are primaries in Puerto Rico today and Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday. It will then be for remaining uncommitted super-delegates to end the fight.
The dilemma faced by the rules committee and the party as a whole regarding Michigan and Florida was not small. While wanting to protect its right to enforce party rules, it also faces pressure not to be seen to be disenfranchising the voters of two states that will be vital in November.
For that reason, the Obama camp quickly made clear it was open to compromise, even if it meant narrowing its candidate’s delegate lead. Speaking on behalf of the Obama campaign with regard to Florida, Congressman Robert Wexler told the rules committee that “Florida certainly deserves to play a key
role in the nominating process”. He added, however, that Florida’s contest “was not a normal primary election” and a 100 per cent reinstatement of its delegates would be unjust.
Mr Wexler thus came out to endorse reseating all Florida delegates with a half vote for each, a move that would give Mrs Clinton a net gain of 19. “Senator Obama should be commended for his willingness to offer this concession,” he announced to a ruckus of cheers in the hall. The notion that Mr Obama was making a concession at all was hotly contested by Clinton lawyer Harold Ickes.
Michigan was a much trickier conundrum, because of the absence of Mr Obama on ballot papers. The committee was considering the legality of allocating delegates to Mr Obama proportional to the 40 per cent of Michigan primary voters who punched “uncommitted”. Mrs Clinton would get the remainder.
The Obama campaign hopes that once the last votes are cast on Tuesday night, uncommitted super-delegates will come in a rush to his column, allowing him to secure the nomination, possibly before the end of the week. In a show of confidence – some might say rash chutzpah – Mr Obama will late on Tuesday hold a “victory rally” at the same convention centre in St Paul, Minnesota, that will host the Republican Party’s nominating convention in early September.
The party leadership, including chairman Howard Dean and the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, have made clear they want the nomination struggle resolved as soon as possible after Tuesday.
Withdrawing this week is one option for the former first lady. But she has others, including appealing whatever ruling on Florida and Michigan emerges this weekend, perhaps all the way to the Denver convention. She is perfectly entitled to do so, even if it would give party grandees the shivers because of the damage it would do to unity.
Mrs Clinton argues that she is ahead of Mr Obama in popular votes in the primary marathon, if not delegates. That may just be true if you do count all votes cast in Florida and Michigan.
With that, and with the wide victory she expects to score in Puerto Rico tonight, Mrs Clinton may make one last desperate pitch to super-delegates to side with her.
Meanwhile, Mr Obama’s choice of St Paul for his Tuesday event is raising eyebrows. “It’s not too subtle,” said University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs.
For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08
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At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowOn 29 December 2014, two U.S. Army captains had to move their wedding in order to accommodate
President Obama’s golf game.
Natalie Heimel and Edward Mallue Jr. were planning to get married at the Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course at the Marine Corps Base in Hawaii that Sunday afternoon. The couple had to change locations, however, when President Obama decided to play a round of golf.
Naile Brennan, manager of K Bay Catering, the company that planned the wedding, told Bloomberg she was prepared for the president’s visit and had several alternate locations ready for the bride and groom:
“(The new location) much prettier and much nicer venue unless you’re an avid golfer. It’s more secluded and there are no golfers yelling, ‘Fore!'”
It’s unclear if the President was aware of the scheduling issue before teeing off. He was apologetic for forcing the military couple to change venues on short notice and according to Jamie McCarthy, sister of the groom, he phoned the newlyweds to congratulate them on their marriage:
“He apologized and congratulated them. (It was a) wonderful talk. We were all there, it was perfect. Made their day.”
McCarthy said the venue change was stressful for the newlyweds. Still, the couple uploaded several photos of the wedding to Instagram with the hashtag #ThanksObama:
#MallueWedding #ThanksObama14 A photo posted by Paige Walker (@pagoodes89) on Dec 12, 2014 at 4:32am PSTAfter a stunt-gone-wrong took the life of professional motorcycle racer Joi “SJ” Harris on the set of Deadpool 2, a voice has emerged with new details surrounding the tragedy.
Emerson Wong, who also performed stunts for the upcoming sequel, tells ET Canada exclusively that the original stunt double for actress Zazie Beetz was unavailable, and that Harris was brought in days before. He said that this was her first time ever performing stunt work on a film.
READ MORE: ‘Deadpool 2’ actress Zazie Beetz remembers stunt driver Joi ‘SJ’ Harris: ‘My heart is breaking’
“She was kind of brought in as a last minute backup,” Wong says, who was not working during Monday’s tragedy and did not meet Harris. “She is a professional motorcycle rider in the racing world, but because it was her first stunt job, perhaps it could’ve been because she was a bit nervous.”
Even though this was Harris’ first take as a stunt performer, Wong says she was a natural choice, since she had years of experience as a motorcycle racer.
READ MORE: Ryan Reynolds led moment of silence for stunt woman who died before filming resumed on ‘Deadpool 2’
He explains, “When they don’t have someone they need from the stunt world, they go outside and find someone from the professional world of that sport, and that’s usually how they start their careers.”
The Hollywood Reporter writes that sources in the stunt community believe Harris was hired not because of her experience, but because her skin tone was a close match to Beetz – a balance Wong says the stunt coordinator and director work to strike.
“The stunt coordinator will say, ‘Skill first,’ and the director will say, ‘I want the person to look as close as possible,’” he explains. “At the end of the day, the stunt coordinator is the boss who says ‘this is the person that’s the closest you can get, and this is what we have to work with.’”
READ MORE: Tom Cruise’s on-set injury shuts down ‘M:I 6- Mission Impossible’ production
An investigation into the accident is ongoing, but Wong maintains that the set of Deadpool 2 was “absolutely professional.” Wong adds: “Everyone there is top-notch. When I worked on there, everyone is just at the top of their game, so I know that the safety is paramount there.”
Wong has been a stunt performer in the industry for 15 years and owns a well-known martial arts and training studio, Pulse Academy, in Toronto.Today, May 2nd, marks the 16th anniversary of the geocaching phenomenon. As we reminisce on all the wonderful geocaching moments we’ve experienced over the years, it’s fun to journey back to the year 2000 to see how it all began.
A Look Back in Time
The year was 2000. Y2K had come and gone. A dozen eggs cost 89 cents. “Survivor” was in its first season. The Summer Olympics were held in Sydney. Traditional outdoor activities at the time included hiking, bird watching, and camping. But then everything changed.
The Big Blue Switch
On May 2nd at approximately midnight, the “big blue switch” was pressed and selective availability on civilian GPS receivers was removed. Twenty-four satellites around the globe processed new orders, and the accuracy of GPS technology improved tenfold. Prior to this date, only the military had the ability to receive accurate GPS readings. Now, the world and all its wonderful people could pinpoint their precise location.
The First Geocache Hide
In celebration with this new-found freedom in global navigation, a computer consultant named Dave Ulmer started The Great American GPS Stash Hunt. The idea was simple: hide a container out in the woods and record the coordinates using a GPS unit. On May 3rd, he placed a black bucket in the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon along with a logbook, pencil, and other various trade items – the first geocache. He shared the coordinates of his “stash” with an online community on sci.geo.satellite-nav and the “game” took off.
Geocaching.com
For the first few months, the stash game was played mostly by experienced GPS users who already used the technology for outdoor activities. Mike Teague, the first person to find Ulmer’s stash, began to gather other users’ posted coordinates and document them on his personal website.
Jeremy Irish, Founder of Geocaching.com, stumbled upon Teague’s site while researching GPS technology and was intrigued by the idea. He purchased a GPS device and went out on his first geocaching adventure that weekend. After an enjoyable experience, Irish decided to start a website for the activity. Adopting the newly dubbed term “geocaching” and putting his web skills to good use, he launched Geocaching.com with only 75 geocaches.
Historic Dates
–March 24, 2001: The first Geocaching Event takes place in Austin, Texas.
–August 30, 2001: The first Travel Bug® is released by Jeremy. TB1 is a rubber ducky named “Deadly Duck: Envy.” Fun fact: The image on the Deadly Duck’s Trackable page is Photoshopped to replicate this mug shot of a famous Seattle-area entrepreneur and philanthropist in his younger, “wilder” days.
–September 20, 2001: Moun10Bike places the second Geocoin in a cache near Deception Pass, Washington. He keeps the first Geocoin in his personal collection.
–April 26, 2003: The first CITO (Cache In, Trash Out) is held outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
–January 10, 2004: The first EarthCache is published in Australia.
–May 27, 2006: The first Mega-Event, GeoWoodstock 4, takes place in Texas.
–October 14, 2008: The first geocache hidden in space is published.
–March 8, 2010: Geocaching.com reaches 1 million active geocache listings.
–February 26, 2013: Geocaching.com reaches 2 million active geocache listings.
Sixteen Years Later
Sixteen years and over 2.8 million geocaches later, the game is larger and more diverse than it’s ever been. Happy birthday geocaching! It’s been a pleasure watching you grow.
How do you think geocaching will change in the next 16 years?
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PrintA Short Story by Melanie Lamaga
Once there was a poor farmer. His father had been a successful farmer, and his grandfather a rich one; but since those days, the great river that irrigated the family’s land had gone completely dry.
The people of the North Country were siphoning off the water, and the delta, once lush with birds, jaguars, and antelopes, had been swallowed by the desert. The marshes and lagoons, once full of fish, had dried into white salt flats where not even sage scrub grew.
Though the farmer loved his home, he knew it was time to leave. Weakened by years of fruitless work and heartbreak, his wife and sons had died of flu. Only he and his daughter, Perla, survived. He blamed himself for not recognizing sooner that the river was gone for good and that no amount of skill, prayer, or hauling well water would ever be enough to grow the crops.
The best opportunity for a better life lay in the North. The border was nearby, but patrolled by guards with guns. Worse, a fierce desert stretched for hundreds of kilometers in either direction.
The size of the desert meant that the guards could not be everywhere all the time, so many citizens of the South sneaked through, hoping to make their way to a farm or town and find work. Some succeeded, but many died.
The farmer would have been willing to take this risk for himself, but not for Perla. Nor could he bear to leave her behind with relatives. He chided himself for being selfish, but since his wife and sons had died, he knew if he lost Perla he would lose the best part of himself, too.
Perla was much younger than her brothers—born delicate, with a feathering of dark hair, and magic in her eyes. The family always gave her the largest portion of food, the easiest jobs, and the warmest spot by the fire on cold nights. As a result, even as her mother and brothers wasted away, Perla had blossomed into a beautiful young woman with lustrous brown skin and long, thick hair that flew behind her when she ran. Sadness now tinged her beauty, however, for she missed her mother and brothers terribly.
“I didn’t help them,” she sobbed to her father, night after night. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Shh,” he would say, holding her. “They know you love them.”
This did not comfort Perla for she knew the truth: her family had treated her like a princess, so she’d believed herself to be one. When her father had been lucky enough to kill a jackrabbit, she’d snatch the biggest piece of meat for herself. Often, although her parents and brothers had worked all day in the fields hauling water from the well, trying to coax green shoots from the dry ground, she’d refused to cook even a pot of beans for them. Now these memories haunted her.
Meanwhile, the ghost of the future haunted her father. He wandered the dusty gray fields, trying to think of where to get money to hire a guide to take them through the desert. Sacks of beans and rice were all he had. Nothing to sell, just enough to stay alive.
#
One morning, after another sleepless night, the farmer went walking, half in a daze, insensible to the beauty of the shell-pink sky.
As the white sun rose above the bones of dead trees, he stumbled into a dry arroyo, seeking shade beneath the low willows and oaks. There he saw a dusty group trudging along with bundles and packs. They told him they were going to the North, guided by the tall man with a long black ponytail and black cowboy hat who loped ahead of the group.
“He knows where to find water and the best places to hide,” they said. “They call him the Coyote King. But be careful how you speak. He is without mercy.”
Ignoring the warning, the farmer ran to the head of the line. “Take us with you, please. My daughter and I need to start a new life.”
“Sure, friend,” said the Coyote King, without breaking his stride. “If you can pay my price.”
“I have no money,” the farmer said. When he saw the look on the Coyote King’s face, he added, “I have something better than money!”
“Nothing is better than money,” the tall man growled. “It was for money that the men from the east invaded our lands. It was for money that the men from the North Country stole our water. It’s for money that I walk these people through the desert now.”
“My daughter can turn tumbleweeds into gold,” the farmer blurted. He was an honest man and didn’t plan to lie, but he felt as if some power outside him had spoken.
The Coyote King stopped walking and looked down at the farmer with a fierce gaze. “This interests me, but I warn you. If you’re lying, I’ll kill her.”
The farmer knew he was taking a great risk, but he told himself he would think of something once they’d reached the other side. Irrational, desperate hope had fallen over him like the shadow of a dark wing.
He ran home, collected his daughter, some water and food. Two hours later they crossed the border into the North Country.
The desert on the other side of the fence looked just the same: arroyos thick with tangled bushes and low trees, bordered by dusty sage scrub. Above them the sun blazed just as hot.
The farmer began to regret his lie, sick with fear for his daughter’s life. With each step his sickness grew until he lagged at the back of the line. He wanted to grab Perla and run, but the Coyote’s men watched with sharp eyes.
“Father, what’s wrong?” Perla asked, again and again.
“I’ve done a terrible thing,” he whispered, finally, and told her about the lie.
“Oh, Father,” she said, sadly. “I have no skill. I couldn’t save my mother or brothers, and now I’m going to die.”
Her father straightened. “I’ll confess to the Coyote King. I’ll beg him to kill me and spare your life.”
Perla grabbed his arm to stop him. “No! I can’t lose you, too. Please. Let me try. Maybe you were right, after all. Maybe I can do it.”
“No.” He shook his head. “The risk is too great.”
Perla began walking again, swinging her arms as she strode through the soft sand of the arroyo. “If you die, I’ll kill myself, too.”
Horrified, Perla’s father begged her to reconsider but she was resolute. “I’m not a little girl anymore. We live together, or die together. That is my decision.”
That night the group stopped in a rocky canyon. As the others searched for spots to rest, the Coyote King sent Perla into a cave with a tumbleweed and a lamp. For hours she sat and stared at the weed, praying it would turn to gold. In the light, so yellow, sometimes she imagined, almost believed… but when she looked closer she saw only worthless twigs.
Eventually, exhausted and afraid, Perla began to cry. It was then that a tiny man with skin that shone like obsidian hopped into the cave.
“Why are you crying, girl?” he asked.
“I must change this tumbleweed into gold,” she said. “Or else in the morning I die!”
The little man cocked his head and winked. “What will you give me if I do it for you?”
“All I have of value is my mother’s necklace with a silver moon,” Perla said. “But would you take the only thing I have to remember her by?”
“I like shiny things,” said the obsidian man. “As for you—wear your memory in your heart, it will serve you better there.”
With that Perla fell fast asleep on the floor. When she awoke the next morning, the tumbleweed had been transformed into a roll of pure gold wire, and the Coyote King stood over her with a smile.
“Well done, girl! I’m impressed.” He held out a hand and helped her up. She noticed he was handsome when he smiled. Her spirit lifted until he said, “Tonight I’ll bring you three tumbleweeds!”
And so, after walking all day through the hot desert, Perla found herself in another cave, three tumbleweeds before her, and no idea what to do. For hours she stared, hoping an inspiration would show her how to change them to gold. Eventually, exhausted and afraid, she began to cry. As soon as her tears dripped to the floor, the little obsidian man appeared.
“Thank goodness you’re here!” she said. “I must change these tumbleweeds into gold, or else in the morning I die!”
“What will you give me if I do it for you?” the obsidian man asked.
The girl looked down at herself. “My hair is the only thing of value I possess. But would you take the only beauty I have?”
“I like soft things to make my bed,” the obsidian man said. “As for you—wear your beauty on the inside, it will serve you better there.”
With that the girl fell fast asleep on the floor. When she awoke the next morning, her hair was short, the tumbleweed had been changed into pure gold wire, and again the Coyote King stood over her with a smile.
“You are the most amazing girl I’ve ever met,” he said. “Tonight I’ll bring you all the tumbleweeds I can find. If you turn them to gold, you’ll be my wife. You’ll have a mansion in the North with a pool, servants, and all the best food.”
“Only if my father can come, and we can send money back to our relatives in the South,” she said.
He shrugged. “Of course.”
“And I will go to school and study environmental science,” Perla blurted. She hadn’t planned to make this demand, but it was as if some power outside her had spoken.
The Coyote King narrowed his eyes. No one had dared to tell him how things would be, not for a long time. But there was something about this girl: perhaps the hope shining from her eyes, perhaps her quiet resolve. She reminded him of Pedro, the fisherman’s son he once was, before he became Coyote King. Looking at her, he remembered standing tall in his boat, singing to the sky, his net full of fat, silver fish.
He would never be that boy again. He had met the darkness in himself early, and had cultivated it the way others cultivate love. But the shadow of all he’d seen and done hung heavy on him. He could find no pleasure in being the strongest or meanest, or indeed, in anything. But with all that gold he could retire from smuggling humans—start a family, make a new life.
When Perla was alone that night, in a cave filled to the top with tumbleweeds, crying with all her might, the small man hopped in again and said, “What will you give me if I spin all this into gold for you?”
“I have nothing more to give,” she said. “But you must help me, or else in the morning I die!”
“Then promise me, if you marry the Coyote King, you’ll give me your firstborn child.”
“Yes, yes, I promise,” said the girl. She couldn’t imagine being a mother, or think of anything beyond that night and the rolls of gold that would save her life.
#
A year and a day later, Perla gave birth to a daughter. Pedro had kept his promises. He had shed the skin of the Coyote King and made Perla his wife. She went to school, and her father spent his days by the pool drinking good coffee and writing the history of his people.
Then one night, as Perla nursed her new baby, the little man with obsidian skin hopped into her room.
“You must give me what you promised,” he said.
“No!” she shrieked. “I didn’t know what I was doing. This baby is my life.” Perla clutched her daughter tighter, baring her teeth like a Coyote wife.
The obsidian man nodded his head, approvingly. “I see you’ve grown fierce like a mother should, but that won’t save your child. A deal is a deal.”
Perla cocked her head and considered. “A new bargain, then?”
“Very well,” the obsidian man said. “If, in three days, you find out my name then I’ll let you keep your child. If not, you’ll give me this one, and the next.”
Perla didn’t want to agree, but felt she had to take the chance.
While Pedro and the baby slept that night, she wrote down every |
this week are out already, so let’s take a quick glance at some featured games what the oddsmakers think will happen during “Championship Week.”
(Odds provided by vegasinsider.com)
VEGAS ODDS – CHAMPIONSHIP WEEK
ACC Championship
Georgia Tech vs. Florida State (-4): The Seminoles are trying to stay perfect on the season, while the Yellow Jackets try to play spoiler and knock FSU out of the College Football Playoff bracket. Florida State is one of the top four teams in the College Football Playoff rankings, but they have two one-loss teams ahead of them and their resume seems to take more and more of a beating each week. The ‘Noles need to survive and advance in this one and they should get a chance to defend their title. Georgia Tech ended any chance Georgia had of making the playoff when the Jackets beat the Bulldogs 30-24 in overtime.
BIG 12
Iowa State at TCU (-33): The Big 12 doesn’t have a championship game because the 10-team league plays a true round-robin schedule where every team plays every conference foe once. This matchup has big implications for the College Football Playoff. The Horned Frogs were No. 5 last week, but Mississippi State was No. 4 and lost to Ole Miss. TCU put on an impressive show on Thanksgiving, destroying Texas 48-10. If the Frogs lose this one they will have nobody to blame but themselves for being on the outside looking in at the football version of the final four.
Kansas State at Baylor: The Bears are behind TCU in the playoff rankings despite beating the Horned Frogs head-to-head. Of more concern for Baylor is the health of quarterback Bryce Petty. He left in the third quarter of the Bears’ win over Texas Tech with a concussion. He said after the game he was OK and would definitely play against Kansas State, but it will be something to monitor throughout the week. The Bears were up 35-17 when Petty left and held on to win 48-46 when Texas Tech failed on a two-point conversion to tie it. K-State dominated in-state foe Kansas 51-13. The Wildcats won’t be able to play their way in to the four-team playoff, but they can certainly end any hopes Baylor has of jumping into the bracket.
Oklahoma State at Oklahoma (-19.5): Bedlam is Bedlam, and this year’s matchup should be no different. OU’s season has been a bit of a disappointment with the Sooners sitting at 8-3, with all three losses in conference games. OSU coach Mike Gundy’s name has been mentioned in connection with other jobs the last couple years, and a win over the Sooners could make him that much more attractive to athletic directors around the country. Both teams were off this week, so they should be plenty riled up when the meet on Saturday. There are no playoff implications here, but there are recruiting implications, bragging rights and Big 12 bowl pecking order implications for sure.
BIG TEN Championship
Wisconsin (-3.5) vs. Ohio State: The Badgers won the Big Ten’s West Division and will take on Ohio State in the Big Ten title game in Indianapolis. Melvin Gordon set the Big Ten single-season rushing record last week, and had 151 yards and a touchdown against a tough Minnesota run defense. The Buckeyes defense struggled a bit against a very average Michigan team, so the Buckeyes better bring their “A” game with them to Indy – especially with quarterback J.T. Barrett out for the rest of the season after suffering a fractured ankle against the Wolverines. Backup Cardale Jones was 2-for-3 passing for 7 yards and ran twice for 18 yards in relief. The Badgers’ defense is outstanding, so Ezekiel Elliott, Jalin Marshall and Co. better be ready to run in order to open things up for Jones in the passing game.
PAC-12 Championship
Oregon (-13.5) vs. Arizona: The Ducks are sitting in the top two of the College Football Playoff rankings, and the Wildcats would love nothing more than to beat the Ducks and knock them out of the four-team playoff. Oregon has enough impressive wins to remain in the top four, but a loss would knock them out of the final four and end their playoff chances. Arizona is the team that handed Oregon its lone loss earlier this season, so if the Wildcats beat the Ducks again it can’t be called an upset. Rich Rodriguez’s team beat the Ducks 31-24 on a Thursday night. The rematch in Santa Clara is set for Friday night, Dec. 5. Arizona earned the rematch by beating in-state rival Arizona State 42-35 while UCLA played its way out of the title game by losing to Stanford 31-10.
SEC Championship
Missouri vs. Alabama (-13): Alabama sits atop the College Football Playoff rankings, but the Crimson Tide needs to win this one in order to guarantee one of the spots in the four-team bracket. Bama represents the SEC West after beating archrival Auburn 55-44 on Saturday. Upstart Missouri is often overlooked and underestimated, and it just keeps winning. The Tigers have won the Eastern Division in back-to-back years now, so it’s time to start taking them seriously. The Missouri pass rush is outstanding, and they have a very good running back in Russell Hansbrough. Quarterback Maty Mauk has played well in big games but has had consistency issues this season.
MAC Championship
Northern Illinois (-2.5) vs. Bowling Green: I know you guys love some MAC-tion, so I thought I’d include it in our Championship Week odds report. Northern Illinois has won four consecutive league titles and will make if five in a row with a win over BGSU at Ford Field in Detroit on Friday night. The Huskies are 10-2, with the losses coming to Arkansas and Central Michigan. Bowling Green is just 7-5 and enters the championship matchup on a two-game losing streak. Northern Illinois should roll in this one.
Mountain West Championship
Boise State (-17) vs. Fresno State: These two teams met in October, with Boise defeated Fresno 37-27 in Boise. The rematch is also in Boise, and Vegas expects much of the same this time. Boise State was No. 23 in the latest College Football Playoff rankings, and the Broncos are in the driver's seat to be the Group of Five representative in one of the New Year's bowls affiliated with the College Football Playoff. Boise's two loses were to Air Force and Ole Miss. Fresno won the West but is just 6-6 overall this season.'s upcoming girl group, currently simply known by their pre-debut name, has revealed 3 new members in addition to their 2 most well-known members, Choi Yoo Jung and Kim Do Yeon
After opening up their official Naver 'V Live' channel last week, members of i-Teen Girls have been introducing themselves through a series of 'Afterschool Agit' clips! The first to greet fans through the series was Choi Yoo Jung, while the�second was member Haelim, born in 1998. The third was member Sookyung, born in 2000, and fourth, fans got to greet Yejin, born in 2001.�
Although the number of members in the new girl group has not been officially confirmed, it's widely believed that the group will consist of 8, which means there are 3 more members to get to know soon!
Stay tuned for more of i-Teen Girls'�'V Live' broadcasts!Atlanta Braves outfielder Jeff Francoeur estimated that 90 percent of Major League Baseball players are in favor of stronger penalties for performance-enhancing drug use. He also said changes to the game's drug testing agreement might be necessary as a disincentive to players who are "cheating the system.''
"The system is flawed,'' Francoeur told Buster Olney on ESPN's Baseball Tonight podcast Thursday. "There's no other way around it. Guys get docked 80 games (pay) or whatever it is. Yeah, that's a lot of money. But if you sign a $60 million deal and you're losing maybe $5 million, it's worth it for a lot of these guys. It stinks because there are buddies of mine who were basically battling these guys for jobs. It's just unfair.
"I know a lot of guys that have been busted, and they're good people. I like them a lot. But at the end of the day, they're cheating the system.''
Jeff Francoeur was outspoken about the MLB's joint drug testing program and its system of penalties, which he called "flawed." Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Francoeur, a 12-year veteran with the Braves and six other teams, joins pitchers Justin Verlander and Jeremy Guthrie as the latest big leaguer to speak out against PED use and advocate for potential changes to the penalty phase. MLB's joint drug testing program calls for an 80-game ban for a first-time violation, a 162-game suspension for a second offense and a lifetime ban for a third offense.
Since January, 57 players have been suspended under baseball's minor league drug agreement, and an additional 12 have been banned under the major league portion. The 12 suspended big leaguers in 2016 are Cincinnati's Juan Duran, the New York Mets' Jenrry Mejia, Cleveland's Abraham Almonte and Marlon Byrd, Philadelphia's Daniel Stumpf and Alec Asher, Toronto's Chris Colabello, Miami's Dee Gordon, the Los Angeles Dodgers' Josh Ravin, Kansas City's Raul Mondesi, Seattle's Boog Powell and free agent Taylor Teagarden.
Gordon, the 2015 National League batting champion, received an 80-game suspension in late April after testing positive for the performance-enhancing substances exogenous testosterone and clostebol. He failed a test in spring training only weeks after signing a five-year, $50 million contract extension with the Marlins.
Although Francoeur declined to speculate on the possibility of baseball voiding contracts for players who test positive for PEDs, he expects drug testing to be a significant topic of conversation when MLB and the Players Association pick up the pace on labor talks after the All-Star break. The existing labor agreement expires Dec. 1.
"It's tough, because the union doesn't want to give the commissioner's office all this power,'' Francoeur said. "I completely understand that. But at the same time, the Players Association needs to understand the players want stiffer penalties.
"We stand our ground on a lot of issues, whether it's arbitration or free-agency rights. We fight hard for that as a union. But you're probably looking at 90 percent of players that want stiffer penalties on PEDs. I think we have to start listening to the majority of the players, and not the other way around.''
In recent months, Colabello, Stumpf and Powell are among the players who have responded to PED suspensions with statements that they took banned substances unknowingly. Francoeur said MLB has made enough resources available to players in recent years that ignorance can't be used as an excuse for failure to pass a drug test.
"For me, the only thing I'll drink is the protein shakes that MLB gives us,'' Francoeur said. "They tell us in spring training, 'Don't take it if it's not certified.' If you go to GNC and get some bogus stuff, how stupid can you be? That's your own fault. (I hear players say), 'I don't know how this got in me.' Well, watch what you put in your body."Editor's note: Yesterday marked 20 years since the passing of Brian Pillman. To pay tribute to him, Dave Meltzer and Chris Jericho discussed Pillman's life and career on the episode of Talk is Jericho that was released today.
Below is the October 13th, 1997 edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and Dave's obituary of Pillman.
**********
Even though this is the first thing you are reading, this is actually the last thing I'm writing. As you all know, a very good friend of mine passed away a few days ago. You all knew of him. Some of you knew him. This is not the first person that I've known fairly well in this business that died at a young age. Friend is a word that I'm not very liberal with, particularly when it comes to wrestling because in many cases it depends on the last word you've written about someone. But it is one that I'd use in this instance without reservation. The shock that I personally felt when Vince McMahon went on the free-for-all segment with that cut-in was like a knife going through me. But the shock was nothing compared to the sadness when the reality set in the next day. The sadness is largely for those who loved him and needed him in their daily lives and have to do without him. From a selfish standpoint, he was one of the funniest people I knew and someone, almost no matter how bad his or my situation was, he would find a way to be both humorous and entertaining.
We had a lot of strange similarities, particularly when it comes to sense of humor and being students of the wrestling business and the insanity that surrounds it, yet in other ways we were complete opposites. His insanity reminded me of my high school days. We were at different ends of the business with different pressures. The business contributed to his craziness. Dealing with the craziness of this business forced me into the other direction. Whenever one of those weird things that somehow always happens in wrestling, and can only happen in wrestling, he'd say about how if we were in baseball, football or basketball, that none of this could ever happen and we'd never have all these entertaining stories to joke about. There are a lot of people who knew him and were very sad this weekend that had to perform, and a lot of decisions that had to be made under a lot of pressure. If things seemed strange or if people seemed distracted while performing, I hope everyone understands. I expect there will be a lot of criticism of several people and decisions that were made, and under other circumstances I'd probably agree with a lot of them and can't say I disagree with them now. There will be a lot of people very critical of themselves and their own decisions. Usually in life if you make a mistake, you have the chance to rectify it. But sometimes mistakes have absolute results that can't be rectified. Those are the ones hardest to deal with. I've been doing this for 15 years, and this was the hardest issue I've ever had to write.Pundits across the political spectrum have been quick to use the weekend's tragic mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater as a means of pushing various threads of partisan rhetoric.
Bryan Fischer, the oft-quoted mouthpiece of the American Family Association, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, tying the mass shooting first to a general breakdown in Judeo-Christian values, and most recently to the public school system's teaching of evolution.
The Raw Story published comments made Monday by Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the fundamentalist Christian organization, during his daily radio show, "Focal Point." In an impressive feat of extrapolation, Fischer linked the massacre to “the liberals’ way” of teaching the theory of evolution and preventing prayer in schools.
Fischer wondered aloud if bestselling author and California magachurch evangelical Reverend Rick Warren was referring to the alleged shooter, James Holmes, when he tweeted, “When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it."
"If this tweet was connected to the shooting, to this James Holmes, to the one that killed the 12 and wounded the 58 in this theater, it would be appropriate,” Fischer said.
Fischer went on to blame Holmes' murderous tendencies on Charles' Darwin's principle of survival of the fittest.
"[Holmes] sees himself as evolutionarily advanced just like he was taught in school about Darwin, that this is how natural selection works," Fischer said.
Fischer then moved on to also blame the killings on the end of organized prayer in schools. The Supreme Court prohibited state-sponsored prayer in schools in two landmark cases in the early 1960s: Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington School District v. Schempp one year later.
"We have spent 60 years telling God to get lost,” Fischer said. "What if every single day in [James Holmes'] educational process, there had been readings from the word of God... Who knows if things could have been different. But we’ve tried it the other way. The point of my column, we’ve tried it the liberals’ way for 60 years now. What do we got? We have massacres in Aurora.”
Fischer did not mention the fact that James Holmes' family belonged to the Penasquitos Lutheran Church for about ten years, as originally reported by the Associated Press. Holmes' mother still attends services there regularly.
The American Family Association is no stranger to controversy. In comments made during a segment of the AFA Journal program on Friday and reported by Right Wing Watch, AFA news director Fred Jackson, co-host Teddy James and guest Jerry Newcombe of the Truth in Action Ministries suggested that violent incidents in America, including in Aurora, were evidence of God's judgement.
"The AFA Journal has been dealing with denominations that no longer believe in the God of the Bible," Jackson said. "They no longer believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, they teach that God is OK with homosexuality, this is just increasing more and more. It is mankind shaking its fist at the authority of God."
"And God will not be silent when he’s mocked, and we need to remember that," James said, to which Jackson replied, "We are seeing his judgment. You know, some people talk about ‘God’s judgment must be just around the corner,’ we are seeing it."All or nothing.
Go big or go home.
There is something appealing about these ideas; going all out for something. It’s inspiring because deep down, we all want to give life our best shot. But there is a dark side to this, and it has nothing to do with Star Wars this time.
All or nothing is associated with bravery, courage, and guts. But let’s not forget that one of the possibilities in all or nothing is nothing. Getting it “all” is great, but getting nothing is the worst! This effect is exacerbated when it comes to personal growth.
The Flaw In All Or Nothing Thinking
Have you ever decided to do something productive, only to cancel it later? I ran into this scenario recently. I was going to go to the gym, until I realized I had no clean gym shorts, so I decided that I would go tomorrow. This seemed fine, but it wasn’t, and here’s why…
I thought that because I couldn’t go to the gym, I couldn’t exercise. I wanted to exercise, but the all or nothing mindset made me think I had to choose nothing. At this realization, I dropped and did some push-ups, and then pull-ups. I did something. The next day, I went to the gym too.
The all or nothing mindset causes us to do nothing sometimes, which hurts our progress in life. We do it because it’s easy to underestimate the double benefit impact of doing a little bit instead of nothing. The error in calculation is thinking that because the full amount is great, that anything less than that isn’t. That’s a lie. Consider these two benefits of doing just a little bit…
Benefit #1 – Small quantities are insignificant alone, but when added up over time, they can have a dramatic positive impact on your life. Writing 100 words a day is enough to write a book in one year. Four push-ups a day is more than 1,000 push-ups in a year, and you WILL feel a difference from even this small amount.
Benefit #2 – Once you start something, you might continue it.
Why All Or Nothing Thinking Is A Failing Strategy
Going all-in in poker. Putting all of your money on red in roulette. Trying for a 2-point conversion to win the game instead of tying it with an extra point.
What do these have in common? Pressure. When you assume an all or nothing mindset, you drastically increase the pressure on yourself to perform. Let’s dissect pressure – is it helpful or hurtful?
Consideration #1: What does pressure do to us?
Pressure is a form of stress, which has been shown to increase habitual behavior (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 36, 499-511). When we feel pressure, the brain resorts to what it knows best – habits. Habits are proven behaviors, and anything else would seem too risky in a high stress situation. This is why high-pressure situations are so difficult – we’ll want to do something bold, but our brain will want to do the same old. That was an awkward sentence, but it rhymed.
Habits may work fine in some cases, like when an NBA player needs to make a free throw, he should rely on muscle memory. But in cases of personal growth, it’s bad news every time. The idea of personal growth is to change yourself for the better, and if you’re relying on old habits, you obviously aren’t changing. So when the time comes to go to the gym, for example, you’ll think in all or nothing terms, and that pressure will coerce your mind into a habitual way of thinking. And just like that, you’re back in a rut!
Consideration #2: Are big accomplishments really better than small ones?
I realize it’s bold to make a comparison between a big accomplishment and a small one. I mean, one is bigger! But when it comes to personal growth, bigger isn’t king, consistency is. Consistency forms habits, which are the framework of every human life.
If one of these would allow us to have greater consistency, then it would technically be better. When you think about it this way, consistent smaller accomplishments are better than sporadic big ones. This is a moot point if you’re able to perform bigger accomplishments with regularity, but that’s easier said than done.
All or nothing thinking holds you back. I hope you can see how ineffective it is for lasting change. Here is a fantastic alternative.
Change Your Strategy To “A Little Bit Or Nothing”
This is my strategy, but I also remove the nothing part, by forcing myself to do small behaviors every day. I call it Mini Habits. I started with one push-up a day, and later, added writing 50 words and reading two pages in a book every day.
My results? I’m in the best shape of my life. (I can now do 16 pull-ups in a row, which is one way I measure that.) I’ve written approximately 3-6 times as much as I did before, which is how I wrote a book while writing 4,000 word guides for my blog and frequent guest posts. I’ve also read 6 books in the last three months, which is 8-10 times as many as I used to read. It’s not me and I’m not boasting – I had tried and failed to do this for the last decade! It’s the Mini Habits strategy that works so well. It keeps you moving forward.
When I removed the pressure to perform and forced myself to take these small steps, I ended up doing quite a bit more. Before this, I tried to do everything, and ended up doing nothing. When I was blown away by my results, I sought to understand why. “Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results” is where I documented the science, theories, and reasons behind why this works so well. It’s also a guide to help you create your own Mini Habits.
Others are reporting early success using this strategy, and I’m not surprised, because it’s based on overcoming the key limitations we have (willpower, among others). As I wrote in the book, “when you never lose, you tend to win.” For a comprehensive look at what makes this strategy work and how to do it, pick up Mini Habits on Amazon. It will be 50% off until January 2nd.MOMENTUM! TRUMP Takes 2 Point Lead in COLORADO – 5 Point Lead in OHIO
MOMENTUM!
Donald Trump took the lead from Hillary Clinton in battleground states Colorado and Ohio in the latest polling.
Trump leads Hillary by 2 points in swing state Colorado.
The Denver Post reported:
The latest polls show the Republican closing the gap with Hillary Clinton in a state where Democrats felt so confident that they diverted millions in television advertising to other battlegrounds. A Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week gave Trump a narrow edge in a two-way race, 43 percent to 41 percent — his first lead in Colorado in the 2016 election. It follows two other recent polls showing the presidential race as a dead heat or within 5 percentage points.
And Donald Trump is up by 5 POINTS in battleground state Ohio.
Bloomberg reported:
Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in a Bloomberg Politics poll of Ohio, a gap that underscores the Democrat’s challenges in critical Rust Belt states after one of the roughest stretches of her campaign. The Republican nominee leads Clinton 48 percent to 43 percent among likely voters in a two-way contest and 44 percent to 39 percent when third-party candidates are included. The poll was taken Friday through Monday, as Clinton faced backlash for saying half of Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables” and amid renewed concerns about her health after a video showed her stumbling as she left a Sept. 11 ceremony with what her campaign later said was a bout of pneumonia.The Mets have made Bartolo Colon available in trades, ESPN New York’s Adam Rubin reports. The team isn’t thought to be seriously negotiating a Colon trade at this time, though a Major League source thinks the Mets will start hearing more offers on the veteran right-hander over the next week.
It was reported last week that the Mets were listening to offers for the 41-year-old Colon, who fits as a trade chip given his contract ($3.75MM remaining this season and $11MM in 2015) and the fact that New York has the young pitching depth to take Colon’s spot in the rotation both this season and next. The Mets could wait until past the July 31st deadline to move Colon and “it is not a foregone conclusion that he will be dealt” at all, Rubin writes.
The Mets’ deadline needs include a power-hitting left fielder and a shortstop who can supplant Ruben Tejada, Rubin reports, though these pieces wouldn’t necessarily come from a Colon trade. (While Colon is still pitching effectively, his age will likely prevent the Mets from landing a true impact young player in return.) The Diamondbacks and Cubs stand out as teams with a possible surplus at shortstop, and the Mets have been connected to Didi Gregorius in the past, though Rubin hears that Tony La Russa is still evaluating Arizona’s roster and may wait until the offseason for major moves.
As for the Cubs, the addition of Addison Russell to an organization that already has Starlin Castro in the bigs and star prospect Javier Baez at Triple-A would seem to make them trade partners for the Mets as well. Rubin says that Baez “is believed to be a more realistic target” for the Mets, though it would take a major deal to get Chicago to part with a player who is a consensus top-10 prospect in baseball, despite Baez’s underwhelming Triple-A numbers this season.
To create room in the outfield, the Mets are trying to find trades for Chris Young and Eric Young Jr. Neither player is enjoying a particularly strong season, though Young Jr. will be more attractive to other teams due to his speed (25-for-28 in steals) and two remaining years of team control, whereas Chris Young is owed over $3MM for the rest of the year.This isn’t getting anywhere near the same amount of oxygen in the news cycle as the Net Neutrality story, but it certainly should be.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the tenure of Barack Obama was busy handing out all sorts of goodies to the unions which finance most Democratic political campaigns. One particular burr under the collective, conservative saddle was a new “reinterpretation” of rules regarding the obligations of larger corporations who authorize the operation of franchises under their name. I wrote about this back in 2015 when the rule was originally finalized and it was a deplorable situation. The NLRB was basically trying to hold parent companies responsible for acting as the HR departments for all of their privately owned and managed franchises and subcontractors. This was an obvious backdoor for collective bargaining agreements and the biggest targets of the Democrats on this front were in the fast food industry. (McDonald’s actually only owns about 30% of the restaurants you see. The rest are franchised.)
Now, with some new, Trump appointed blood at the NLRB, that rule has been reversed. (NLRB website)
In a 3-2 decision (link is external), the National Labor Relations Board today overruled the Board’s 2015 decision in Browning-Ferris Industries, 362 NLRB No. 186 (2015) (“Browning-Ferris”), and returned to the pre–Browning Ferris standard that governed joint-employer liability. In all future and pending cases, two or more entities will be deemed joint employers under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) if there is proof that one entity has exercised control over essential employment terms of another entity’s employees (rather than merely having reserved the right to exercise control) and has done so directly and immediately (rather than indirectly) in a manner that is not limited and routine.
This sounds like some dry legalese which could put some readers into a coma, but the distinction being drawn here is important. The phrase Joint Employer is critical here. When a subcontractor or franchise owner agrees to have the parent company exercise direct, immediate control over their personnel policies (rather than simply issuing “guidelines” which are left up to the smaller unit to implement and enforce) then the parent company is a true joint employer. In such cases, workers may wish to collectively bargain with the parent company or hold them accountable for labor law violations.
But when the subcontractors are left to manage their own HR affairs or the franchise owner is basically just renting out the brand name of the company, those conditions do not and should not apply. The NLRB has now wisely conceded this point. Of course, the description you’ll get of this story at the New York Times takes a decidedly different tone.
The ruling changes the standard for holding a company responsible for labor law violations that occur at another company, like a contractor or franchisee, with which it has a relationship. The doctrine also governs whether such a corporation would have to bargain with workers at a franchise if they unionized, or whether only the owners of the franchise would have to do so. While most labor law experts expected the labor board, which gained a Republican majority only in late September, to overturn the board’s so-called joint-employer decision from 2015, the speed of the change came as a surprise to many. “Frankly, it’s shocking,” said Wilma B. Liebman, a former Democratic appointee on the board who once served as its chairwoman.
Oh, yes. It must be shocking indeed that the NLRB would ask the business owners who are actually employing the workers and are directly responsible for them to deal with labor law enforcement or collective bargaining. And they’re additionally shocked at how quickly it happened. Quickly? Trump has been in office for almost a full year. It took some time to get new appointments in place, but frankly, I’m personally shocked that it took this long.
As I mentioned above, this distortion of the rules under the Obama administration was primarily a sop to the unions who have been trying to go after the fast food industry for decades. In 2014 the NLRB sanctioned McDonald’s for the actions of a few franchises who they claimed had “punished” people who protested fast food restaurants. This effort later morphed into the Fight for 15 movement which has always targeted McDonald’s and the other big fast food chains. (It’s also why they’re now moving more and more to automation and simply eliminating jobs.)
It’s good to see the NLRB exercising some common sense. If you have a problem with your employer, take it up with your employer. Not with the company that they may be renting your services out to or simply paying for permission to uses their brand name.Metro has taken its first step toward turning 8.5 miles of ugly, abandoned railway that cuts through South Los Angeles into a bike path and much-needed green space.
Metro is looking at the blighted railway that starts at the Los Angeles River just south of downtown at Redondo Junction. It curves southwest and runs along Slauson before dipping southwest again toward Inglewood. The path would end at the West Boulevard Station, which will be a part of the Crenshaw/LAX Line.
So far it sounds like just about everyone likes the idea. Bikers and walkers and even stroller-pushers in the area love the idea of having their own space to bike safely. "I see folks there walking, I see them biking. I see folks pushing strollers in conditions that most of us would not want to be pushing baby strollers, and moving and trying to get to work," Jameca Marshall, a life-long resident of South Los Angeles, told KPCC.
People who complain that South Los Angeles is shortchanged when it comes to green space love it (South Los Angeles has less than 2 acres of park space for every 1,000 residents, while West Los Angeles has more than 50.) Metro doesn't have any plans to use those rails right now, and just about everyone agrees that the rails are unsightly. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who chairs the MTA board, said, "This is one of the ugliest corridors in Los Angeles right now. One of the most blighted, most poorly designed, most overgrown."
The only problem? Money. The project could cost $35 million altogether and take 10 years. And right now, Metro has no clue where that money would come from—at this point, it would have to come from other projects in the works.
Garcetti advised that in the initial stages, they shouldn't worry: "money begets money." In other words, if Metro starts funding the project, it will be easier to find other streams of money, like grants and government funds, to finish the job.
So that's exactly what Metro did. Last week they approved a $2.85 million plan to get the ball rolling. They're looking to places like the High Line in New York City or closer to home, the Chandler Bikeway in Burbank and the Whittier Greenway Trails. (For Burbank, the toughest part of converting their railway to a bike trail was making sure that they designed it in a way that one day it could be converted back into a railway.)
Earlier this year, The Grist explored what made Minneapolis a great biking city. It turns out its greenway network that gives cyclists their own sort of freeway system is the secret. Heather Smith describes what it's like biking on a designated path not just for pleasure but to commute:
Here was the thing that was missing for the first time since I became a bicycle commuter: fear. I wasn’t listening for cars behind me. I wasn’t listening for the sound of a car-door latch, which might mean that I was about to get doored. I wasn’t watching cars up ahead for signs that they weren’t paying attention to what they were doing. One of my closest calls as a cyclist happened when a Snap On Tools truck drifted into the bike lane early in the morning. “Oh sorry!” yelled the driver out his window, when he realized he had almost run me over. “I didn’t see you!” “That’s not good enough,” I yelled back, politely. “You have to pay attention.” In Minneapolis, none of this was happening. Except for a few minutes at the beginning and end of every trip, there were were no cars around me at all. I had been transported to a magical land of cyclists and pedestrians.
And it might take a decade, but maybe this sort of magical commute could become a reality for South Los Angeles residents heading to a job downtown.Back in July I wrote a piece which questioned how effectively the Red Cross was spending the massive amounts of money which generous donors send to them to perform their missions of mercy. The answer, unfortunately turned out to be that it’s a trade secret. Still, even with disturbing questions like that hanging over it, I found it difficult to be too critical of an organization which so diligently shows up to provide relief to the needy, particularly in times of crisis. But a new, extensive report from Pro Publica has raised disturbing questions about not only inefficiency in the management of the organization, but in their motives and methods to keep the public in the dark.
I caught wind of this story at Bloomberg, where Barry Ritholtz compiles a list of sins which go beyond simply failing to pack enough batteries for the flashlights.
• Despite plenty of advance warning of Sandy, the Red Cross lacked basics such as food, blankets and batteries to distribute to victims after the storm. • Red Cross workers weren’t provided with the usual GPS devices. Many got lost driving around the New York area and were unable to deliver aid and supplies. • As many as half of the emergency meals prepared for Sandy victims were wasted or never delivered. • The Red Cross failed to deliver food, water, shelter, cleaning supplies, blankets to survivors of Sandy until weeks after the storm. Mormon and Amish volunteers, on the other hand, were delivering supplies just three days after the storm. • Red Cross supervisors ordered dozens of empty trucks to be driven around, “just to be seen,” in lieu of delivering relief supplies.
The last item on the list – along with similar, shocking events in the report – speak of a media diversion tactic, not just poor logistical management. There is a difference between making a mistake, being bad at your job, and spending time and resources to try to hide exactly how badly you are doing from the public. The coverage of the activities of the Red Cross in recent years seems to document a slow progression between those three stages of #fail, as the kids like to say.
Last year I was down in Tennessee covering the VW auto workers union debate and happened to speak with a person who told me that they never donated blood any more during the company Red Cross blood drives. The reason given was that they just stockpile it and sell it all, so it’s not like poor people in accidents are getting it for free. I wrote that woman off as some sort of conspiracy theorist and went on my merry way. But the more stories like this I saw, the more I began to wonder if I was writing her off too quickly.
And then I saw this. We should never assume that anyone is beyond scrutiny, no matter how much of a charitable icon they may be.Irish child abuse: The Ryan Report |
Flyers that night, including his first power play goal of the season. It is, however, curious how he has posted just one multi-point game since then. He had 12 in his first 29 outings.
It should also be noted that Manning hasn’t exactly established himself as an all-star since the Dec. 8 meeting. Manning was a healthy scratch vs. St. Louis on Dec. 28 and is a minus-5 in in nine games (zero points) since the Edmonton game. But some players have a knack for playing well against certain superstars and inflicting frustration on hockey’s best players. Longtime Flyers defender Chris Therien was seemingly always able to slow down Jaromir Jagr. Brandon Dubinsky has found a way to get under Crosby’s skin. Perhaps McDavid will continue to bring out the best in Manning — even if it’s only twice a year.
Maybe we will find out when the two teams reunite in Edmonton on Feb. 16.
Maybe Manning will have a warm welcome waiting for him in chilly Alberta that night.
He probably shouldn’t bet on it.
Commentshas been out of the Star Trek game for a long time, but it’s a game he loved and remains thrilled to have been associated with, and he won’t rule out returning to it one day. Moore, as most fans know, wrote and/or produced The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and, briefly, Voyager, as well as the features Generations and First Contact. Post-Star Trek, Moore struck gold with the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica and also worked on Caprica and Virtuality. He just signed a deal to executive produce a new series entitled Helix. Moore is about to get busy with Helix, but followed through on his promise to StarTrek.com to answer Trek questions posed mostly by you, the readers. So, below is part one of our interview, and be sure to visit StarTrek.com again tomorrow to read part two.
We've got a few questions to start things and then 15 from the fans themselves. How amazed are you that people are still interested in your work and your experiences, some of which date back nearly 25 years now?
Moore: Star Trek, to me, was always Kirk and Spock and those guys. On an inner level, Star Trek was always bigger than what I did. And it’s really amazing now to meet people and talk to people who loved the shows I worked on and the stories that I participated in. They want to hear tales about Patrick Stewart. They want to know what it was like to work on the Paramount, things that were just part of my commonplace existence. It’s gratifying. It’s great. It’s really, really nice to remember and share and look back at it from this kind of distance.
Many fans wrote variations of this question: Of all the episodes and films you wrote for Trek, which ONE are you most proud to have your name on? And why that episode or movie?
Moore: Wow, that’s kind of hard, and my answer to that varies a lot. Looking back, I sometimes forget some of the ones I’m tickled by. But I go back again and again to “Tapestry” and also to “All Good Things…” “Tapestry” meant a lot to me personally. I was sort of telling a story of my own views and things that I felt were profound mistakes of judgment that then later turned out to be the very events that allowed me to go work on Star Trek. So that was very personal to me. And “All Good Things…” turned out like a dream, and it was such a great, wonderful ending to the show. I remain very, very proud of that. But there’s a lot I’m proud of. My son is 14 and I’ve been showing him Star Trek, and I’ve got him up to Next Generation. As he’s going through seasons and asking about episodes, I’m going online and looking up the episodes again. I keep going, “Oh, I haven’t thought about ‘Relics’ in ages" or "I haven’t thought about…" I get to another one and think, “Oh God, I love that episode.”
TNG'S "Relics"
Syfy just announced that Helix is green lit as a series, not just a pilot, and that it will debut this year. How excited are you to get a new show on the air, and how does it change things to know you have 13 episodes and it's not all riding on the pilot?
Moore: I’m very excited. It’s great to have a show on the air. It’s all about getting stuff on the air. I hate the pilot business. Everybody in this town hates the pilot business. It’s nice to see that it’s starting to go away bit by bit because it’s just a bad business to be in. It’s a tremendous amount of effort, a tremendous amount of energy and money that ultimately is wasted, and it doesn’t seem to improve the process, doing a pilot first. So just going to series is really great. That’s becoming a more common thing and you’re seeing more networks do it – because it just makes sense. Instead of spending all this money on one atypical episode and then trying to judge it, they sort of buy in on the concept and maybe the pilot script and then order the whole series. It costs everybody involved a lot less and everyone is much satisfied being in the business of making television episodes instead of just playing the numbers game in the pilot business. So it’s a positive trend and hopefully more and more networks will start doing this.
When will casting and then production begin?
Moore: We’re ramping up into both. Steve Maeda is going to be the day-to-day showrunner. I’m supervising this project as an executive producer. It’s a script written by another writer, developed at Sony, and they brought it to me. I really liked it, and then we took it to Syfy and said, “Here’s the outline of what the first season would be like. Here’s our vision for the show,” and on that basis they green lit it. We then reached out to Steve to run it day to day while I develop various other projects. I’m developing a series called Outlander for Starz, which is based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon. The idea would be to do a season a book, and she’s done seven or eight books at this point. It’s sort of a big adventure period piece with a romance at the heart of it. If all goes well, they’d also go straight to series and not do a pilot first. So, we’re hopeful.
OK, let’s switch to the fan questions. Josh Lee wrote: I want to know if he misses Star Trek on TV, both as a fan and as a very creative voice?
Moore: I do. I think that Star Trek, in its DNA, is a television show. The features are great. They’re a lot of fun and they’ve certainly opened it up to a lot of different audiences, but the features all are basically atypical episodes, if you think about it. The features are very big action-adventure movies, lots of spectacle, run and jump, shoot-em-up and blowing things up. The fate of the Earth, or the universe itself, is always at stake. It’s always about the captain, and one other character has a strong B-story, and everyone else sort of has very small roles beyond that. But Star Trek, as originally conceived, and as you saw play out in all the other series, was really a morality play every week, and it was about an ensemble of players. They were exploring science fiction ideas, sociological ideas and moral ideas. That’s really what the shows are about, and the movies are just pitched in a different way and at a different audience. The movies will do a story where the captain is split in two by a transporter accident and one half is evil and one half is good, and the whole story is about where does the nature of a man’s strength come from? What makes a man a man? Is it his good side? His bad side? Or how the two come together to make something greater than the sum of its parts? The movies will never do that. They’ll never do a day-in-the-life story with Data or something like “Lower Decks,” where you go explore the other characters. They’ll never do all the things that all of us who are fans fell in love with this franchise for. So I think, at some point, Star Trek will return to television, and that would be great. I’d love to watch the weekly adventures again just because it gives you an opportunity to explore lots of other things besides the action-adventure component.
TNG's "Lower Decks"
David Di Troia asks: Apart from being more expensive to produce, why do you think sci-fi has such a stigma in the eyes of network executives? Do you think the days of 20ish episodes per season are over?
Moore: Well, the episode orders really vary depending on the perception of the network and the show’s viability. Science fiction pieces typically have a lot of heavy post and visual effects, which makes it hard to do that many episodes a season. But, you know, on a successful piece they’ll order as many episodes as they can get. In terms of its perceptions, science fiction as a genre has a very checkered history on broadcast network television. There really aren’t that many successful models. Even the original Star Trek series, which ran three seasons, was generally considered a failure when it ran in the 60s, even though the ratings it got then, people would kill for now. There have been various attempts over the years to do a space opera, hardware-oriented, futuristic, flying-around-in-spaceship shows, and none of them have really succeeded. The ones that have succeeded are things that looked much more like contemporary society, with a little bit of sci-fi sprinkled in. The X-Files was very successful. Fringe did well. But these are shows that take place in our world and have sci-fi around the edge, per se. That’s probably too strong, but the sci-fi is not dramatized by people getting in spaceships and flying around, which is really Star Trek’s and Star Wars’ stock in trade. And the networks have just not been able to put that on the air successfully.
Dino Monzon wants to know: Why weren't any DS9 characters used in First Contact? Having Capt. Sisko on hand would’ve been cool as he also had a history with the Borg, and perhaps the Prophets could've intervened during the Borg invasion of the Federation.
Moore: I think we talked about having Quark in it at one point, but that didn’t work out. I don’t remember the reasons why it didn’t happen. I think it was budget or schedule, and it kind of went by the boards. Technically speaking, Worf was a Deep Space Nine character at that point, and so was the Defiant, and they were in the film. But I think there was a bigger strategic choice that was made above my head and Brannon’s to not cross-pollinate too many of the Star Trek franchises. They kind of wanted them to have their own fan bases and integrity. I think they were also trying to make First Contact as friendly to the first-time Trekkie as possible and there was probably a feeling that once you start bringing in characters from other franchises, you really have to explain it and do more backstory.
Tracy Tobias wonders, Do you get sick of fans accusing you of "Killing Kirk?”
Moore: (Laughs) Actually, no one has said that to me in a really, really long time.
"Kill me?... HA."
Check back tomorrow to read part two of our interview with Ronald D. Moore.Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.
While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation:
* I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever.
* I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and of course unexpected) emergency surgery.
* I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing that patience.
Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.
A few months ago, I decided the only way to balance was by stepping back from my job. MongoDB is a special company. In my nearly 4 years at the company, we have raised $220 million, grown the team 15x and grown sales 30x. We have amazing customers, a great product which gets better with every release, the strongest team I have ever worked with, and incredible momentum in the market. The future is bright and MongoDB deserves a leader who can be “all-in” and make the most of the opportunity.
Unfortunately, I cannot be that leader given the geography of the majority of the company in New York and my family in California.
I recognize that by writing this I may be disqualifying myself from some future CEO role. Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so. At first, it seemed like a hard choice, but the more I have sat with the choice the more certain I am that it is the right choice.
In one month, I will hand the CEO role to an incredibly capable leader in Dev Ittycheria. He will have the task of leading the company through its next phase of growth (though thankfully not of commuting across the country while doing it!). I know the company will be in great hands; his skills fit our next phase of growth better than mine do. And I will be there to help (full time, but “normal full time” and not “crazy full time”) in whatever areas he needs help. More about the announcement can be found in today’s press release.
I hope I will be able to find a way to craft a role at MongoDB which is engaging, impactful, and compatible with the most important responsibilities in my life. As great as this job has been, I look forward to creating one which is even better.
— MaxPortland May Day rally 2017
Police detained several protesters in Portland's May Day rally following outbreaks of vandalism.
(Dave Killen/Staff)
This letter is in response to The Oregonian's "Portland must be done with punk fascists" editorial of May 5 and its invitation for responses to the May Day police actions.
What do anarchists want? Anarchists want a society free of racism, class exploitation, misogyny and ecological ruin. Anarchists want everyone to have access to free health care. Anarchists want to live in a way that doesn't necessitate imperialist wars. Anarchists want a society that doesn't change the climate. Clearly, this society does none of those things, and, therefore, anarchists want fundamental social change.
We can debate tactics and strategy, but we need to be consistent in our uses of terms. Fascists believe in white supremacy, genocide and an authoritarian state. Anarchists are the opposite of fascists. All those anarchists who died fighting fascists - in Spain in the 1930's and elsewhere - could attest to this. They gave their lives for their ideals.
The black bloc anarchists on May Day confronted a violent police attack on working families when the police cancelled the parade permit and attacked innocent people using tear gas, concussion grenades and baton charges. It is fortunate that a section of the march, those in the black bloc, was prepared for this heavy-handed over-reaction to some thrown Pepsi cans. Our focus should be on violence by the police. The Oregonian's attempt to deflect attention from the true brutality exhibited on May Day - that of the police - is apparent.
While I do not speak on behalf of anarchists, for over 20 years I have been part of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, a grant-giving, educational, 501(c)3 non-profit organization and for the last nine years have been part of its journal collective, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.
Paul Messersmith-Glavin, Southeast PortlandIt's probably a real test of character, living in 97 square feet through the long, dark Yukon winter in Pelly Crossing, three hours north of Whitehorse. It's also a real test of design and construction; the temperature gets down to -50°C (-58°F).
A few years back Kim showed Laird Herbert's Leaf House and I admired its aesthetics and roofline; Now, with Leaf version 3 he has taken the concept to a whole new level of technical sophistication.
It's a simple interior, with a Murphy bed instead of what has almost become a standard, the loft bed. This allows for a smaller volume and lower ceiling, and helps reduce the weight. In fact, weight has become a bit of an obsession here, and the house weighs less than 5,000 pounds. This is really important if you are going to move this a lot. It is also hard to do if you are building for this kind of climate.
So to keep the weight down, the cladding is simply galvanized mesh normally used to reinforce concrete; it acts as a rain screen and is a lot lighter than conventional siding, although to me it doesn't look like it is going to a whole lot of rain screening. It's installed over lightweight foam sheathing and metal x-bracing that stiffens the 2x3 framing.
For insulation, Laird uses vacuum insulated panels that have an R value of R60 per inch; he puts R68 in the floor and roof and R38 in the walls. Panasonic explains how they work:
© Panasonic © Panasonic
Wrapped in laminate film to create a low vacuum inside and control thermal conduction, our vacuum insulation panels use a proprietary lining molding technology coupled with improved insulation performance of the lining to boost overall insulation performance to the level of a full-vacuum thermos despite the low-vacuum environment. This major improvement prevents energy loss from heat transfer in house-hold and other appliances.
So basically, the occupant of the tiny house is living inside a thermos bottle. Someone cooking, showering or just breathing in such a small and tight space is going to generate a lot of moisture which could lead to icing and mould even with quadruple paned windows, so some form of fresh air supply is going to be required. A heat recovery ventilator would be the best thing, but they have ductwork and are pretty big and this space is very small.
But Laird finds the Lunos E2 HRV, which is like one I have never seen. It doesn't have two sets of ducts; Instead it has a ceramic core that absorbs the heat from the air as it is pumped through by the fan. Then, after 70 seconds, the fan reverses and brings in fresh air, recovering 90.6% of the outgoing heat. It's almost silent at 16.5dB and sips electricity. Ken Levenson of 475 High performance building explains it in detail here. This is a wonderful technical advance for getting fresh air into small, tightly sealed homes and apartments.
Being so well insulated, the tiny house doesn't need a lot of heating; In fact, all it has are two radiant electric panels totalling only 800 watts. We're talking a hair dryer here, turned to low. The whole house can operate on less than 15 amps, what you get in one circuit through an extension cord.
The kitchen has a compact fridge and freezer, and an interesting countertop:
Using a concrete micro-topper and foam backer board, Leaf House was able to create an ultra-lightweight concrete countertop for version.3, which gives the appearance of a slab of concrete but weighs below 35lb.
© Leaf House © Leaf House
The bathroom is supplied with hot water from a 30 gallon tank with a "ventless tankless propane water heater," and has a custom bucket toilet. These seem to be almost standard in tiny houses now. But composting toilets almost all have exhaust fans which will create all kinds of problems. It will be really interesting to see how this works out over the course of a winter.
This has been designed for perhaps that harshest climate that any tiny house has seen, it's colder than Mars and not much more hospitable. Laird has juggled weight, moisture, insulation, wall thickness, rigidity and electrical consumption. He has used FSC certified woods, reclaimed materials and healthy finishes. It looks cosy and comfortable too. It is going to be occupied by an instructor at the Yukon College Campus, so at least it won't be in the middle of nowhere, but I suspect wintering in 97 square feet will still be a real challenge.
More at Leaf House.The mayor of Charlotte, N.C., resigned on Wednesday after he was arrested on public corruption charges, as federal law enforcement officials alleged that he accepted a trip to Las Vegas, use of a luxury apartment and more than $48,000 in cash in exchange for helping smooth out municipal obstacles for undercover agents posing as investors.
Patrick D. Cannon, a Democrat, had been in the mayor’s office only since early December, but he has been involved in city politics since he was elected to the City Council in 1993 at the age of 26.
The undercover operation that led to Wednesday’s arrest began in August 2010, when Mr. Cannon held an at-large City Council seat. Undercover officers claim that they made four payments of thousands of dollars in cash to Mr. Cannon between January 2013 and February of this year.
Mr. Cannon, 47, appeared in federal court briefly on Wednesday and was released on bond pending indictment. He submitted his resignation letter hours later.Farrah Abraham I Want My DNA... On Your Chest
Farrah Abraham -- I Want My DNA On Your Chest
EXCLUSIVE
A piece of Farrah Abraham can be yours … and we’re not talking about her ass -- the backdoor teen mom has put her DNA on the market.
Abraham's partnered with Celebrity Gene, a company that liquefies the DNA of celebrities -- usually extracted from hair -- and puts it in a vial you can wear around your neck. Very Angelina Jolie circa 2001.
The jewelry vials go for $99, and it’s mostly for a good cause because 50% goes to the charity of the celeb's choice – in Farrah’s case, it's Operation Underground Railroad, which helps rescue kidnapped children from slavery.
We're told Abraham's also banking a 10% cut from sales... in addition to the roughly $30,000 she got upfront for the DNA sample.
Abraham has a history with the double helix … she tells TMZ a positive paternity test changed her life and "created a better future" (aka Social Security benefits) for her daughter.
Abraham joins the ranks of Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, Elvis and Al Capone, who also have DNA for sale via the site... so pick wisely.Singapore – Saab has unveiled a modified A26 submarine fitted with vertical launched land attack cruise missiles at the IMDEX Asia maritime and defense exhibition in Singapore, the first time such a system has been fitted on a conventionally powered boat.
The model on display at Saab’s stand at IMDEX Asia showed three cylinders with six vertical launch cells each in the lengthened midships section of a model of an A26 submarine. Saab says the lengthened section adds 33 feet and about 400 to 500 tons to the displacement of the A26.
According to Gunnar Öhlund, head of marketing at Kockums, which is part of Saab, the lengthened module "shows the flexibility in performing different missions" of the A26, which he says can also be used for stowing and deploying unmanned underwater vehicles and even special forces or naval divers.
Saab says that the lengthened module can be fitted on newly built submarines or retrofitted onto existing boats as part of a Mid-Life Upgrade program. The company has had experience in the latter for Singapore’s Archer class submarines, which were former Swedish Västergötland class submarines with a 40-foot section added for an air-independent propulsion unit.
When asked by Defense News about the effect the addition of the segment will have on the A26’s performance, Öhlund said that Saab’s previous experience with similar work on other submarines has shown that any effects on their overall performance.
Defense News understands that the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, or TLAM, is being proposed by Saab for a potential European customer’s ongoing submarine program. The fact that the company can come up with a firm proposal like this would indicate that it already secured approval from the United States to integrate Tomahawks onto the A26.
Saab has declined to reveal who that customer is, although there aren’t very many European countries that have a submarine acquisition program of record and is close enough to the U.S. to be able to acquire Tomahawks for one to make an educated guess as to the identity of the interested party.Ever find yourself wondering about the math behind your favorite simulation game? Did you know that the motion physics of a car are much more complicated than the those of an airplane?
Brian Beckman, physicist, programmer and Channel 9 celebrity (he's been on C9 a few times...), sure does. Besides spending time innovating programming languages and tools, Brian spends time working on the mathematics behind real-time physics simulation. Most recently, he worked on the math behind the tire physics of the popular racing game Forza.
Simulation, by definition, needs to be accurate. Otherwise, well, it's not simulating reality, really, which is of course the idea of simulation. Games like Forza in fact simulate real physics of racing in a predictable and highly mathematically precise manner. That's exactly why Forza is a real-time automobile racing simulation game.
The past, present and future of computer simulation of real-time physical events, or simply computer-based simulations that involve highly accurate representations of things moving/changing in space and time that are precisely affected by multiple variables like wind, rain, gravity, mud, oil, planets, waves, etc are very fascinating topics for gamers(many may not realize this explicitly, but they sure experience it!), mathematicians, programmers and physicists alike. Heck, any body who thinks about the thinking behind things that they experience in a simulated environment should watch/listen to this interview (available in podcast form as well as video).
Towards the end of this conversation, Brian mentions Rigs of Rods and Plasma Pong. Check out the Rigs of Rods simulation demo at 00:58:11!
Our sister site, Channel 10, has a great Forza piece.
Tune in. Learn (alot).While wandering through Facebook as I often do when I’m supposed to be working I stumbled upon what is possibly the most important Facebook Community out there for gamers; Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers. This community has been getting regular doses of heroic women who did awesome thing for nearly a year now. So I was eager to find out more about the group. A quick message to the group turned into an exciting interview opportunity in which I got to ask the man behind it all, Ernest Adams a little bit about himself and his views on the gaming community.
I’d like to start off with an introduction. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. I’m a game design consultant and part-time professor at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I’ve been in the game industry since 1989, first as a programmer and then as a game designer, writer, and audio/video producer. I began at a startup, then moved to Electronic Arts for 8 years, mostly on the Madden NFL franchise, before going freelance. I also founded the International Game Developers’ Association in 1994 to help counter the threat of censorship against video games.
What inspired you to create the Heroic Women To Inspire Game Designers Facebook community?
I was irritated at hearing game developers claim that the reason there are so few female protagonists in games is that there are no real heroic women to serve as models. That’s obviously false, but I wanted to assemble the proof. I just keep finding more and more all the time.
What do you hope to accomplish with the community?
I’m not really trying to build a community, although I’m always delighted when people submit their own candidate heroic women. I want it to be available to anyone who is looking for inspiration, and to serve as a counter-argument. Now when anyone gets told that there are no heroic women, they can point to this. Ideally I would like both game designers and game development students and teachers to treat it as a resource.
How do you select which women to feature on the page and which ones not to?
They need to be women who showed physical or moral courage, persistence, or resourcefulness. Just being the first woman to do something isn’t enough. I’m chiefly (but not exclusively) interested in adventurous women because they’re the ones whose stories are most easily adapted to video games. However, I also include women who worked in a male-dominated field because I know they had to overcome prejudices and obstacles along the way.
I don’t generally include women who were heroic in a bad cause. There must have been any number of brave women on the Axis side in the Second World War (though none of those regimes had much use for women as anything but mothers), but I haven’t included them. For the most part I also don’t include women who were brave but ruthless or cruel along with it. But there are a few exceptions: Artemisia I of Caria was commanding a naval battle and intentionally sank one of her own side’s ships in order to make the enemy think that she was a friend.
Do you have any hopes to expand the community beyond Facebook?
I’ve created a Pinterest page which is a mirror of the Facebook page, also called Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers. Pinterest has the advantage that you can categorize the pins, so I have divided them into military heroines, medical ones, journalists, artists, and so on. I doubt if I will take it beyond that, although I would like for a lot of people to link to it. Unfortunately I don’t have time to build it into a real community or a blog; as I say, it’s just a resource.
Why do you think there aren’t more female protagonists in games?
It’s a combination of factors. It’s not just a big misogynist male conspiracy, though there are certainly a few misogynist male game designers around. I think the widespread belief that video games are “boys’ toys” is part of it; and there’s a misconception that games with female protagonists don’t sell well, or that men won’t play as one. (The Tomb Raider and Metroid series are obvious proof that that is false.) But perhaps the biggest reason is that most game designers are male, and not many of them have given much thought to it. They simply don’t know how to make decent female protagonists. Ragnar Tørnquist is our Joss Whedon, the male game designer in the industry who consistently creates good female characters with real depth.
Do you think the creators of MMOs do a better job with female characters than those making single player games?
There are so many MMOs around that it’s hard to generalize. Certainly the creators of MMOs are more inclined to expect female players than the creators of, say, Call of Duty. And they build worlds full of people for players to interact with, not just grunts for them to shoot at. So on the whole I think they probably are more likely to think about female characters, yes.
Is there anything that we as gamers can do to encourage developers to create more female protagonists?
Yes – keep asking for them! Contact the game designers and let them know that you want them! Praise the good ones and thank their developers. The more voices the industry hears demanding female protagonists, the more likely they are to make them.
What would you say to people who say that the gaming industry is fine as it is and that female representation in games isn’t an issue?
Leaving aside the question of social justice or common decency, which mean nothing to some people, I would say to them that they’re leaving money on the table. I wrote an article called “We Don’t Need the Haters (and I Can Prove It)” that used actual numbers from the MobyGames database to show how skewed it is to have so many female players and so few female protagonists. If we could make games that appealed to more women, we’d make more money; it’s that simple. There is a noisy minority of men who swear blind that they’ll quit gaming if we do that, but frankly, there aren’t enough of those men to bother with – let ‘em go. Besides, they’re almost certainly lying.
Are there any female NPCs in MMOs that you feel are more harmful to equal representation of the genders than helpful?
I’m afraid I’m just not that familiar with enough MMOs to name any specific female NPCs who are a problem. Certainly female characters that are nothing but hypersexualized eye-candy, such as those in Scarlet Blade, don’t encourage women to play and don’t encourage appropriate attitudes among male players.
If you could talk to all game developers and say just one thing what would it be?
You have the power to change the world. Every game is a ripple in the stream, and it affects its players and its developers and other games. Artists and writers and filmmakers already know this, and we should know it too. Will you change the world for good, or for ill?
Your community has already started inspiring people from all across the world, can you tell us one way in which has had an impact?
Yes! Professor Nia Wearn of Staffordshire University in England gave out an assignment to her students to make games based on the Heroic Women list. She ended up with three Grace Darling boat related games, two jungle related Juliane Koepcke survival platformers, one with a burning plane, one Amelia Earhart game you couldn’t win, and a bomber game based on the Russian Night Witches with all the instructions for the plane in Russian. I’m completely delighted. If we can get more students thinking along these lines, we can change the way designers approach the task.
(Since this interview BAFTA Scotland has also hosted a game jam in which all the games feature women from the Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers page. Check out #YNotJam for more information)
A lot of people equate a good female protagonist with being unattractive or not sexy, can a female character be both sexually appealing and a strong female protagonist or are they mutually exclusive?
Of course they’re not mutually exclusive, and our definition of sexy is much too narrow. Characters that look like porn stars are aimed at adolescents or those with adolescent mentalities, but the audience for video games is far larger than that. Competence is sexy. Confidence is sexy. Resourcefulness is sexy. Intelligence is sexy. Grace and courage and compassion are sexy. And, yes, the ability to hold your own in a fight is too.
What hopes do you have for the future of gaming?
That’s much too general a question. I hope they’ll be imaginative and diverse and everyone from two-year-olds to the elderly will play and enjoy and learn from them. And I hope that they will come to be appreciated as a vibrant, joyous part of our culture.
Finally, I’d like to end by asking you which real life heroic woman inspires you most?
That’s a tough one; there are so many and they’re so different, but Harriet Tubman really stands out. She was born into slavery, escaped, then went back on no less than 19 secret missions to sneak other slaves out of the South along the Underground Railroad, over 300 slaves in all. She would certainly have been hanged or shot if she were caught, and it doesn’t get much braver than that. She was a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and after the war became an activist for woman suffrage. Her story would make a brilliant video game if it were sensitively handled, and it’s a travesty that no one has made a movie about her. For a modern instance I would choose Malala Yousafzai. I don’t personally know any individual, male or female, as brave as she is.
I would like to once again thank Ernest for taking the time to answer these questions and encourage you all to join the Facebook community. Share this with your favorite game developers. There are already some pretty amazing women highlighted on the group and I cannot wait to see who gets put up next!
Related: FacebookSteve Bruce guided Hull City to promotion to the Premier League via the play-offs in May
Former Birmingham City boss Steve Bruce has held talks with Aston Villa and he remains favourite to fill their managerial vacancy.
Villa sacked Roberto di Matteo on Monday, with the club 19th in the Championship and winless in nine games.
Bruce, 55, has been without a club since leaving Hull City, but was interviewed by the Football Association for the England job in July.
He has won promotion to the Premier League four times as a manager.
Di Matteo's assistant Steve Clarke remains in caretaker charge at Villa, and the club's next match is at home to West Midlands rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers on 15 October.
Former Birmingham midfielder Robbie Savage, who played under Bruce at St Andrew's, described him as the "right man" to take over at Villa Park.
Burnley manager Sean Dyche, Ipswich Town boss Mick McCarthy, Huddersfield Town manager David Wagner and Bristol City's Lee Johnson have all also been linked with the Villa job, but Wagner and Johnson have ruled themselves out of the running.
Analysis - BBC Radio 5 live's Pat Murphy
"Steve Bruce has had exploratory talks three times in the past 48 hours with Aston Villa, hardening up the fact that he's now odds-on for |
model, and with stills of the painting.[79] By the time the film was released, the fad for prints of Hope was long over, to the extent that references to it had become verbal shorthand for authors and artists wanting to indicate that a scene was set in the 1900s–1910s. Watts's reputation continued to fade as artistic tastes changed, and in 1938 the Tate Gallery removed their collection of Watts's works from permanent display.
Later influence [ edit ]
Jordanian 30 fils stamp, 1974
Despite the steep decline in Watts's popularity, Hope continued to hold a place in popular culture, and there remained those who considered it a major work. When the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of its Watts holdings in 1954, trade unionist and left-wing M.P. Percy Collick urged "Labour stalwarts" to attend the exhibition, supposedly privately recounting that he had recently met a Viennese Jewish woman who during "the terrors of the Nazi War" had drawn "renewed faith and hope" from her photographic copy.[Q] Meanwhile, an influential 1959 sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., now known as Shattered Dreams, took Hope as a symbol of frustrated ambition and the knowledge that few people live to see their wishes fulfilled, arguing that "shattered dreams are a hallmark of our mortal life", and against retreating into either apathetic cynicism, a fatalistic belief in God's will or escapist fantasy in response to failure.[83]
Myths continued to grow about supposed beliefs in the redemptive powers of Hope, and in the 1970s a rumour began spread that after Israel defeated Egypt in the Six-Day War, the Egyptian government issued copies of it to its troops.[75] There is no evidence this took place, and the story is likely to stem from the fact that in early 1974, shortly after the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt, the image of Hope appeared on Jordanian postage stamps.[R] Likewise, it is regularly claimed that Nelson Mandela kept a print of Hope in his cell on Robben Island, a claim for which there is no evidence.
In 1990 Barack Obama, at the time a student at Harvard Law School, attended a sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ preached by Jeremiah Wright.[S] Taking the Books of Samuel as a starting point, Wright explained that he had studied Watts's Hope in the 1950s, and had rediscovered the painting when Dr Frederick G. Sampson delivered a lecture on it in the late 1980s (Sampson described it as "a study in contradictions"), before discussing the image's significance in the modern world.
The painting depicts a harpist, a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation. It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere... That's the world! On which hope sits! [...] And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint tones floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope... she has the audacity... to make music... and praise God... on the one string... she has left! Jeremiah Wright, 1990, as quoted by Barack Obama, 1995[T]
Wright's sermon left a great impression on Obama, who recounted Wright's sermon in detail in his memoir Dreams from My Father. Soon after Dreams From My Father was published he went into politics, entering the Illinois Senate. In 2004 he was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In Obama's 2006 memoir The Audacity of Hope, he recollects that on being chosen to deliver this speech, he pondered the topics on which he had previously campaigned, and on major issues then affecting the nation, before thinking about the variety of people he had met while campaigning, all endeavouring in different ways to improve their own lives and to serve their country.
It wasn't just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.' had once used in a sermon. The audacity of hope... It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family's story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent. — Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 2006
Obama's speech, on the theme of "The Audacity of Hope", was extremely well received. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year, and two years later published a second volume of memoirs, also titled The Audacity of Hope. Obama continued to campaign on the theme of "hope", and in his 2008 presidential campaign his staff requested that artist Shepard Fairey amend the wording of an independently produced poster he had created, combining an image of Obama and the word progress, to instead read hope.[93] The resulting poster came to be viewed as the iconic image of Obama's ultimately successful election campaign.[94] In light of Obama's well-known interest in Watts's painting, and amid concerns over a perceived dislike of the British, in the last days of Gordon Brown's government historian and Labour Party activist Tristram Hunt proposed that Hope be transferred to the White House.[95] According to an unverified report in the Daily Mail, the offer was made but rejected by Obama, who wished to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright following controversial remarks made by Wright.[96]
Hope remains Watts's best known work, and formed the theme of the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Paralympics in Nagano.[97] In recognition of its continued significance, a major redevelopment of the Watts Gallery completed in 2011 was named the Hope Appeal.
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Nowhere is the price of wine more clear than in the hierarchy of supermarket shelves. Look up, the prices go up; look down, they go down. And right in the middle are the mid-range bottles.
That part is easy. Trying to figure out if that $59.99 cabernet is really 10 times better than one costing $5.99? That could drive consumers to drink.
A seemingly infinite number of variables go into the price of a bottle of wine, from where the grapes are grown, to the size of the winery making it, to whether the finished product is sold in a retail shop or restaurant. From prized Napa Valley cabernet sauvignons to the mocked — yet wildly popular — Two Buck Chuck, everything from basic supply and demand to byzantine distribution networks affects how much wine costs.
But like trying to find a sure-fire remedy for a hangover, nowhere in that blend of economic factors is there a magic answer to the question: Is expensive wine superior to cheaper wine?
“Something costing 10 times more, is it really 10 times better? Is a new Ferrari 20 times better than a new Prius? It’s subjective. It’s what you can afford and what you want to do with your life,” said Skip Coomber, the Encinitas-based founder of Coomber Family Wines.
An increasing number of Americans apparently feel they can afford more expensive wine.
According to data compiled by Liz Thach, a professor of management and wine business at Sonoma State University, sales of U.S. wine topped $38 billion in 2015, up 1.3 percent from 2014, and marking the 23rd straight year of increased growth. (85 percent of the nation’s wine comes from California.)
Consumers have been trading up, or opting for higher-priced bottles, “with double digit value and volume growth in four price points: $11 to $14.99, $15 to $19.99, $20 to $24.99 and over $25,” said Thach’s report on the state of the nation’s wine industry in 2016.
Despite that, she noted, “75 percent of the wine in the U.S. is still sold at $9 and under.”
Since 2010, America has been able to toast its status as the world’s largest wine-consuming nation. But even in pleasure-seeking, it is a country divided — among lovers of mass-produced bargain juice, those who seek out small-production, critically regarded bottlings, and buyers of the sea of so-so to well-made, mid-range wines between them.
They can all peacefully co-exist, said Brian Donegan, an advanced sommelier and a partner at Truly Fine Wine, an importer and retail shop on Morena Boulevard.
“For a lot of people, if they’re getting a vast amount of enjoyment out of that $6.99 bottle of wine, I wouldn’t even talk them into buying something more expensive,” he said.
“I’ve had a $1,000 wine where I’ve said, ‘that’s OK,’ and I’ve had $10 wines where I’ve said, ‘that is brilliant, I’m going to buy that out for myself.’”
The Skater Girl line of affordable wines from Coomber Family Wines. The Skater Girl line of affordable wines from Coomber Family Wines.
The portfolio of Coomber Family Wines is separated into three price points. The easy-drinking, accessibly-priced Skater Girl line sells for $14.99 and can be widely found in retail shops. The mid-range Coomber Family Ranch Vintners Collection, which retails for about $24.99 to $28.99 — and is poured by the glass at restaurants and wine bars throughout San Diego County — is the brand builder. The premium-priced Coomber Family Ranch Private Reserve label, which Coomber called his “passion,” includes a showcase $149.99 cabernet sauvignon made from Beckstoffer George III grapes, one of the most prestigious vineyard sites in Napa Valley.
While winery owners can struggle to set the cost of a bottle, Coomber said he had some guidance with the latter one. As stipulated in his contract for the highly valued Beckstoffer fruit, he can’t sell his cab for less than $125 a bottle.
Like most small winery owners, Coomber is sanguine about the economics of the wine lifestyle and the folly in romanticizing it.
“You know what they say,” Coomber chortled, “if you want to make small fortune in the wine business, start with a large fortune.”
To help uncork the complexities of wine pricing, we consulted with several local experts: Donegan; Sabrina Bochen, co-founder of Truly Fine Wine; Coomber; and Mayur Pavagadhi, Coomber’s co-owner at Carlsbad’s Witch Creek Winery and the owner of Paon Restaurant and Wine Bar, also in Carlsbad, among other eateries.
The following are broad explanations of what is often a very bottle-specific situation.
Where the grapes are from
Napa Valley on a label can automatically drive up a bottle’s price, as would Bordeaux and Burgundy’s noted estates. Much of the boost comes from reputation, earned and hyped.
But anywhere in the world, there is land that’s considered better for growing grapes than others. It’s the soil composition, the drainage, the elevation, the slope, the hours of sun, the nighttime cool-downs, and more.
“It comes down to geography,” Bochen said. “If you have a top site... those are geographically limited. So there’s limited production from there. That land is expensive. It’s supply and demand.”
Contrast that to, say, California’s vast Central Valley, where the land is flat, the soil — while exceptionally fertile — is less-regarded for wine-grape growing, and the heat is relentless. This 300-mile stretch of farmland is also the state’s largest wine-producing area, turning out millions of gallons of lower-end and super-value wines. Famed Napa Valley fruit, by comparison, makes up only 5 percent of the state’s output.
Beyond quantitative differences, qualitatively, regions from Walla Walla to Tuscany, Paso Robles to Rioja, Spain, are regarded for their vineyards that produce well-concentrated, fully ripened, distinctively fruity grapes that have the necessary acidity to provide a wine with structure and balance — the holy grail of winemaking.
To quote the most over-used marketing slogan in the industry, “It all starts in the vineyard.”
Don Boomer Whether a winery uses a natural cork and a tip cap enclosure, as Coomber Family Ranch does, or a composite cork and plastic cap can make a difference of about 45 cents per bottle. Multiply that by hundreds or tens of thousand of bottles — those choices will impact the price consumers pay. Whether a winery uses a natural cork and a tip cap enclosure, as Coomber Family Ranch does, or a composite cork and plastic cap can make a difference of about 45 cents per bottle. Multiply that by hundreds or tens of thousand of bottles — those choices will impact the price consumers pay. (Don Boomer)
The size of the winery
Mega-companies like E&J Gallo Winery and the Bronco Wine Co., maker of Charles “Two Buck Chuck” Shaw, among its dozens of brands, have equally outsized cost-saving advantages.
Often, they can command the lowest prices on land, grapes and production equipment, flooding the market with budget wines, as well as higher-end vintages that can be made for a fraction of what a small winery might spend.
“Their costs really are that low to be able to charge that little amount of money,” Coomber said."The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address," the Heartland Institute said in a statement this morning. Among the documents that Heartland does not claim to be faked, is a budget showing payments to selected scientists. One of the recipients of funding is Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University, a geologist and marine researcher who spoke at the "convoys of no confidence" protests against the carbon price last year alongside the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, and writes columns for News Ltd newspapers. The documents show Professor Carter receives a "monthly payment" of $US1667 ($1550) as part of a program to pay "high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message". Professor Carter did not deny he was being paid by The Heartland Institute, but would not confirm the amount, or if the think tank expected anything in return for its money.
"That suggestion is silly and offensive - a kindergarten level argument," Professor Carter told the Herald. "Institutions or organisations simply pay for services rendered - in the same way that an architect is paid for their work, so are scientists," he said. "What they may make any payment to me for, I'm not discussing with anybody outside of my family." Altogether, more than $US20 million had been spent funding and co-ordinating the activities of climate sceptics and bloggers since 2007, the documents suggest. Other cash recipients include Anthony Watts, the leading US climate sceptic blogger, who is to receive $US90,000 for his work this year. Programs slated for funding include new curriculum modules that teach science from a climate-sceptic perspective, to be sent to US schools. The documents also set out some of the strategies that the Heartland Institute says it will pursue this year, one of which is a campaign to convince people that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for gas is safe and beneficial.
The plan says that, in 2010 and 2011, environmentalists "invented charges that fracking poses environmental and safety risks. The liberal media has uncritically reported these charges as though they were scientifically based, leading to pressure on national and state elected officials to ban or regulate the use of fracking". This year, the document says Heartland would "approach dozens of companies and trade associations that are actively seeking allies in this battle." The organisation's funding comes from 1800 donors, including many manufacturing and resources businesses, and also drug companies. One anonymous donor has given a staggering $US8.6 million to the think tank since 2007. The documents were first published on a Canadian website, DeSmogBlog, which monitors the public relations efforts by some industry groups to discredit climate change science.
"An important message here is for the media to learn how to recognise this co-ordinated attack on science and to see through the PR pollution that Heartland and its network creates to cast doubt on climate change," said the website's executive director, Brendan DeMelle. In its statement, the Heartland Institute apologised to its donors for allowing their identities to be revealed, and asked news organisations to stop linking to them. "The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents," its statement said. In fact the Herald sought comment from the Heartland Institute about the content and veracity of the documents yesterday, eight hours before the newspaper's deadline, and received no comment. Written questions sent to all 14 of the Heartland board members at 12.30pm yesterday are also yet to receive a response from the organisation. The DeSmogBlog has issued a statement about the claim that one of the documents may have been faked.book by Maya Angelou
The Heart of a Woman (1981) is an autobiography by American writer Maya Angelou. The book is the fourth installment in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The Heart of a Woman recounts events in Angelou's life between 1957 and 1962 and follows her travels to California, New York City, Cairo, and Ghana as she raises her teenage son, becomes a published author, becomes active in the civil rights movement, and becomes romantically involved with a South African anti-apartheid fighter. One of the most important themes of The Heart of a Woman is motherhood, as Angelou continues to raise her son. The book ends with her son leaving for college and Angelou looking forward to newfound independence and freedom.
Like Angelou's previous volumes, the book has been described as autobiographical fiction, though most critics, as well as Angelou, have characterized it as autobiography. Although most critics consider Angelou's first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings more favorably, The Heart of a Woman has received positive reviews. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1997.[1]
Critic Mary Jane Lupton says it has "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography" and that it is Angelou's "most introspective" autobiography.[2] The title is taken from a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, which connects Angelou with other female African-American writers. African-American literature critic Lyman B. Hagen states, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood".[3] The book follows Angelou to several places in the US and Africa, but the most important journey she describes is "a voyage into the self."[4]
Background [ edit ]
The Heart of a Woman, published in 1981, is the fourth installment of Maya Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The success of her previous autobiographies and the publication of three volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1981. And Still I Rise, her third volume of poetry, was published in 1978 and reinforced Angelou's success as a writer. Her first volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.[2][note 1]
Writer Julian Mayfield states that Angelou's work set a precedent not only for other black women writers but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.[6][note 2] Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women through the writing of her life stories.[7] It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton stated, "without a doubt... America's most visible black woman autobiographer."[8] Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to discuss her personal life publicly, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books. Writer Hilton Als calls her a pioneer of self-exposure, willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.[6] While Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute.[9] Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and to "be honest about it."[9]
In 1957, the year The Heart of a Woman opens, Angelou had appeared in an off-Broadway revue that inspired her first film, Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions,[10] something she does not mention in the book. Also in 1957 and not discussed in the book, her first album, Miss Calypso, was released; it was reissued as a CD in 1995.[10][11] According to Als, Angelou sang and performed calypso music because it was popular at the time, and not to develop as an artist.[6] As described in The Heart of a Woman, Angelou eventually gave up performing for a career as a writer and poet. According to Chuck Foster, who wrote the liner notes in Miss Calypso's 1995 reissue, her calypso music career is "given short shrift"[12] and dismissed in the book.[note 3]
Title [ edit ]
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
-— "The Heart of a Woman", by Georgia Douglas Johnson[13]
Angelou takes the title of her fourth autobiography from a poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson, a Harlem Renaissance writer. Critic Lyman B. Hagan states that although the title is "less striking or oblique than titles of her preceding books,"[14] it is appropriate because Johnson's poem mentions a caged bird and provides a connection to Angelou's first autobiography, whose title was taken from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The title suggests Angelou's painful loneliness and exposes a spiritual dilemma also present in her first volume.[15] Johnson's use of the metaphor is different from Dunbar's because her bird is a female whose isolation is sexual rather than racial. The caged bird may also refer to Angelou after her failed marriage,[16] but writer Mary Jane Lupton says that "the Maya Angelou of The Heart of a Woman is too strong and too self-determined to be kept in a cage".[17]
The Heart of a Woman is the first time Angelou identifies with another female African-American writer. Her early literary influences were men, including James Weldon Johnson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and William Shakespeare. Angelou has stated that she always admired women writers like Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her choice of title for this book is an acknowledgment of her legacy as a Black woman writer.[18]
Plot summary [ edit ]
The events described in The Heart of a Woman take place between 1957 and 1962, beginning shortly after the end of Angelou's previous autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. Angelou and her teenage son Guy have moved into a houseboat commune in Sausalito, California.[19] After a year, they move to a rented house near San Francisco. Singer Billie Holiday visits Angelou and her son there, and Holiday sings "Strange Fruit", her famous song about the lynching of Black men, to Guy. Holiday tells Angelou, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing."[20] In 1959, Angelou and Guy moved to New York City. The transition is difficult for Guy, and Angelou is forced to protect him from a gang leader. No longer satisfied with performing in nightclubs, she dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing, and her son. Her friend, novelist John Killens, invites her to join the Harlem Writers Guild. She meets other important African-American artists and writers, including James Baldwin, who would become her mentor. She becomes a published writer for the first time.
Angelou becomes more politically active and participates in African-American and African protest rallies, including helping to organize a sit-in at the United Nations following the execution of Patrice Lumumba, the ousted prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She meets Malcolm X and is struck by his good looks and magnetism. After hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, she and her friend, activist Godfrey Cambridge, are inspired to produce a successful fundraising event for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called Cabaret For Freedom. King names her coordinator of SCLC's office in New York. She performs in Jean Genet's play The Blacks, with Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, and Cicely Tyson.
In 1961, Angelou meets South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make.[note 4] Angelou and Make never marry, but she and Guy move with Make to London and Cairo, where she acts as his political wife while he is in exile.[6] Their relationship is full of cultural conflicts; he expects her to be a subservient African wife, and she yearns for the freedom of a working woman. She learns that Make is too friendly with other women and is irresponsible with money, so she accepts a position as assistant editor at the Arab Observer. Their relationship is examined by their community of friends, and Angelou and Make eventually separate. Angelou accepts a job in Liberia, and she and Guy travel to Accra, where he has been accepted to attend college. Guy is seriously injured in an automobile accident, so she begins working at the University of Ghana and remains there while he recuperates. The Heart of a Woman ends with Guy leaving for college and Angelou remarking to herself, "At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself."[22]
Genre [ edit ]
All seven of Angelou's installments of her life story are in the tradition of African-American autobiography. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou challenges the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.[23] Angelou said in 1989 that she is the only serious writer to choose autobiography to express herself,[24] but she reports not one person's story, but the collective's.[25] Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe writes that Angelou is representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people.[26] Her use of devices common in fictional writing, such as dialog, characterization and thematic development, has led some reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction.[27]
All of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the autobiography's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.[28] In a 1983 interview with literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies,[29] and later acknowledges that she follows the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I' meaning 'we'".[7] Lupton compares The Heart of a Woman with other autobiographies, and states that for the first time in Angelou's series, she is able to present herself as a model for successful living. However, Angelou's "woman's heart"[2]—her perspective as a woman with concerns about her self-esteem and the conflicts with her lovers and her son—is what makes her autobiography different.[2] Angelou's feelings as described in The Heart of a Woman, which Lupton calls Angelou's "most introspective" book, are what dictates the book's form.[2]
Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books, which differentiate her work from more traditional "truthful" autobiographies.[30] Her approach parallels the conventions of many African-American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US when truth was often censored for purposes of self-protection.[31] Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the tradition of African-American autobiography, but insists that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.[32] In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discusses her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs.[33] When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she states, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about."[33] Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories. Hagen states, "One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work", and that Angelou uses aspects of fiction writing to make her depictions of events and people more interesting. Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis, said that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.[34]
The Heart of a Woman is similar to Angelou's previous volumes because it is narrated from the intimate point of view of a woman and a mother, but by this time, she can refer to events that occurred in her past books. Angelou has become a serial autobiographer, something Lupton calls "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography".[2] Angelou successfully draws upon her previous works, and can build upon the themes she has already explored;[35] for example, Angelou threatens the gang leader who has been threatening her son, a powerful incident when considered in light of Angelou's rape in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Lupton calls Angelou's violent behavior an "unconscious effort to rewrite her own history".[35]
Style [ edit ]
The Heart of a Woman. Angelou describes her impressions of Malcolm X (March 1964) in
Angelou does not begin to create her own narrative until The Heart of a Woman,[36] which depends less upon the conventions of fiction than her previous books. For example, there is less dialog and fewer dramatic episodes.[3] The Heart of a Woman is more uplifting than its predecessors due to Angelou's resolution of her conflict between her duties as a mother and her success as a performer.[3]
Angelou perfects the use of the vignette in The Heart of a Woman to present her acquaintances and close associates. Two of her most developed vignettes in this book are of Billie Holiday and Malcolm X.[37] The vignettes of those she knew well, like Vusumzi Make, also present her interactions and relationships. Hagen writes that although "frank talk seemed to be almost requisite for a commercially successful book" in the early 1980s,[38] Angelou values monogamy, fidelity, and commitment in her relationships.[38]
For the only time in this series, Angelou describes her son's accident in detail at both the end of this book and the beginning of her next one, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, a technique that centralizes the two books, connects them with each other, creates a strong, emotional link between them, and repeats Angelou's pattern of ending each book on a positive note.[39][40][41] In this book, Angelou ends with a hopeful look to the future as her son attains his independence and she looks forward to hers. Hagen writes, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood."[42]
Themes [ edit ]
Race [ edit ]
Race, like in the rest of the series, is a central theme in The Heart of a Woman. The book opens with Angelou and Guy living in an experimental commune with white people, trying to participate in the new openness between Blacks and whites. She is not completely comfortable with the arrangement; Angelou never names her roommates, even though "naming" has been an important theme in her books thus far. For the most part, Angelou is able to get along well with whites, but she occasionally encounters prejudice, as when she needs help from white friends to rent a home in a segregated neighborhood.[43] Hagen calls Angelou's descriptions of whites and the hopes for eventual equality in this book "optimistic".[44] Angelou continues her indictment of white power structure and her protests against racial injustice.[45]
Angelou becomes more politicized and develops a new sense of Black identity.[46] Even Angelou's decision to leave show business is political.[47] She sees herself as a social and cultural historian of her time, and of the civil rights and Black literary movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.[38][48] She becomes more attracted to the causes of Black militants in the US and Africa, to the point of entering into a relationship with a significant militant, and becomes more committed to activism. During this time, she becomes an active political protester, but she does not think of herself in that way. She places the focus upon herself and uses the autobiographical form to demonstrate how the civil rights movement influenced her. According to Hagen, Angelou's contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".[49]
Journey [ edit ]
Travel is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole; McPherson writes that it is something of a national myth to Americans as a people.[50] This is also the case for African-American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative.[50] The Heart of a Woman has three primary settings—the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Egypt—and two secondary ones—London and Accra.[51]
Like all of Angelou's books, the structure of The Heart of a Woman is based on a journey. Angelou emphasizes the theme of movement by opening her book with a spiritual ("The ole ark's a-moverin'"), which McPherson calls "the theme song of the United States in 1957".[46] This spiritual, which contains a reference to Noah's Ark, presents Angelou as a type of Noah and demonstrates her spirituality. Angelou mentions Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's 1951 novel On the Road, thus connecting her own journey and uncertainty about the future with the journeys of literary figures.[52] Even though Angelou travels to Africa for a relationship, she makes a connection with the continent. Lupton states, "Africa is the site of her growth".[53] Angelou's time in Africa makes her more aware of her African roots as she searches for the past of her ancestors.[53] Although Angelou journeys to many places in the book, the most important journey she describes is "a voyage into the self".[4]
Writing [ edit ]
The Heart of a Woman, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing." Billie Holiday, 1949. Holiday tells Angelou in, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing."
Angelou's primary role in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas was stage performer, but in The Heart of a Woman she changes from someone who uses others' method of expression—the songs and dances of the African, Caribbean, and African-American oral tradition—to a writer. Angelou makes this decision for political reasons as she becomes more involved with the civil rights movement, and so that she can care for her son.[36] For the first time in Angelou's autobiographies, she begins to think of herself as a writer and recounts her literary development.[54] Angelou begins to identify with other Black women writers for the first time in The Heart of a Woman. She has been influenced by several writers since her childhood, but this is the first time she mentions female authors. Up to this point, her identification has been with male writers; her new affiliations with female writers is due to her emerging feminism.[18]
Angelou's concept of herself as an artist changed after her encounter with Billie Holiday. Up to that point, Angelou's career was more about fame than about art; Als states, "Developing her artistry was not the point".[6] Als also says that Angelou's busy career, instead of revealing her ambition, shows "a woman who is only moderately talented and perpetually unable to understand who she is".[6] Angelou, in spite of the mistakes of her youth, needed the approval and acceptance of others, and observes that Holiday was able to perceive this. Holiday tells her, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing."[6][55]
Angelou had begun to write sketches, songs and short stories, and shows her work to her friend John Killens, who invites her to New York City to develop her writing skills. She joins the Harlem Writers Guild and receives feedback from other African-American authors such as Killens, Rosa Guy, and Caribbean writer Paule Marshall, who would eventually make significant contributions to African-American literature. Angelou dedicates herself to improving her craft, forcing herself to understand the technical aspects of writing. Lupton writes, "Readers can actually envision in this volume the distinguished artist who becomes the Maya Angelou of the 1990s".[56]
Motherhood [ edit ]
Motherhood, a theme throughout Angelou's autobiographies, becomes more complex in The Heart of a Woman.[56] Although Guy struggles with the developmentally appropriate process of adolescent separation from his mother, they |
To expand your garden you have to plant vegetables and fruits or begin to build new projects. But to build these important goods you must have diamonds and coins. Additionally there’s a Boom Beach hack on http://www.cool-mods.com/ available, for producing these important items.
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The incident took place in the staff-room on March 17 as the Principal watched.
According to Standard, the teachers tied the girl’s hands and feet and demanded that she disclose the whereabouts of another student.
When she said she did not know the girl in question, they resorted to burning her and demanded that she confess to “devil worship”.
The girl’s parents, who were called in after she was rushed to hospital, denied that she was a devil worshipper. Their lawyer further revealed that the school was not registered.
In January, another teenager went through a similar ordeal in Nakuru County after members of a local church burnt her in alleged exorcism.
The 13-year-old Standard Seven girl was staying with her brother when members of the Roho Mowar church at Ponda Mali slum in Nakuru town went to the house, doused her face with paraffin then lit a fire in a bid to expel demons from her body.
In a clip aired on Citizen TV, the church members claimed she was possessed and that they needed to expel the demons using paraffin and fire.
It was later discovered that she was pregnant after being raped by one of her tormentors. — AFPThe best definitive treatment option for end-stage heart failure currently is transplantation, which is limited by donor availability and immunorejection. Generating an autologous bioartificial heart could overcome these limitations. Here, we have decellularized a human heart, preserving its 3-dimensional architecture and vascularity, and recellularized the decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM). We decellularized 39 human hearts with sodium-dodecyl-sulfate for 4–8 days. Cell removal and architectural integrity were determined anatomically, functionally, and histologically. To assess cytocompatibility, we cultured human cardiac-progenitor cells (hCPC), bone-marrow mesenchymal cells (hMSCs), human endothelial cells (HUVECs), and H9c1 and HL-1 cardiomyocytes in vitro on dECM ventricles up to 21 days. Cell survival, gene expression, organization and/or electrical coupling were analyzed and compared to conventional 2-dimensional cultures. Decellularization removed cells but preserved the 3-dimensional cardiac macro and microstructure and the native vascular network in a perfusable state. Cell survival was observed on dECM for 21 days. hCPCs and hMSCs expressed cardiocyte genes but did not adopt cardiocyte morphology or organization; HUVECs formed a lining of endocardium and vasculature; differentiated cardiomyocytes organized into nascent muscle bundles and displayed mature calcium dynamics and electrical coupling in recellularized dECM. In summary, decellularization of human hearts provides a biocompatible scaffold that retains 3-dimensional architecture and vascularity and that can be recellularized with parenchymal and vascular cells. dECM promotes cardiocyte gene expression in stem cells and organizes existing cardiomyocytes into nascent muscle showing electrical coupling. These findings represent a first step toward manufacturing human heart grafts or matrix components for treating cardiovascular disease.There's a fine line between freedom of speech being used to express one's opinion or concern and defaming someone. And due to the Internet, the line is getting blurry. In a case against a blogger—Jitender Bagga and believers of the founder of NGO—Art of Living, the Delhi High Court has sided with the NGO followers' and asked Google to remove objectionable content against the NGO leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. While Google and Facebook fight for protecting India's freedom of speech in the Indian court of law, Google has more trouble coming their way.
The complaint against the blogger is for content posted on his blog hosted on Blogpost (owned by Google) at revolutionprithvi.blogspot.in and srisriravishankarisguruorconman.blogspot.in. The directive by the High Court seemed to be another harsh ruling biased against the Internet and freedom of speech. However, if one looks at the websites listed in the complaint and the content, it does appear that Jitender Bagga was vindictive and has an axe to grind. Voicing ones opinion as form of art or literature is one thing, going hammer and tongs against someone in a malicious and resentful attack, is something completely different.
In India the case against censorship and social media is being fiercely fought by a minority—the vocal web users, and the powerful government. Unfortunately for the people of India, the law seems to be siding with the government and in favor of censorship in most cases. While the initial complaint against 22 web companies operating in India was brought down to two—Google and Facebook, the companies are caught in the crossfire between freedom of speech and regional politics or communal harmony, take your pick.
The curbs are not limited just to the Internet, author Salman Rushdie has been facing some very tough times due to his book Satanic Verses, late artist MF Hussain died in exile. The focus being shifted to the Internet, a new platform for voicing opinions, should not be a surprise.TEHRAN — An opposition leader long under house arrest has written a letter to President Hassan Rouhani demanding a public trial, putting the president in a difficult spot and highlighting a deepening rift in Iran’s reformist wing.
In the letter, published Sunday on a foreign-based Persian-language website, Saham News, the opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, does not ask the president to grant him his release, “since this is not in your power.”
Yet even asking for a trial presents a problem for Mr. Rouhani, a moderate who in the past has promised to end house arrest for Mr. Karroubi and two other leaders of the so-called Green Movement, Mir Hussein Moussavi and his wife, Zahra Raghnavard. Either he grants Mr. Karroubi’s request — risking confrontation with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his hard-line supporters — or he denies it and looks weak.
So Mr. Rouhani has chosen to ignore the letter and instead allow his infuriated supporters to respond to Mr. Karroubi.Remember the other day how we mentioned search engine powerhouse Google has dumped something like $680 million into various clean energy projects? Well, you can bump that up by $100 million or so, as the company just announced it, along with Citi, are pumping $102 million each into a large scale wind power project in, you guessed it, California.
Google and Citi are putting the $204 million into the 168 MW Alta V project, which is part of the much larger Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC) being developed by Terra-Gen Power. We’ve written about this project numerous times before, even noting Google and Citi each already ponied up $55 million. The total scope of this project, once completed, will ultimately have a generating capacity of 1,550 megawatts (MW).
The two companies now hold leveraged leases for two phases, totaling 270 MW, with Citi also having underwritten the equity financing for Alta Projects II-V, totaling 570 MW. All of these wind projects in Tehachapi, Calif. “will use a new transmission line developed as part of the 4,500 MW Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project, the first major transmission project in California built to transport electricity from remote, clean energy resources in the Tehachapi region to population centers in Southern California and elsewhere.”
It is said that, by the end of the year, the AWEC project will have enough clean energy online – 1,020 MW of operating capacity – to make it the largest of its kind in the nation. All of this, as well as wind power yet to be built, is being supplied to Southern California Edison via a power purchase agreement dating back to 2006.
When completed, it is said, AWEC is expected to increase wind industry jobs in California by 20 percent, including more than 3,000 domestic manufacturing, construction, operation and maintenance jobs. The Alta projects will also contribute more than $1.2 billion to the local economy in Kern County.GARDNERI KILLIFISH
GENERAL INFORMATION
DESCRIPTION
Males are multi coloured and quite spectacular. Females look like tadpoles.
SIZE
About 5 cm.
INTERESTING FACTS
Gardneri are a desert fish. Their eggs can survive out of the water for an extended period of time. When the rains come, the eggs hatch.
In their native country of Zambia, Gardneri killifish have been known to live out their entire lives in a puddle made from an elephant's footprint.
APPEAL
Killifish are beautiful little creatures. They are small, easy to accommodate and fairly easy to breed.
OBSERVATIONS ON CAPTIVE SPECIMENS
SUITABILITY
You should have had some experience keeping other tropical fish before you try Killifish.
AQUARIUM CONDITIONS
Does not need much room - has been known to live out it's entire life in an elephant's footprint. Dislikes bright light and strong current. Prefers soft water. 18C - 25C temperature range. Should have some cover.
AQUARIUM BEHAVIOR
Males are aggressive and tend to fight. They can injure each other and I have had adult males killed by other males. When they are in groups they don't seem to harm each other as seriously. Males also tend to harass females. These fish are reasonably extroverted. They swim around and court one another, rarely hiding away. They seem to appreciate cover, but don't use it often. They move throughout the water column.
FEEDING HABITS
These fish can be trained to take flake foods but they do much better on frozen and live foods. Mine are principally fed on blood worm and finely minced beef heart. I have seen other fish which mainly get live food and they tend to get much larger and have more colour. Flake fed fish don't seem to grow. Food is taken from the surface, mid water and the substrate.
FISH KEEPING RECOMMENDATIONS
GAR Killifish are a small and fairly sensitive fish. They are a good first killifish but are probably not suitable for the beginner due to their aquarium requirements and their aggressive nature. Males should be separated or maintained in groups to prevent bullying. If you keep females with the males, there should be more females than males so that females will take turns in being harassed.
OUR FISH
DETAILS OF SPECIMENS WE HAVE KEPT
We started with two pairs ended up with 30 fish.
AQUARIUM DETAILS
They were all in a 60 cm community aquarium. It was heated to 25C and has a peat substrate. Water was soft.
BREEDING
TANK SETUP
Bare 60 cm tank, 25C, dark, box filter containing filter wool and peat to soften the water. One spawning mop placed on the bottom of the tank.
BREEDING STOCK
Initially I placed two adult males and two adult females into this tank however I had to remove one of the males due to fighting. He died a short time later. I fed the fish lots of frozen blood worm. The male constantly displayed to the females.
EGG SEPARATION
On the second day I removed the spawning mop and found it to be covered in small round eggs. Took some washed peat and dipped it in water. I then squeezed it until it was almost dry and placed it into a plastic aquarium bag. I removed the eggs from the mop with damp fingers and placed them into the bag of damp peat. I repeated this for several more days and then sealed the bag, wrapped it in newspaper and left it on top of a tank to stay warm.
HATCHING FRY
Three weeks later the eggs were ready to put to water. I removed the adults from the spawning tank (who had laid eggs all over the place but I had no where to put them). I dropped all the peat and eggs into the spawning tank where it settled to the bottom. The next day there were small fry swimming about.
RAISING FRY
The fry were fed on a culture of micro worms and vinegar eels until they were large enough to take finely minced beef heart. All the eggs from the peat hatched almost immediately but subsequently all the other eggs in the spawning tank hatched. I isolated the larger fish into mesh covered boxes suspended in the water to prevent them from eating the smaller fish. All the fish are now isolated in the mesh box and the tank is being used to spawn other fish. After one month the young males developed colour and started to fight. After three months the fish started trying to breed.
USEFUL LINKS
Age of aquariums - killifish
User posted comments and an image
FISH LIST
INDEX PAGE
Page constructed by Alexander Foreman.I’m not going to make any friends with this – probably lose a few in fact.
I’ve never been shy about making enemies before. If you want to bake a cake you need to break few eggs.
But enemies with serious money behind them? That’s another thing. And if we’re talking about a lot of enemies with a lot of money..? Well, then its time to review your security systems.
I’ve been sitting on this report for a little while. Some people in my team were pushing me to publish earlier. Some of them wanted to can it altogether. I almost pulled the plug on it a few times.
But I’ve decided to come clean.
In this report I’m going to blow the lid on one of the greatest scams of the century so far.
I’m going to show you how ordinary investors have been played in order to protect the interests of the rich elite. Like pawns, their financial futures were sacrificed to line the pockets of people who had already made their money.
Truth be told, people like me.
I’ve been awake to this scam since the get go – which is one of the reasons I’ve been able to do as well as I’ve done. But I’ve never stood up publicly against it before.
You do what you can do. You make sure your friends and family aren’t falling into the trap. You invest in education programs that give people real alternatives. But it is a scam so entrenched, so protected by power, that I felt I was helpless against it. What can one man do?
And so I did nothing.
But that was then. Now, I’m sick and tired of seeing people being taken for a ride, year after year. And now that I’ve developed a voice as one of the most widely-read property bloggers in the country, I feel a responsibility to use that position for the greater good.
I’ve found a voice and I’m going to use it.
And it starts with this report.
I’m going to show you just how the scam works. I’m going to show you who wins and who just gets played. And I’m going to show you just what you can do to keep yourself from becoming another victim.
So, what am I talking about?
NEGATIVE GEARING
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled…
Now I can hear the cries already. “What’s wrong with negative gearing?” “It’s income tax 101” etc. etc.
And personally, I’m not against negative gearing. I’ve used it a lot myself.
But this is the real genius of this scam. It’s impossible to talk about without talking about negative gearing, but negative gearing is not really the problem.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg.
And because of the way negative gearing works and its role – effectively making mum and dad investors feel ok about carrying loss-making properties – it has become a very energised topic. And the vested interests that benefit most have worked hard to make sure that it stays an energised topic.
And in all that energy and hoo-ha around negative gearing, they’ve managed to distract the country from the real issues involved.
Take the 2016 Federal Election. Negative gearing was one of the hottest of the hot-button topics. But it a total pantomime. Labor decided to propose negative gearing reform to differentiate themselves from the Coalition. Turnbull and Morrison also wanted to reform the ‘excesses’ of negative gearing, but they were rolled in cabinet so the Coalition could attack Labor “with clean hands”[1].
As far as the rich and powerful are concerned, there’s no debate. The negative gearing “debate” is nothing orchestrated theatre. Nothing but smoke and mirrors.
But let’s take a little peep inside the magician’s box.
I’ll get to the actual mechanics of the scam in a moment, and show you just how Joe Public’s been taken for a ride. But to appreciate how beautiful the scam is, we need to step back and see it in context.
The Puzzle
Here’s a question for you. Have the past twenty years been good years for the Australian property market?
Unless you’ve just been born, you’ll know that the answer is a resounding ‘YES’. On a global and historical scale, the past twenty years have been one of the great bull runs of all time. House prices have effectively triple since 1986.
So there has never been a better time to be a property investor… ever… in the history of the world. All of this should have sparked a virtuous cycle of equity and leveraging power, and Long Island Ice Tea’s around the pool at sunset.
But it didn’t.
This is the great puzzle of our times. If these have been the best times to be a property investor in the history of humanity, why haven’t investors done better?
And by better, I mean, why haven’t they used these conditions to expand their portfolios, develop passive lifestyle income plays, and put their feet up?
What the data shows is that 95% of investors don’t get past two properties. Of those that do, most don’t do all that much better. Only 2% of investors get to four properties. And less than 1% (or 0.068% of the Australian population) become portfolio investors with 5 or more properties.
The question is why.
If these have been the best market conditions in history, why have 95% of investors not been able to get past two properties?
The answer?
Negative Gearing.
Everybody’s doing it…
I don’t think people realise how common negative gearing is.
Two-thirds of investors report an income loss on their investment properties. The average negatively geared investor loses $10,947 a year or $210.50 a week.
Many lose a lot more.
… and everybody’s getting screwed.
Negative Gearing was sold to investors as a “professional” play. Like one of those B.S stories at the car lots when you get to see the fleet manager to get a better deal. They see you coming from a mile off.
But investors thought they were playing with the big boys. It was a clever way to mess with the tax man, and that’s what rich people do, right? Therefore, if I’m messing with the tax man, I’m playing like a big boy.
You’re not playing like a big boy. You’re playing right into their hands.
I’ve written a lot over the years about why negative gearing is a dud strategy – about the way people underestimate the operating losses involved, or the way it leaves them exposed if something goes wrong – like someone losing an income, or banks increasing rates. So I won’t go into it that again. But it doesn’t really matter. Far and away my biggest gripe with negative gearing is just that it is a portfolio killer.
If all your properties are bleeding cash, at some point the banks are going to stop lending to you. You hit up against a serviceability ceiling. You can only lay so many negatively geared properties on your income’s shoulders.
(And looking at the data, my guess is that that number of properties is 2!)
And the truth is that macro-economic factors have done a lot to disguise how dangerous negative gearing is. With interest rates on a steady downward run and rents growing at a decent clip, negatively geared properties can become positively geared in a few years. And once they become positively geared you can start investing again.
But interest rates are getting tapped out and rental growth is stagnating, so I don’t think we can rely on those macro-economic tail-winds going forward.
That means investors are playing with fire. If our obsession with negative gearing continues, two-thirds of property investors are going to find themselves seriously exposed.
So this isn’t an argument about what’s good for the country, what’s good for the market, or what’s consistent with taxation code or any of that. This is only about whether negative gearing is good for you – as an individual investor.
And the numbers speak for themselves. Through one of the great property bull runs in history, 95% of investors couldn’t get past two properties.
So that raises the question. If it’s not serving individual investors, who is it serving?
The CGT tango
This is where my accountant becomes one of those enemies I was talking about.
To understand how the scam works in practice, we need to understand how negative gearing works with the Capital Gains Tax discount.
As I said, negative gearing is not really the issue. We’re just made to think it is.
I think this stuff is dense and boring by design. It’s difficult to penetrate, which is why it has survived so long. But I’ll try keep it as simple as I can.
The 50% CGT discount was introduced by the Howard Government in 1999, and it was what allowed negative gearing to be used as a “sheltering tax haven” (in the words of Malcolm Turnbull, back when he was a back-bencher and could say what he liked.)
The drop off
The basic idea is that you arrange your affairs so an individual property is making a loss. You claim the loss against your income, which saves you 45 cents in the dollar, and ideally, drops you down into a lower tax bracket.
The pick up
You get your money back when the property appreciates in value and you sell it. The 50% CGT discount effectively means you’re only pay tax on half of the gain. That’s another way of saying you’re only paying half of the tax (half of your marginal tax rate) on the full gain.
The net result? If you play your cards right, you’ve paid half as much tax on that portion of your income than you otherwise would have. Nice.
I’ve used this strategy more than a few times myself.
Now you might think there’s nothing wrong with this, since the option is open to everyone. But the reality is that the negative gearing / CGT tango is a lot easier to pull off if you have deep pockets.
You have much more scope to arrange your affairs in the right way. You can wear rental losses for a long time and your not going to get caught out by market movements. Deep pockets and a large portfolio of properties means you can set up the right financing arrangements, and you also have more flexibility around when you enter and exit your trades.
There’s a lot to this, and I usually leave all this to my accountant, but if you want an idea of how well the NG/CGT tango serves the rich, have a look at these charts here.
We know that a higher portion of negative gearing losses, and negatively geared taxpayers occur at higher taxable income levels:
However, this is taxable income, so it is after negative gearing deductions have been included (which are often only there to reduce taxable income in the first place). So this muddies this picture.
We also know that higher income earners have much higher negative gearing losses. As I said before, the average loss is about $10,000 a year. But the average loss for people earning more than a million dollars a year is over $45,000.
It certainly looks suspicious. But you know, maybe if you’re earning a million a year you have more properties, or fancier tastes.
The crux of it is here – the distribution of Capital Gains Tax discounts. Almost three-quarters of the CGT discount benefits go to the top 10% of income earners.
So negative gearing is skewed, but the CGT discounts are off the hook! The capital gains tax discount overwhelming favours the rich – and I mean the very rich.
Rich people like me.
So the NG/CGT tango is a tax dodge for the rich. Pure and simple. At last count, it cost the country over $13 billion in lost taxation revenue.
That’s serious coin.
And every time this comes up, the same old lines get trotted out – that negative gearing mostly used by mums and dads and “ordinary” investors – policemen and nurses and so on.
But which electorate do you reckon uses negative gearing the most?
Wentworth.
Yep, Malcolm Turnbull’s plumb electorate in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. The last time I was sitting in a café in Vaucluse, overlooking the sunny harbour, drinking an $18 a glass chardonnay, I wasn’t thinking, yep, Battler Heartland.
Here’s a bonus thought for you. Every state and territory in Australia reports an average rental loss at the moment. But where is the biggest average loss?
Canberra.
Do those politicians know something we don’t?
Getting played like a fiddle
And that’s the thing about the negative gearing debate. So long as there’s a negative gearing debate, there can’t be a CGT discount debate. But the negative gearing ‘debate’ is so energised and noisy, that we never get to the crux of the issue.
Genius.
At the same time, the rich elite have mobilised an army of mum and dad investors to defend their interests for them. If you’ve got a negatively geared property, you are deeply invested in the negative gearing regime. If negative gearing goes, all you’ve got is a property bleeding you of cash.
No one wants that.
And so even though the benefits of the NG/CGT tango overwhelmingly go to the rich, and even though negative gearing has hamstrung a generation of investors, the most vocal defenders of the system are the ones the system is failing to serve. (Isn’t it always the way?)
I’ll let you in on a secret. None of this was an accident.
You’re getting played like a fiddle.
Armed with paper swords
One of the amazing things about this campaign to protect the NG/CGT tango is the amount of misinformation out there. Here’s a couple of myths:
Negative Gearing helps bring Supply to the market
The truth is that 93% of investors buy existing properties. Only 7% buy new properties that increase the housing stock – owner-occupiers do much more heavy lifting here.
Removing Negative Gearing will cause House Prices to Fall
This is inconsistent with the first claim, but it doesn’t stop people trotting them out in the same breath. If the first is true, then removing negative gearing should reduce housing supply, and prices should actually rise.
But the first isn’t true, and it seems negative gearing does little for supply. That means it should have little impact on prices… or rents…
Rents soared last time we removed negative gearing
This is one of the most popular myths, and refers to the time Labor removed negative gearing between 1985-1987.
The truth of it is that it was a mixed bag across the states during this time. Rents rose in Sydney and Perth, but fell in every other capital city, leaving the national market flat over all.
If negative gearing had any impact on rents, it certainly wasn’t consistent from city to city, and you can’t see it here in the data.
But if it wasn’t about the so called ‘landlord strike’, why did Labor reinstate it after just two years..?
… Remember those powerful vested interests I was talking about?
Shit is getting serious…
So it might be tempting to say, so the rich are screwing the poor. That always happens. At least no one got hurt.
And that’s true to an extent.
But from where I stand, I see a generation of investors who never found a way to make property work – who never made it a vehicle for true financial freedom.
In my eyes, that’s a crime.
What’s more, the system has enjoyed a lot of cover from the macro-economics over recent years. Interest rates were falling, rents were rising. That made the negative gearing strategy look a lot better than it actually is.
But a lot of that cover is evaporating.
Take interest rates. Interest rates have fallen steadily over the past decade or so, to a 50 year low. But they can’t go all that much further. As a small open economy we can’t go to zero like the big boys, so that means rates could fall another 1 to 1.5 percentage points at most, and that’s even if they do fall.
Once you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s only one way rates can go: up. That means there’s going to be very little help for negatively geared properties in the years ahead.
Or take rents. In a low interest rate environment – the yield on assets is also low, since the first is a foundation for the second. We’re seeing that with rental yields, that have also fallen to historical lows in recent years.
This is keeping downward pressure on rental growth. That leaves wages growth to do the heavy lifting in driving rents, but wages are going nowhere.
And so rental growth has been falling since the GFC. In fact, in the detached housing market, rental growth has recently turned negative for the first time since records began.
Rents are already falling.
This has serious implications for a negative gearing strategy. If interest rates hold, and rents go nowhere, then a negatively geared property remains negatively geared… indefinitely. It’s negatively geared til one of those things improves.
So for the time being, that means investors can’t rely on macro-economic forces turning their negatively geared duds into positively geared cashflow performers.
But even that’s a reasonably sunny scenario. Imagine if rates rise (only direction they can really go, though not likely in the short term) or if rents fall (they are already in some places!). That means your negatively geared property starts bleeding more cash. And then more cash. And then more and more cash the more rents fall.
How long can you support it? The rich folks will be alright. They’ll just ride it out or rearrange their affairs. But how long can you keep it up? You’re bleeding from a wound that doesn’t want to heal.
If this report can save you from that fate, then it will have done its job.
A hard truth
So this is the truth about negative gearing. It’s the story of ordinary investors being mobilised to defend a system designed by the rich to benefit the rich.
That said, I sincerely hope that you will be rich one day too.
Then, I think you’ll find negative gearing to be a useful strategy. When you’re in the payout phase of your portfolio, when you have a number or properties and the flexibility to arrange your own affairs, you will probably find that negative gearing is a good way to optimise your tax.
Which is exactly what I have found.
But don’t jump the gun. If you’re still in the construction phase of your portfolio – if you are still acquiring properties and establishing income streams to give you a bit of distance from the 9 to 5, then stay the hell away from negative gearing.
Negative gearing was not designed to serve you. In fact, it was designed to make investors nervous about their position and more easily mobilised into political action.
Now I totally get it if all this just makes you want to throw up your hands and walk away.
And I also understand if this report makes you angry – if it makes you want to get active and start campaigning for political change. I’m telling you, you’re going up against some powerful vested interests and change isn’t going to come easily. But sure, if you want to send a copy of this report to your local MP, go for it.
But first things first. Protect yourself and protect your family.
Because negative gearing isn’t the real villain here. Ignorance is.
But now you know how the system works. Now you can game the system for yourself. From where I sit, the tide seems to be shifting. Public opinion is divided. This report will get out there.
There’s a growing mood for change.
So there’s a window of opportunity here. If you’re in the construction phase of your portfolio and you have negatively geared properties, time to start transitioning away – consider strategies that can increase the rental return on your properties.
And for a short time, you still have cover from those investors who don’t know what a scam negative gearing is. They’ll figure it out eventually, and I’m doing my bit to tell them, but in the meantime they’ll keep chasing properties with atrocious yields.
The more that leaves for savvy buyers like us.
We also have some sophisticated strategies for building cashflow and equity – the stuff that really makes you money. Stay tuned to Knowledge Source for that.
But now you are warned. And now you are armed.
Ignorance is the real villain here. Don’t fall into its trap.
Wishing you all the best with your investing career, whatever shape it takes.
Jon Giaan
[1] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/treasury/turnbull-and-morrison-supported-negative-gearing-shift/news-story/582c5b4f48784e8d20ac1573041aafa1MACON, GA—Saying that while she’s proud of her son’s decision to join the Army and knows that he is serving his country with honor, area mother Diane Brockmeyer told reporters Thursday she lives in constant fear knowing that her 24-year-old son, Pfc. Daniel Brockmeyer, is stationed at a military base in the United States. “I know that Daniel is extremely well-prepared and has specifically trained for dangerous scenarios, but I just can’t relax knowing he’s out there serving at a potentially volatile domestic Army facility day in and day out,” Brockmeyer said, adding that while emails and Skype calls with her eldest child assuage her anxieties in the short term, she continues to lose sleep over the knowledge that a typical day for him could turn deadly at any moment. “Keeping busy helps, and talking with other parents whose kids are stationed at bases throughout the country can provide some relief, too. But you read the paper and hear the awful stories and you can’t help but worry. There are just so many crazed, violent people out there who want to see harm come to American soldiers. I just want him to come home.” Brockmeyer added that she looks forward to the day when Daniel will be back in his hometown, able to walk freely down the street, pick up his children at school, and enjoy going to the movies with friends, secure in the knowledge that nothing will threaten him there.
AdvertisementThe Pathologies of War
There can be little doubt that America has become a permanent warfare state.(1) Not only is it waging a war in three countries, but its investment in military power is nearly as much as all of the military budgets of every other country in the world combined. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute states, “The USA’s military spending accounted for 43 per cent of the world total in 2009, followed by China with 6.6 per cent; France with 4.3 per cent and the UK with 3.8 per cent.”(2) The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost Americans a staggering $1 trillion to date, second only in inflation-adjusted dollars to the $4 trillion price tag for World War II.”(3) Pentagon spending for 2011 will be more than $700 billion. To make matters worse, as Tom Englehardt points out, “We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second. We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that’s without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs).”(4) Moreover, the United States maintains a massive ring of military bases and global presence around the world, occupying “over 560 bases and other sites abroad”(5) and deploying over 300,000 troops abroad, “even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services.”(6) In spite of how much military expenditures drain much-needed funds from social programs, the military budget is rarely debated in Congress or a serious object of discussion among the public. Rather than avoid squandering resources and human lives on foreign wars, we avoid “the realities and costs of war.”(7)
War is now normalized even as the United States becomes more militarized, moving closer to a national security state at home and an imperial/policing power abroad. Military historian Andrew Bacevich is right in arguing, “The misleadingly named Department of Defense serves in fact as a Ministry of Global Policing.”(8) War has become central to American character, but what is often unacknowledged is that its perpetual wars abroad are increasingly matched by a number of wars being waged on the domestic front. Such a disconnect becomes clear in the refusal of politicians, anti-public intellectuals |
Every ball because it was spinning, I decided to smack him over the leg side. He said that he hit him even from outside the pitch. Outside off stump and hit him for a six on the leg side," Ashwin said.
"So basically for Sehwag, it was very simple, he hit people on good balls. So my simple strategy to Sehwag was to bowl rubbish balls. And it worked. Because when you start bowling rubbish balls, he starts dictating the pace to you with your rubbish balls or your so-called against him."
Ashwin also said that Sehwag was least interested in team meetings to discuss strategy.
"He (Sehwag) just wanted to see the ball and hit it. He used to be the least participative during team meetings," he said.
"There used to be team meetings or huddles, followed by a short speech addressed by Gary (Kirsten). MS (Dhoni) would then take over, would not utter a word and said everything is good. That was how team meetings would end," revealed Ashwin.
First Published: June 7, 2017, 8:36 AM ISTAt 546 Civic Center Drive, look at entrance to arena to north, river is to south.
INSTRUCTIONS: Hover your mouse over the Google Street View windows below. Click the arrows on the window to move up and down the street. Click the window to change your view. Double click to zoom in. Click the box in the right-hand corner for full screen view.
At the suggestion of a listener caller, James Howard Kunstler gives a virtual walking tour of Detroit, Michigan using Google Street View. Google Street View is an interactive photographic map that allows users to view photographs of streets and buildings in many cities throughout the world. Users can follow along with this program using the embedded Google Street View windows below. During this “walking” tour, Kunstler examines the Michigan Central Depot Train Station, Tiger Stadium, the Renaissance Center, the People Mover, The Joe Louis Arena (aka the Aztec Maw of Death), The Grand Circus, the Fillmore and Fox theaters, and the Detroit waterfront.
BUY NOW: The KunstlerCast Book
Available at Amazon
Or Shop Indie Bookstores (price varies)
For Canada, Buy Here
For all else, check online.
REVIEWS
“This book is indeed great fun. … However, Crary’s superior volume has the guts to truly grapple with the harsh realities shaping our times—realities that few dare discuss out in the open.”
“KunstlerCast is an easy read that you can dip into and out of at will”
“For those of you wanting a good overview of Kunstler’s thinking and for those of you that want to share JHK with others but may fear being embarrassed by the sometimes ‘salty’ language he can use, this book is a great tool. The format is, by design, conversational. You can digest it in small bites or in large pieces. And the Kunstler world through Duncan’s eyes is not necessarily sanitized, but it is communicated in a way that I think will reach a broader audience.”
“The 320-page New Society Publishers offering was just released in paperback and is based on four years of weekly Kunstler riffs recorded by podcasting journalist Duncan Crary. In his introduction to the book, Crary professes to be merely a host, and sometimes a Kunstler foil, but the two upstate New Yorkers really are kindred intellects.”
—Ready to despair? ‘Doomer’ exhorts us to ‘grow up’, Jon Rutter Lancaster Sunday News, Nov. 12, 2011
(More Information and Reviews)A Roseville man’s belief that his wife was having an affair with her co-worker may have been the reason he shot and killed the man and then himself outside her workplace, authorities said Friday.
Roseville police responded to a report of a shooting with two men down at 4:15 p.m. Thursday near the loading dock area of CPI Card Group, a plastic card printer located at 1975 W. County Road B2, a few blocks from the Rosedale Shopping Center.
Police say Cheng Vang, 44, and his wife, Yong Vang, 37, both from Roseville, traveled to the business, where she works, to meet with her co-worker Joseph Yang, 33, of Brooklyn Park. Once there, Cheng Vang shot Yang multiple times with a semi-automatic pistol before turning the pistol on himself, police said. Yong Vang, who witnessed the shootings, went to the aid of her husband before police arrived.
The details of the meeting are under investigation, but authorities said in a news release they believe it was prearranged. Yang had a pen and paper documents when he was killed. Near Cheng Vang’s body, investigators found the pistol, which police determined he purchased legally in May.
Nearby surveillance cameras showed the Vangs arriving and parking on the east side of the loading docks with Yang arriving moments later and parking parallel to them. With the surveillance camera triggered to record only large object movements, the image stopped shortly after both Cheng Vang and Joseph Yang exited their vehicles and met.
“Preliminary investigative interviews indicate Cheng Vang may have believed Joseph Yang and his wife may have been involved in an extramarital affair,” Lt. Lorne Rosand, spokesman for Roseville police, said in a release. Thursday’s “meeting may have only been a ruse to lure Yang to a familiar location. Police speculate that once at CPI Card Group, Vang may have requested Yang to sign documents as a distraction in order to murder him.”
Autopsies determined that Cheng Vang died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and Yang from multiple gunshot wounds.
Yong Vang was not injured during the shooting and has been cooperative with police. She is not believed to be an accomplice. The investigation is ongoing.
Both Yong Vang and Joseph Yang were employed by CPI Card Group in an unknown capacity.
“The safety of our employees is of utmost importance and we are extremely saddened by this incident,” Diane Jackson, a spokeswoman for CPI Card Group, said in an e-mail.
The business has a counselor onsite for employees, Jackson said.
“Our thoughts and support are very much with our colleagues and the families of those involved in this incident as well as all of our colleagues in Minnesota,” she said.
CPI shares a large loading dock area with the shopping center that houses REI, Tuesday Morning, a furniture store and an urgent care clinic.
Twitter: @stribnorfleetImage caption There have been rumours about Garcia Marquez' memory losses
The brother of Gabriel Garcia Marquez says that the Colombian writer and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature is suffering from dementia.
Jaime Garcia Marquez told students at a lecture in the city of Cartagena that his brother, who is 85, phones him frequently to ask basic questions.
"He has problems with his memory. Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him," he said.
He says the author has stopped writing altogether.
The BBC's Arturo Wallace in Colombia said there have been rumours about Mr Garcia Marquez' memory problems.
Jaime Garcia Marquez, his younger brother, is the first family member to speak publicly about it.
Invited to talk about his relationship with Gabo, as the writer is affectionately known in Colombia, Jaime said he could not hold back from talking about his illness anymore.
"He is doing well physically, but he has been suffering from dementia for a long time," he said. "He still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had."
The 1967 masterpiece of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, begins with the story of a family unable to care for their senile grandfather.
"It is a disease that runs in the family," said Jaime Garcia Marquez.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez currently lives in Mexico and has not made many public appearances in recent years.
His novels include Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the The General in His Labyrinth.
He is best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has sold more than 30 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.With 20,000 players taking part in the fictional sport from the Harry Potter books, organisers announce a league pitting teams including the London Monarchs and the Yorkshire Roses
If rugby and football don’t prove magical enough this season, the launch of a Quidditch Premier League in the UK next summer could be the answer.
Quidditch leaves Harry Potter behind as (real) World Cup fever grows Read more
Dreamed up by JK Rowling, quidditch is played in the Harry Potter novels by characters who fly through the air on broomsticks. In its real-world equivalent, players hold a broom between their legs as they run around the pitch. Invented by two students in Vermont in 2005, it is now played by 20,000 players in 25 countries, some of which have lively university and college leagues. There is also a biannual Quidditch World Cup, most recently won by Australia in July.
As in the novels, there are seven players per team on the field at a time: a keeper, who guards the hoops, three chasers, who try to throw a “quaffle” (a semi-deflated volleyball) through the hoops to score goals, two beaters, who throw “bludgers” (dodgeballs) at the opposing team, and one seeker, who attempts to catch the “snitch”. In the novels, the snitch is a flying golden ball; in reality, it is a sock with a tennis ball in it, attached to the snitch runner’s shorts.
The UK Quidditch Premier League will run from May to August. Eight teams will compete for the title of national quidditch champion and include the London Monarchs, the Eastern Mermaids, the Yorkshire Roses and the West Midland Shredders.
Tom Newton, one of the organisers, said that each team represents a region of England and is named in reference to an element of the local culture. The lineup is completed by Southwest Broadside, Southeast Knights, Northern Watch and the East Midland Archers.
Brooms up! European Quidditch finals sweep Tuscan town Read more
“The Quidditch Premier League is such an exciting opportunity and development,” said director Jack Lennard. “It’s an opportunity for the sport to grow and gain prestige. It’s an opportunity for players to compete at the highest level. And, most importantly, it’s an opportunity for more people in more places to find out about this incredible sport.”
According to organisers of the UK’s Quidditch Premier League, it is the world’s most progressive sport for gender inclusivity, because there can be a maximum of only four players of the same gender per team on the pitch at any time.MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, a Democrat, ripped into Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s latest outburst on the Senate floor, declaring it “unhinged.”
After rolling a clip of Warren raging at fellow Democrats, a visibly exasperated Brzezinski excoriated the Massachusetts senator on Tuesday’s episode of Morning Joe.
“Do you lead on anger, though? Because that doesn’t seem very constructive to me. I gotta tell you. I love her; I’m getting tired of this act,” Brzezinski said. “You know what? There’s a huge part of the country that doesn’t think [Donald Trump is a disaster] and she might want to be a little inclusive because she is sounding like the people she is accusing of as being exclusive.”
“I mean she’s just got to stop. I’m sorry. It’s getting exhausting,” she added. “It’s not going to work. At some point we have to look at what happened and look at the people we’ve lost along the way.”
Bzezinski had been a vocal supporter of Warren’s, even championing her as Hillary Clinton’s top vice presidential option at one time, but it seems the lovefest may have run its course.
Earlier in the month, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) admitted the Democratic Party is “going to cease being a national party” if it maintains its current course.
“We can’t keep going down the same road… I’m pulling the fire alarm right now, is what I’m doing in the Democratic Party,” he warned.
Ryan said establishment Democrats are still in denial about the election, which indicates they have no clue about anything.
“I’m pulling the fire alarm, because the house is burning down, and we better get our act together or we’re going to cease being a national party,” he added. “We’re going to be a regional party that fails to get into the majority, and fails to do things on behalf of those working class people that were the backbone of the Democratic Party for so long.”
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SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:A Calgary mother is starting her own campaign to fight homophobia inspired by the courage of her daughter.
Calgary Transit vehicles, along with billboards, will feature gay acceptance messages this month.
For all of September, Calgary Transit vehicles will feature posters with simple messages like "stop homophobia" and "support transgender rights".
The posters, part of the "Acceptance" campaign, will be found on the buses and C-trains across the city. Billboards around the city will carry the message to parents as well.
Gail Dahl said she took up the campaign after seeing the difficulties, including bullying, that her 15-year-old daughter, who is gay, faced.
Dahl hopes the campaign will remind Calgarians about the need to respect diversity.
"I think Calgary has this kind of good-old-boy attitude that we’ve had for years and years that we really need to dig out and shine a light on and say, ‘Hey, is this helpful’, because I think everyone now has someone in their family who is gay, whether they have come out or not," Dahl said.Maxi Lopez: Set for move
Catania have confirmed that Maxi Lopez will move early in the New Year, but his destination has not yet been decided.
AC Milan had put Lopez on stand-by to be their choice of striker reinforcements for January, in case their move for Carlos Tevez fails to materialise.
But Milan have now decided they will not move for Lopez, meaning he is now looking elsewhere.
A host of Serie A clubs are thought to be looking at the 27-year-old former Barcelona man.
Catania want around €10million for the Argentine, who is also being linked with clubs in Germany and England.
Wolfsburg are reportedly keen, whilst Tottenham, Fulham and Queens Park Rangers are being credited with an interest in the Italian media.
"Maxi Lopez will leave and we'll see what happens in the next few days. He has offers from Italy and abroad," general manager Pietro Lo Monaco told Radio Marte.
Another Argentine on his way out of the club is goalkeeper Mariano Andujar after he had a row with Lo Monaco.
"Andujar has played his final game for Catania," Lo Monaco told the Gazzetta dello Sport.
But Lo Monaco insisted that their captain Marco Biagianti would not be heading to Napoli, with Giuseppe Mascara linked in exchange.As the Cypriot financial crisis continues, some are seeing a new opportunity for the popular Internet crypto-currency Bitcoin to gain broader acceptance.
Entrepreneur Jeff Berwick, founder of Canadian financial investment services company Stockhouse.com and CEO of TDV Media, announced earlier this week plans to open up an ATM in Cyprus to allow customers to exchange cash for Bitcoins, the popular decentralized Internet virtual currency.
Berwick is calling his new company BitcoinATM.
Fearing a bank run resulting from the panic caused by the EU and IMF’s initial €10 billion deal with Cyprus — which included a one-off 6.7 percent tax on deposits of up to €100,000, and a 9.9 percent tax on higher amounts— local banks froze bank accounts, cutting Cypriots off from their funds.
While the initial deal was rejected by the Cypriot parliament, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades, Eurozone finance ministers, and IMF officials agreed to a different deal on March 25 that impacted numerous uninsured bank accounts.
After the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF first announced their bailout deal with Cyprus, for example, the value of one Bitcoin has risen from $48 USD to its current value of more than $80 USD.
The surge in interest has exploded the overall value of the Bitcoin economy to beyond $800 million, reports Fox News.
BGR News reported last week Monday that several Bitcoin-related apps surged in popularity on the Spanish iPhone market. Also, an analysis of Google Trends also shows that worldwide search interest in the currency has risen significantly in the past month.
Bitcoin has been the subject of some controversy given its association with the sale of illicit drugs on the Internet.
It first emerged in 2009 as an online peer-to-peer crypto-currency. Users can exchange real currency for Bitcoins, and the transactions are encrypted and nearly anonymous, making it an attractive option for those looking to evade the ever-watchful eye of governments.
Its popularity and acceptance on the Internet, however, continues to grow as trust continues to erode in the world’s central banking institutions – acting as a kind of commodity similar to the way gold works.
Bitcoins are also accepted by numerous businesses on the Internet, including WordPress.
Since BitcoinATM’s technology would act as an intermediary between the Bitcoin world and the financial system, it would need to meet certain regulatory requirements.
In the U.S., for example, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) — a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury — recently announced money-laundering rules with respect to virtual currencies.
While Bitcoin was not named specifically, the rules do address decentralized currencies.
Engaging in the transfer of a virtual currency for real currency, or facilitating that transfer through an exchange, classifies that person or company as a money services business (MSB) that has to be registered with FinCEN.
According to the rules, however, a person purchasing or creating Bitcoins simply to purchase real or virtual goods does not classify them as an MSB.
“We are taking all of the necessary steps to ensure BitcoinATM passes all EU regulatory criteria,” said Justin O’Connell, General Counsel for BitcoinATM, to The Daily Caller Tuesday.
“We are also aware of the latest publications from FinCEN and the ECB, and have a dedicated legal team assessing all of the implications for the operations of BitcoinATM,” said O’Connell.
The ECB, or European Central Bank, issued a report in October 2012 concluding that virtual currencies “could have a negative impact on the reputation of central banks, assuming the use of such systems grows considerably and in the event that an incident attracts press coverage, since the public may perceive the incident as being caused, in part, by a central bank not doing its job properly.”
O’Connell also told The Daily Caller that BitcoinATM’s software team has ensured that the “platform will be highly adaptable to meet the needs of a rapidly changing Bitcoin marketplace.”
“The key to adoption will be adaption, as technology evolves to make the transactional side of Bitcoin as streamlined and straightforward as possible,” he said.
The team at BitcoinATM is looking to be the providers of the world’s first Bitcoin ATM, but it appears that they already have some competition.
Zach Harvey and Matt Whitlock, partners at the venture firm Lamassau Bitcoin Ventures, debuted their own prototype of a Bitcoin ATM at the Free State Project’s annual Liberty Forum in February. The two are hoping to sell their machine to bars, restaurants and other retailers in the U.S.
Follow Josh on TwitterArtists in New Jersey used the sun and sand to express their anger toward Gov. Chris Christie after he enjoyed time on a beach that he closed during a state shutdown during the holiday weekend.
The group of artists at Seaside Heights raised a larger-than-life sand sculpture of the governor, showing him leaning back in a chair while wearing shorts and a baseball cap, NJ.com reported.
A plaque at the sculpture’s feet read “IBSP” for Island Beach State Park, where Christie was caught Sunday taking in the rays with his family at a beach house reserved for the state’s governor.
CHRISTIE PIC FUROR IS JUST THE BEGINNING: STATES ENTER SUMMER OF BUDGET PAIN
When asked about the photos on Sunday, Christie spokesman said: “Yes, the governor was on the beach briefly today talking to his wife and family before heading into the office. He did not get any sun. He had a baseball hat on.”
During the Independence Day holiday weekend the rest of the state was barred from entering the park – or any other – after the state legislature failed to pass a budget by the June 30 deadline. The shutdown caused non-essential state services to close.
The state shutdown ended slightly after midnight Tuesday when Christie signed the budget, NJ.com reported. State-run recreation site were open for Fourth of July.
WORLD WAR II VETERAN HAS LOST MEDALS REPLACED IN TOUCHING JULY 4TH CEREMONY
The sculpture at Seaside Heights were not the only way New Jerseyans poked fun at Christie, who many consider to be the least popular in the state’s history.
A banner ad urging Christie to “Get The Hell Off Island Beach State Park” flew over the Jersey Show on Monday -- apparently referencing the governor's famous demands that people “get the hell off the beach” as Hurricane Irene approached in 2011.It’s been a year and a half since Chancelor Bennett’s tell-all mixtape Acid Rap launched him to global stardom and unanimous acclaim. But since then, the rapper’s output has been limited to a handful of digital singles. To get a sense of how fame has affected the 21-year-old singer, Chicago asked Loyola psychologist Scott Leon to analyze some of Chance’s recent lyrics—anything released between Acid Rap and now. Here’s what he said.
“I Am Very Very Lonely”
Leon: The title suggests he’s feeling alone and fatigued from his success. My guess is that’s a really common experience. Managing one’s success is very difficult.
This is not the castle this is just the casa tonight / Ain’t no Nala so my Simba ain’t gon’ be Mufasa tonight
Leon: Mufasa is the active, aggressive man, but he doesn’t want to be Mufasa. He wants to be Simba. He just wants somebody to come over and take care of him. It’s the fantasy of the booty call.
“Home Studio”
I’m the only minor minority in priority / Sippin’ gin and tonic while I plot upon authority / Author of my horoscope, feeling like the oracle
Leon: This is the height of his bravado and grandiosity: “I am the master of my own fate.” A record label is not going to tell him what to do. But even he knows that’s not totally true. In other songs, he downsizes this extreme self-sufficiency.
“Wonderful Everyday: Arthur” (a cover of the theme song from the PBS cartoon Arthur)
I’m gonna get by when the going get rough / I’m gonna love life ’til I’m done growing up / And when I go down / I’mma go down swinging / My eyes still smiling / And my heart still singing
Leon: He was doubted quite a bit when he was young, so his psychological resilience and perseverance started early on. They’re strengths that come from his childhood.
“No Better Blues”
I hate my bed, I hate my home, I hate my job / I hate the wife, I hate the kids, I hate the dog / I hate the sun, I hate the rain, I hate the clouds / I hate the TV, hate the dinner, hate the couch
Leon: He’s taking everything that a person could want and rebelling against it. He’s saying, “I hate my desire.”
I hate the womb, I needed room, I ate my twin
Leon: A womb fantasy is usually of being totally taken care of, like a helpless baby. He’s having the opposite of that. He’s saying, “I hate the need to be taken care of and dependent.”
This article appears in the January 2015 issue of Chicago magazine. Subscribe to Chicago magazine.
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November 19, 2014
(TheAntiMedia)
Shawn D. Miller, the managing director of environmental and social risk management for Citigroup, was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday around 3 p.m.
Miller, who resided in an upscale downtown apartment in New York City near Ground Zero, was discovered in his bathtub by a doorman who worked in the building. The Citigroup banker was found with his throat slashed.
No knife or weapon was recovered at the scene which prompted NYPD to rule out the possibility of suicide.
Citigroup issued a statement saying:
“We are deeply saddened by this news and our thoughts are with Shawn’s family at this time.”
Police are currently trying to determine who other than Miller had access to the residence.
It is currently unknown what led the doorman to enter the apartment where he discovered the body, but what is know is that a one bedroom apartment in the Greenwich Street building is currently priced at over $1,000,000, meaning not just anyone was allowed onto the property.
Miller, 42, a graduate of Syracuse University had been with Citigroup since 2004.
This article (Citigroup Banker Found Dead With Throat Slit) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TheAntiMedia.org. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to receive our latest articles.
Pin 4 17K SharesOwls’ are spherical, hummingbirds’ are elliptical and sandpipers’ are pointy.
All bird eggs have the same function — to protect and nourish a growing chick. But they come in a brilliant array of shapes. This variety has puzzled biologists for centuries. Now, in the most comprehensive study of egg shapes to date, published Thursday in Science, a team of scientists seems to have found an answer.
The researchers cataloged the natural variation of egg shapes across 1,400 bird species, created a mathematical model to explain that variation, and then looked for connections between egg shape and many key traits of birds. On a global scale, the authors found, one of the best predictors of egg shape is flight ability, with strong fliers tending to lay long or pointy eggs.
“This paper is remarkable because it creates a wonderfully unified theory for the variety of egg shapes we see in nature,” said Claire Spottiswoode, a bird ecologist at the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town who did not participate in the research.Jack Nicholls on Monaco, making history and signing autographs.
As Formula E makes its way to Europe for the second half of its inaugural season, we caught up with world feed commentator Jack Nicholls between glasses of something definitely non-alcoholic to talk Long Beach, Monaco and podium predictions.
If you could pick one highlight of the Long Beach race, what would it be?
Nelson Piquet winning his first Formula E race 35 years after his dad won his first F1 race at the same track. It was a great story and I make no apologies for going on about it. On the Thursday before the race, I remember wandering into the paddock for the first time and I saw this red and white helmet, like the one that Piquet’s dad wore back at that 1980 F1 race. Nelson has had these really bright helmets – in fact, his usual Formula E helmet has been gold glitter – but that helmet was something else. Red and white coolness. We didn’t know if Nelson was going to wear it for the race because he said there was an issue with the radio or something in shakedown, but then he wore it on Saturday. It just felt like it was going to be his weekend, and it was.
My other highlight was being asked for an autograph! I was walking around the paddock with Dario Franchitti, who is a bit of a legend, especially in the US. This couple came up to us and asked me for an autograph. I expect to be signing a lot more autographs in Monaco – but only because my family are coming!
Piquet drove away from the field like he was in a different car. How did he do it?
Sometimes, you can’t tell. It was like Sam Bird in Malaysia. How did it happen? I don’t know. Drivers talk about being “in the groove” at a race track. With Formula E’s limited time on the circuit, it can be hard to find that groove. If you’re Nelson Piquet, and it’s Long Beach, and you have all of that history, maybe it does get you into the groove earlier. If it’s two or three tenths a second a lap that you’re pulling out, normally that wouldn’t be a massive advantage in other race series. But in Formula E that can make a huge difference.
Six winners in six races: will the trend continue in Europe?
It can’t carry on, can it? We can’t have seven different winners….but then you look at the people who haven’t won a race yet. It’s a ridiculously strong grid. When we arrived in Long Beach, I think Piquet was the only one in the top six who hadn’t won a race, so it was kind of his turn. I think now it’s Heidfeld’s turn. I think he’s led more races than anyone but hasn’t actually won one yet. The only way we’ll get seven winners in seven races is if he takes it. Saying that, this is Formula E and, as we’ve already seen, anything can happen! Malaysia and Long Beach are the only two races that have had similar victories. It hasn’t all come together yet for Jaime Alguersuari – he’s one to watch out for. Trulli won the Monaco F1 race in 2004 from pole position so this could be his race, too.
Alain Prost’s e.dams-Renault team is looking formidable. Can they be beaten?
How can you say that when China Racing won so convincingly last time out? The team that operates e.dams-Renault, DAMS, has a lot of experience at Monaco and they’re a very, very good team. But e.dams were favourites from the outset and they haven’t converted that into the same sort of unchallenged winning performances as Sam Bird managed in Putrajaya and Piquet in Long Beach. There are still five races to go in this championship, remember.
Monaco is a fantastically historic track but isn’t known for the most exhilarating racing. What sort of show can we expect from Formula E?
I don’t know if it’ll be as thrilling as the Buenos Aires race but Monaco is one of the greatest F1 races of all time. It’s super that Formula E will be racing there. The track is a slightly shortened circuit and it doesn’t have the tunnel, but it takes in the essence of the place. Formula E cars are totally different to F1 cars, so it’ll be a different sort of spectacle. It might be easier on energy levels, but no one will really know until we get there. Coming into La Rascasse will be similar to the hairpin at Long Beach. There should be some decent overtaking places, but there’s more to a good race than just overtaking chaos. I think Monaco will have a similar vibe to the Long Beach race. Plus, entry is free, which is great.
Who’ll take the podium positions in Monaco?
It’s not a particularly quick circuit and I don’t think they’ll be energy limited. So it will all come down to the driver, as Monaco always does. No one has yet won from pole position in Formula E and this could be the track where that happens for the first time. Who can get into the zone fastest? I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Sam Bird turn up and say: “I know Monaco. I like Monaco. I can win at Monaco. Off we go.” My top three? Buemi, Bird, Trulli.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Police stand guard at the entrance to Trump Tower
Since last week's election upset, rumours have been swirling over whether newly appointed President-elect Donald Trump will leave his $100m (£80m) New York penthouse for the White House.
The billionaire's 58th floor residence in Trump Tower offers stunning views of the Manhattan skyline and has been decorated in a "Louis XIV style" decked in gold and marble.
Photos of the penthouse, published by the Daily Mail, show enormous chandeliers, plush sofas, and gold-encrusted Corinthian columns.
Mr Trump once told biographer Michael D'Antoni about his penthouse, expressing great pride in its construction.
"This is a very complex unit. Building this unit, if you look at the columns and the carvings, this building, this unit was harder than building the building itself."
And, according to the New York Times, Mr Trump has been speaking with advisers about how many nights a week he would spend in the White House, saying he would like to spend time in New York when he can.
The business mogul is reportedly a homebody who flew long hours during the campaign just to sleep in his own bed.
It is unclear if Mr Trump, his wife Melania and the couple's 10-year-old son, Barron, who is currently halfway through his school year, will live at the White House.
But if he opted out of his presidential quarters he would certainly turn Washington's historical status quo on its head.
World leaders who have rejected official residences
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose not to live in the official residence of 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa because of its dilapidated state of disrepair. Mr Trudeau's mother, who lived in the house while her husband was prime minister, referred to the residence as "the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system".
Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama refused to live in the newly built Flagstaff House because his party had accused the then government of wasting taxpayers' money. Mr Mahama, a former vice-president before he took his current office, continues to live in his old home, only using Flagstaff House as an office. Ironically this means taxpayers must shell out more money for another house for his deputy.
Pope Francis famously denounced the papal residences after his election in 2013, saying he did not need a large apartment and liked interaction with other clergy. "I'm visible to people and I lead a normal life - a public Mass in the morning, I eat in the refectory with everyone else. All this is good for me and prevents me from being isolated."
The White House is seen as a symbol of American history and tradition and has been occupied by every office holder since John Adams, America's second president.
In 1902, the president's offices were relocated to the building's second floor, making the commute to a busy job a bit easier.
The White House is a quick two miles from the Capitol building where the US Congress is held - Trump Tower happens to be over 220 miles away.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The White House is a symbol of American history and tradition
Also, if Mr Trump chooses to reside in New York he could greatly disrupt city traffic. New Yorkers frequently take to social media in frustration when President Obama's motorcade disrupts the city's busy grid.
Whenever the president travels, roads are blocked, traffic can back up for miles and delays can last hours, but this would be exacerbated in a crowded city like New York.
Then there is the issue of security. On election night, the US Federal Aviation Administration established a no-fly zone over midtown Manhattan until 21 January, the day after the US presidential inauguration.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Protesters outside Trump Tower pose an additional security risks to Mr Trump and his Secret Service team
The directive cites "VIP movement" as the reason behind the flying ban, which prohibits planes, helicopters and drones from flying below 3,000ft and within a two-nautical-mile radius of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
Secret service flights are exempt.
Nevertheless, were Mr Trump to remain in New York, security at Trump Tower would have to be bolstered.
The White House has multiple layers of defence, making a veritable fortress.
An outer iron fence is reinforced by groups of armed guards at the gates and inside the perimeter.
Snipers are perched atop the building and windows have bullet-proof glass. Additionally, infrared alarms, lasers, and missiles are all reportedly part of the building's defence system.
For a tycoon accustomed to jetting to lavish residences as he pleases, his new job may be an adjustment.When you saw the word “reputation”, did you think I meant the New Orleans Saints defense itself?
Well not really.
I was actually referring to the the reputation that comes along with being the defensive coordinator for the team, or more specifically for head coach Sean Payton.
NOLA.com Saints beat writer Larry Holder joked recently in an interview on WWL 870 AM that Payton tried to “save face” by firing former defensive coordinator Rob Ryan midway through the 2015 season so instead of having five defensive coordinators in eight years, it was “five defensive coordinators in 8 1/2 years”.
Payton was also smart in doing it before the holidays too — so that way he didn’t have to buy Christmas gifts for him.
Nov 8, 2015; New Orleans, LA, USA; New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton on the sidelines in the second half of their game against the Tennessee Titans at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. The Titans won, 34-28, in overtime. Mandatory Credit: Chuck Cook-USA TODAY Sports
But on a somewhat serious note, the track record for longevity as a defensive coordinator for the Saints ranks right up there with Payton’s patience for kickers.
As in: not very long.
I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation
I’ve never been afraid of any deviation
An’ I don’t really care if you think I’m strange
I ain’t gonna change An’ I’m never gonna care ’bout my bad reputation
Oh no, not me, oh no, not me Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – 1983
The big question moving forward is can the newly crowned one in Dennis Allen; change not only the defense for the better, but stick around long enough to embed a true culture at the coordinator position that seems to rise and fall like the tide?
Back in 2009, everyone was caught off guard by the Saints defense and how they attacked opposing offenses with not only their mainstay players, but ones that they had signed as free agents who weren’t as flashy by some standards.
Then-defensive coordinator Gregg Williams changed the mindset of the defensive unit by preaching an attacking and aggressive style of play that was meant to constantly keep the other team on their heels.
I mean for heavens sake, the guy was showing the defense footage of lions and eagles hunting and killing their prey and telling them that’s how they were meant to play, when |
the minds and the hearts of people because the character was so well liked."[4] The show also raised the issue of whether television series "like political trial ballons, can ready the populace for change." [5][6][7]
After Barack Obama's election, the television show the Cosby Show was cited for what has been termed the “Huxtable effect” for the influence of its "warmhearted" portrayal, "free of street conflicts and ghetto stereotypes - that broke ground for its depiction of an upwardly mobile black family." The show has even been cited by some observers as a factor in Obama's victory.[8]
Novels [ edit ]
In 1964 Irving Wallace published The Man, a popular novel addressing the idea of a black president, named Douglas Dillman in the book. Recently a critic described it as a window into "Kennedy-era racial pathologies", despite the author's liberal attitude. It included the portrayal of attractive multiracial or "mulatto" women who could pass for white, as does the hero Dillman's own light-skinned daughter.[9] The Man—which was made into a 1972 movie starring James Earl Jones as Dillman—noted factors against a black president being elected in America, and Dillman's coming to power through an unlikely series of circumstances of succession.[1]
Other novels featuring a first black president include Philip K. Dick's The Crack in Space (1966), T. Ernesto Bethancourt's young adult novel The Tomorrow Connection [10] (1984) and T.D. Walters' self-published thriller The Race[11] (2007).
Stand-up comedy [ edit ]
After civil rights and voting rights legislation was passed in 1964 and 1965, the move of blacks into full political participation began. Portrayals of blacks as president began to appear in comedians' routines. In the early years of his career in the 1960s, comedian Bill Cosby frequently told jokes along racial lines, including one about an imaginary first black president. He stopped when he decided to reach a wider audience.[12]
In 1983 at age 22, Eddie Murphy (who was born the same year as Obama)[13] enacted a parody of a black president in one of his stand-up routines, Eddie Murphy Delirious, filmed in Washington, D.C..[14]
Movies and television [ edit ]
Writers and directors have featured a black man as president in several memorable portrayals. There have been film and television proposals based on the idea, as well.[15] The first movie portrayal of a black American president was probably that of Sammy Davis Jr. in the 1933 film Rufus Jones for President. In this short musical comedy, the 7-year-old Davis is told by his mother, portrayed by Ethel Waters, that "anyone can become president, and later dreams of his own inauguration". Outside the dreams, the film reflects contemporary racist attitudes.[16]
The 1941 musical movie Babes on Broadway included Judy Garland in black male drag singing a song "Franklin Delano Jones", about the first black president of the United States.[17]
"When Rod Serling adapted Irving Wallace's "The Man" to the screen in 1972—it was a joint production of Paramount Pictures and ABC Circle Films, originally intended to air on ABC's made-for-television Movie of the Week series, but the network chose not to air it, prompting Paramount to release the film to theaters instead[18]—the political climate had changed sufficiently that he could promote Douglass Dilman from survivor to competitor—a genuine leader who, after standing up to his white rivals, vows to win the presidency through "legitimate" electoral means."[9] With James Earl Jones starring in 1972, the film version had a heroic black man as president, who ended the film in a position of moral authority.[19][20]
In 1977 comedian Richard Pryor portrayed the first black president of the United States in a skit on The Richard Pryor Show, his short-lived foray on NBC television.[14][21]
Lizzie Borden's 1983 science fiction film Born in Flames about a radical feminist insurgency, set in an alternative United States Socialist Democracy, features a black president.
The 1987 animated series Spiral Zone is the first television show in history to show a serious depiction of an African-American president of the United States in the episode The "Imposter".[22]
In the 1993 science-fiction series SeaQuest DSV, the unnamed President of the United States featured in the first season episode "Better Than Martians" is portrayed by African-American actor Steven Williams.
In the 1997 science-fiction film The Fifth Element, character actor Tom Lister, Jr. played President Lindberg, the commander-in-chief of not just the United States of America but the planet Earth. His competence to lead is not questioned due to his race. In fact, his skin color is never mentioned.[23]
A generation after The Man, the 1998 science fiction film Deep Impact featured black actor Morgan Freeman as president Tom Beck.[1][19] Critic Louis Bayard noticed that Dennis Haysbert seemed to adopt Freeman's cadences for his own role as president.[9]
In the hit show 24, a television precedent was set when Dennis Haysbert portrayed a lead character, David Palmer, and successful president who fought terrorism. Critic Charles Taylor described him as showing "the determination of magnetism, brains, resolve, compassion and willingness to make tough calls we dream of in a president."[24][25] After the show portrayed the assassination of Palmer, his brother Wayne, played by D.B. Woodside, was also elected president.[26] The Jerusalem Post speculated in June 2008 that television ratings "may have predicted Obama's primary victory over Hillary Clinton, as the most recent female television president appears to have been less popular than the black leaders of 24." [27]
In 2000, Chris Tucker planned on writing, directing, producing and starring in a movie about the first black president of the United States.[28]
Chris Rock wrote, directed, and starred as presidential candidate Mays Gilliam in the 2003 comedy Head of State, described as "undernourished."[9][19] The movie's tagline was "The only thing white is the house".[1] Another critic described Rock as in way over his head, and found it "depressing to see Rock pander to the most reactionary elements of the black audience." He also was surprised at some of the settings. "Rock doesn't seem to know much about contemporary America; when his character travels to Memphis (a majority-black city with a black mayor) we see only white people."[24]
In 2004, a sketch on Chappelle's Show called "Black Bush" featured Dave Chappelle as an African-American "interpretation" of then President George W. Bush and his administration. It was controversial due to its set-up segment (which had Chappelle mocking fellow comedian Dennis Miller over the comedian's infamous "free pass" comment regarding not saying anything bad about George W. Bush) and its overall theme that if Bush and his top aides were black, that the public would be more willing to be critical of the President and his decisions. The sketch also features cameo appearances by actor Jamie Foxx, who appears as "Black Tony Blair" and Mos Def as "Black Head of the CIA" holding "Yellowcake from Africa" (Anthony Berry's character warns the other not to "drop that shit", though it is clearly just yellow cake).
In CBS's 2004 TV series Century City's fictional timeline, Oprah Winfrey is the US President.
Louis Gossett Jr. played the President in two different movies in 2005 — in the Christian movie Left Behind: World at War[29] he played President Gerald Fitzhugh and in the direct-to-DVD Solar Attack he played President Ryan Gordon.
Mike Judge's 2006 Idiocracy featured President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho as a former porn star and champion wrestler played by erstwhile NFL defensive end Terry Alan Crews.[1] Critic Bayard thought it odd that the lead character seemed so little advanced from earlier 20th century caricatures. The "joke is essentially unchanged from the days of Rufus Jones: These are the last guys in the world -- or any world -- you'd want to vote for."[9]
A 2006 BBC Four adaptation of John Wyndham's short story Random Quest depicts the main character being sucked into an alternate reality in which Condoleezza Rice is president of the United States.
In ABC's 2008 series Life on Mars (a remake of BBC's series of the same name), it is hinted that Malia Obama, the daughter of then-candidate Barack Obama, is the President in 2035.
Post-Obama's election [ edit ]
Actor Danny Glover played President Thomas Wilson in the 2009 movie 2012.
NBC's 2010 series "The Event" features Blair Underwood in a starring role as Elias Martinez, an Afro-Cuban US President.
Actor Jamie Foxx played President James William Sawyer in the 2013 movie White House Down.
Actor Samuel L. Jackson played William Alan Moore, the US President in the 2014 movie Big Game.
In the 2014-2015 NBC TV series State of Affairs, Alfre Woodard plays Constance Payton, the first black female president of the United States.[30]
In 2015, Keith David voiced the President of the United States in the 2015 second season Rick and Morty episode "Get Schwifty."
Music [ edit ]
Parliament's 1975 Washington, D.C.-themed song Chocolate City had Muhammad Ali as President of the United States and James Brown as Vice President, among others.
In 1983, R&B artist Blowfly released a track entitled "The first black president", a conversation between President Blowfly and his assistant over hip hop music.
The music video accompanying N.W.A's "Express Yourself" featured a shot of the White House with the caption, "Live from the Black House", followed by one of Dr. Dre swiveling a chair in what is apparently meant to represent the Oval Office. Several more shots in the video continue the same scene.[31]
Rap artist Nas was inspired by the Obama campaign to write a song entitled "Black President", which includes quotations from Obama. The track samples Tupac Shakur with a modified lyric saying, "And although it seems heaven sent, we ain't ready to have a black president."[32]
Rap artist Young Jeezy, also inspired by the Obama campaign, wrote a song entitled "My President", which also featured Nas, and featured the chorus "My President Is Black..."
When he appeared in speaking roles on Snoop Dogg's album No Limit Top Dogg, actor Rudy Ray Moore joked that he would run for president with two priorities - painting the White House black and legalizing just about everything.
Other media [ edit ]
An unnamed black president played a major role in the 2000 first-person shooter Nintendo 64 video game Perfect Dark. The player must prevent his assassination and lead him to the escape pod on a futuristic rendition of Air Force One.
Effect of Obama's presidency on television [ edit ]
The Obama presidency has potential to affect television shows, but people have differing reactions to that.[8] The comedian and actor Bill Cosby said he is "not all that optimistic that Obama’s presidency will make a major difference in terms of onscreen diversity," saying "they would die before putting another show on about a black family and black pride." [33]
Pastor T.D. Jakes noted the portrayal on television of "middle-class African-Americans who are articulate, intelligent and thoughtful." He hoped the new president would make a difference in encouraging those types of depictions.[8] "The Obama effect might even go beyond bolstering the presence of blacks on television and actually bring about a tonal change in programming," according to Brok Akil. She wrote a script based on a book called Making Friends With Black People, a buddy comedy that focuses on the state of race relations in the U.S.[8] She added that, "In our pitch to NBC, we referenced Obama." She also said, "We talked about how he has gotten us to the table to talk about race in a meaningful way and it’s time to continue the discussion. So our new president has already had an impact." [8]
See also [ edit ]PA, Philadelphia will press on with climate policies despite Trump withdrawal from Paris pact
Jon Hurdle Bio Recent Stories Jon is an experienced journalist who has covered a wide range of general and business-news stories for national and local media in the U.S. and his native U.K. As a former Reuters reporter, he spent several years covering the early stages of Pennsylvania’s natural gas fracking boom and was one of the first national reporters to write about the effects of gas development on rural communities. Jon trained as a general news reporter with a British newspaper chain and later worked for several business-news organizations including Bloomberg News and Market News International, covering topics including economics, bonds, currencies and monetary policy. Since 2011, he has been a freelance writer, contributing Philadelphia-area news to The New York Times; covering economics for Market News, and writing stories on the environment and other subjects for a number of local outlets including StateImpact. He has written two travel guidebooks to the European Alps; lived in Australia, Switzerland, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and visited many countries including Ethiopia, Peru, Taiwan, and New Zealand. Outside of work hours, Jon can be found running, birding, cooking, and, when weather permits, gardening in the back yard of a Philadelphia row home where he lives with his partner, Kate.
Emma Lee / WHYY
President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord isn’t likely to derail Pennsylvania’s efforts to curb methane emissions, and it strengthens Philadelphia’s determination to set its own climate policy, officials said.
Trump’s rejection on Thursday of the historic agreement to stop global temperatures rising more than an average of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels prompted howls of protest from other signatory nations but is expected to result in business as usual in Pennsylvania.
State officials said the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, would press on with its efforts to cut escapes of methane – a potent greenhouse gas – from natural gas wells and pipelines. Philadelphia officials were expected to continue their drive to reduce carbon emissions and prepare for the higher temperatures and bigger storms that are forecast to come with climate change.
“Climate change is a global issue that needs cooperation at all levels, from international agreements down to local efforts to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gases,” said Neil Shader, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, which implements climate policy. “While withdrawal from the Paris agreement will not directly impact specific DEP policies, climate change is still an issue that is already affecting Pennsylvania.”
In Philadelphia, Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney issued a statement saying that the city would continue its efforts to cut carbon emissions to match the requirements of the international pact.
“President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement goes against the interests of Philadelphians,” Kenney said. “My administration is now committed to upholding at the local level the very same commitment made by the United States in the Paris climate agreement — to reduce carbon emissions between 26 and 28 percent by 2025. This will ensure that we’re well on our way to meeting Philadelphia’s current long-term goal of reducing the city’s emissions 80 percent by 2050.”
Kenney said Philadelphia would be one of about 60 U.S. cities working to meet the standards set by the Paris agreement.
In a statement at the White House, Trump said the United States would immediately withdraw from the Paris accord but would try to renegotiate what he said was a better deal. He said other countries such as China and India would be allowed to exploit coal reserves under the Paris accord while the United States would be prevented from doing so.
“The bottom line is that the Paris accord is very unfair at the highest levels to the United States,” Trump said.
He said some of he other 194 countries that have signed the agreement would be able to gain financially, at the expense of the United States.
“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries getting a financial advantage over the United States,” he said.
“We are getting out but we will start a negotiation and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair,” he said.
In Harrisburg, the Wolf administration’s climate efforts previously focused on a plan to cut power plant emissions, as required by the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule.
But compliance efforts halted after the U.S. Supreme Court halted implementation of the plan in February 2016, and Trump issued an executive order to review the rule in March this year. As a result, Pennsylvania’s climate policy is now focused on reducing methane leaks from natural gas operations.
That’s being opposed by some state lawmakers who want to ensure that Pennsylvania’s restrictions on methane leaks are no stricter than those required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Any tougher limits would reduce state competitiveness and cost jobs, according to supporters of SB 175, a bill that aims to lessen the impact of the methane rule.
Rep. Greg Vitali, a Delaware County Democrat, said many lawmakers in the Republican majority of both state houses already oppose the methane restrictions proposed by the Wolf administration, and so Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris agreement is unlikely to make a lot of difference.
“The resistance is there already,” Vitali said. “It’s difficult to get positive things done on climate.”
Steve Miskin, a spokesman for the House Republicans, said he expects the state will continue to pursue climate policy, as required by a 2008 state law under which the DEP must make two reports on climate change every three years.
“Pennsylvania’s 2008 Climate Change Act requires the Commonwealth to have its own plan independent of federal polices and international agreements,” Miskin said. “We have made significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Pennsylvania and it’s expected we will continue to do so.”
The state reduced carbon emissions by some 11 million metric tons from 2000 to 2012, according to DEP data, largely because of the price-led switch from coal to natural gas as a fuel for generating electricity.
With the federal government now turning its back on international efforts to cut emissions, advocates say there is an increased need for states and cities to strengthen their own efforts in the hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change in coming decades.
“This underscores the absolute necessity of states and cities taking the lead from a public policy perspective” on climate policy, said former DEP Secretary John Quigley.
As the nation’s second-biggest natural gas producer, Pennsylvania has a special responsibility to lead efforts to curb emissions, Quigley said.
But he warned that Pennsylvania’s emissions could begin to rise again if nuclear plants like Three Mile Island close, renewing opportunities for coal. Three-Mile Island’s owner, Exelon Corp., said this week that it will close the plant in 2019, 15 years before its operating license expires, in a market dominated by cheap natural gas, growing renewables, and slowing demand for electricity.
“Right now, we are benefiting from the switch from coal to gas because of market forces,” Quigley said. “But if the nukes go away, PA’s emissions are going to rise, and the positive trend we are seeing because of shale gas could be reversed in a very significant way.”
Advocates for the U.S. to remain a part of the global climate agreement hailed Wednesday’s vote by shareholders of Exxon Mobil for an open assessment of how the company’s business is affected by climate change policy such as the Paris accord.
U.S. Senator Tom Carper of Delaware urged President Trump to note that a majority of company’s shareholders recognize the threat to profits from climate change, and are directing the company to take the issue seriously.
“Today, the shareholders of one of the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels, Exxon Mobil, have recognized this very fact,” Carper, a Democrat, said in a statement. “This is a victory, and I hope it’s a sign that the small minority of people who remain unconvinced on this issue are ready to face reality.”
Ahead of Trump’s scheduled announcement of his decision, Gov. Wolf urged the president to keep America in the Paris pact.
“Many of America’s largest corporations – from energy to technology – agree with environmental advocates, faith leaders and scientists that staying in the Paris agreement is the right choice for America,” Wolf said in a statement. “We cannot ignore the scientific evidence and economic significance of climate change and put our economy and population at risk.”
Editor's PicksSenran Kagura: Bon Appetit! has gotten quite the expansion in the form of the Gessen x Hebijo downloadable content.
If you bought the game without any knowledge of the manner in which content within the game is handled, you were probably confused and/or angry to see over half the cast locked behind DLC.
The new downloadable content adds both the Gessen Girls’ Academy and the Hebijo Clandestine Girls’ Academy, with a total of ten new girls to choose from. You’ll also get a free soundtrack (31 songs in total), although it appears to be restricted to PlayStation systems, so no dice if you’re looking to throw it on your iPod or something.
Finally, if you’re wondering why both Rin and Daidōji are locked behind DLC still, it’s because you didn’t buy their character packs for Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus. Also, if you bought those and want to just play as either of those two girls, Rin still requires the Gessen x Hebijo DLC, as she’s a part of the Hebijo Academy.
You can find the Gessen x Hebijo DLC here on the PlayStation Store, for $14.99.On Monday the 14th of September, at 10:14 my heart broke.
I logged into Facebook and saw a message from friend Clare, but before I had a chance to read it I’d already seen the image pop up on my screen. An announcement that my favourite band for over 10 years, Funeral for a Friend, were calling it a day.
I have been meaning to write about the band on here since I started this blog, I’ve had ideas swirling around in my head for over 2 years. Yet is has taken this announcement for me to finally sit down and type. The thing is sometimes a band isn’t just a band, sometimes a band is such a large part of your life you feared the day this would come.
In 2003 I was 15, sat in a Science lesson trying to act cool. Listening to Blink 182 on my C.D player between lessons, a guy I had a huge crush on asked me what I was listening to, knocked my earbud out and announced it was time I listen to something better. The album he played me was the newly released Casually Dressed and Deep in Conversation. I only heard a few seconds but as I fancied the guy I went out and bought the C.D with a few of my friends at the next opportunity. I have a distinct memory of putting it into my parents Hi-fi and blasting it as loud as possible. When I got to track Escape Artists Never Die I was hooked. I listened to that one track on repeat for ages before I continued with the rest of the album. It was official, I was obsessed.
As quickly as I could I was hunting out older E.P’s in HMV, putting posters on my wall and buying every interview I could in Kerrang. By the time they played the Octagon in Sheffield my friends and I were bouncing with excitement. I still remember that gig so clearly. That was the first gig in so many, my music tastes are open and ever changing, but Funeral for a Friend remain my most watched band to date, and I doubt they will ever be topped. I have seen them all over the UK, from headlining festivals to Barrow in Furness of all places. I traveled to see them and every time I loved it. I can honestly say I have never been to a Funeral for a Friend gig I’ve not loved.
My love of the band can be split into two periods, the first one lasted until just after the release of Tales Don’t Tell Themselves. I started a relationship that was very destructive and controlling. Once of the things he stopped me from doing was seeing live bands and he didn’t like me listening to any band he deemed too attractive. I still listened to the old stuff but their other albums were banned. When we finally ended, going to see them live was a big part of the recovery. I remember the feelings of freedom and nostalgia as I watched them again, their album Conduit had just been released and I’d fallen in love again. I’d traveled to Nottingham dragging my friend Leigh along with me with a suspected collapsed lung. I was seriously ill, and yet I managed to forget it all when they played. I met the band for the first time after that show, but never could find the right words. From here on in I became a one woman marketing machine telling everyone I knew to listen to their new releases.
There are two recent gigs that really stand out for me. One I attended in Leeds last year, it was the anniversary tour for Hours and as soon as they started playing the first track, one I’d never heard live, I was in tears. I was alone and surrounded by groups of drunken lads and it was embarrassing. The second was the last gig I went to see. I saw one of my dreams com true, my favourite band played my favourite venue, Corporation in Sheffield. I am glad it’s something I managed to tick off my wish list, it’s one I never thought I would.
Other little moments such as sweat dripping from the roof in in a student union gig, and being front row at Download, helping me solidified some of my longest friendships, are things I can never forget.
When I got my first ipod I went out of my way to make sure Casually Dressed was the first album I added to it, and every subsequent ipod/iphone since I have kept up this tradition. This year when I got my first car, their latest album Chapter and Verse was the first C.D in there, and I’ve annoyed everyone to death in the past months playing it non-stop.
When I read the news I wasn’t completely shocked. It was something I have been expecting for a while and had been warning my friends about the awful mood I would be in if it happened. When I read the news at work I went into practicality mode ok how do I get the money together to afford tickets for the farewell tour. A little later it really hit me. Honestly, I cried. At 27 and at work I cried over a band splitting up, I actually felt dizzy.
If this post had a full title it would be “Why I was never going to be ready for Funeral for a Friend ending, but I totally respect their decision and will enjoy their music for the rest of my life“, but that’s not as catchy. I can’t afford it but I will be there at their final gig in London in April, and hopefully a couple more besides. I’m sad it’s gone, but I am mostly glad it happened. Thank you guys. Thank you so much.By 2016, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium will be the largest stadium in the state of Mississippi.
Ole Miss director of athletics Ross Bjork announced renovation plans for the Rebels’ home on Monday, highlighted by the north endzone becoming bowled in and a new video board, among other additions.
The plans coincide with the Forward Together campaign the university announced in 2011. The current total for the campaign stands at $175.75 million, up from the initial $150 million, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Renderings of the plans for Vaught-Hemingway Stadium were released at the outset of the Forward Together campaign, and again last year, though Bjork says the plans announced on Monday best fit Ole Miss’ needs and its financial capabilities.
New renderings should be released soon.
Capacity will increase to 64,038 and is expected to be completed in time for the 2016 season.
Construction will begin in December 2015. Additional work will begin on the south endzone on Jan. 7, which will add 30 luxury suites and 770 club level suites for 2015.
The student section will move from the south endzone to the north endzone, according to the Clarion-Ledger. Bjork said the move will increase to student capacity to more than 10,000 seats, up from the current 8,100.
The north endzone will be home to a new video board, which will stand 104 feet wide by 94 feet tall. Two new video boards will occupy each side the north endzone, both at 30 feet wide by 50 feet high.
Bjork said the new capacity of 64,000-plus meets the demand of the university, and that the changes take advantage of the current infrastructure. Bjork added, however, that the way the north endzone will be constructed allows for future expansion, if necessary.Image copyright Instagram: EssenaONeill Image caption The Instagram star from Australia is revamping her account to expose the realities behind her successful picture posts
A teenage Instagram star has made an emotional statement about the dark side of social media, editing the captions of her own pictures saying they were artificial and self-promoting.
With more than 500,000 followers on Instagram, Australian Essena O'Neill, 18, earned an income from social media.
She became a social media celebrity through posting images of her apparently picture perfect lifestyle.
She now says it left her feeling empty and addicted to social media likes.
In a 17-minute video which she uploaded onto her YouTube account, she vows to act against the "unhealthy" ideals of social media.
She also set up a website to fight against what she described as the cult of social media. She deleted 2,000 photos on Instagram that, she said, "served no real purpose other than self-promotion", and scrapped her other social accounts.
"I don't want to support social sharing sites that makes billions off advertisements I don't agree with," she said.
"I've also spent hours watching perfect girls online, wishing I was them. When I became 'one of them', I still wasn't happy, content or at peace with myself."
Image copyright Instagram: essenaoneill
Image copyright Instagram: Essenaoneill
She said she was re-editing captions on the remaining photos hosted on her Instagram account to reveal "manipulation, mundanity and insecurity".
"Social media isn't real. It's a system based on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers," she said in a post in October.
"It's perfectly orchestrated self-absorbed judgement. I was consumed by it."
A previous post showing work-out selfies of the then-15-year-old girl in fitness gear, has now been re-captioned to highlight how the amount of "calorie restriction" and "excessively exercising" that went into her daily routine.
"Anyone addicted to social media fame like I once was, is not in a conscious state," she added.
Another Instagram, once showing her in a bikini, has been re-captioned: "Stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn't candid life, or cool or inspirational. It's contrived perfection made to get attention."
Image copyright Instagram: Essenaoneill
Ms O'Neill's followers on Instagram largely reacted with praise for her stand against social media.
"Your honesty and vulnerability are so powerful. I'm very proud of the direction you are taking," commented Gina Hart, a user from Melbourne.
Another Instagram user, Jill O'Riley commented: "We are all aware of the evils that social media brings; particularly relating to one's public image on them that only serves to reinforce narcissism and low self-esteem. Good on Essena for waking up and trying to change this one step at a time."
One user said: "I wasn't a fan of you before but I am now. Thank you for adopting a smart and realistic approach to social media and an even bigger thanks for moving things in the right direction."Gay rights advocate Vin Testa waves a rainbow flag in front of the Supreme Court on June 26, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled against Kentucky’s ban on same-sex marriage, though gay couples in the state won’t be able to get marriage licenses at least for now.
Judge John G. Heyburn II, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, ruled that the state’s marriage ban violated the constitutional rights of same-sex couples, but stayed his decision pending appeal.
“[A]s this Court has respectfully explained, in America even sincere and long-held religious views do not trump the constitutional rights of those who happen to have been out-voted,” he wrote in his opinion.
The Kentucky decision is the latest in a string of federal court rulings against state same-sex marriage bans, the latest of which saw Indiana’s ban struck last week. A federal appeals court there delivered a much more limited victory, also on Tuesday, ordering Indiana to recognize the marriage of a lesbian couple “on an emergency basis.” One of the spouses is terminally ill fighting ovarian cancer.
Tuesday’s ruling in Kentucky represents the 23rd consecutive pro-marriage ruling since a key Supreme Court decision last summer, according to a list maintained by Freedom to Marry, a group that advocates for same-sex marriage. That ruling, in U.S. v. Windsor, struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, granting married same-sex couples federal recognition and arming judges with the legal precedent to overturn state bans. Eighteen rulings have been issued by federal courts, affecting policies in 14 states, according to Freedom to Marry. Challenges have been filed against every state gay marriage ban and bans have been struck in 10 states, the group says.
Judge Heyburn in February ruled that Kentucky must recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages and, in doing so, alluded to the decision that came Tuesday. The February case, he wrote at the time, did not deal with the constitutionality of Kentucky’s ban, but, he added, “there is no doubt that Windsor and this Court’s analysis suggest a possible result to that question.”
That result came, at least for now, in Heyburn’s ruling. In it, he argued that allowing same-sex marriages places little burden on opponents.
“Sometimes, by upholding equal rights for a few, courts necessarily must require others to forebear some prior conduct or restrain some personal instinct. Here, that would not seem to be the case,” he wrote. “Assuring equal protection for same-sex couples does not diminish the freedom of others to any degree. Thus, same-sex couples’ right to marry seems to be a uniquely ‘free’ constitutional right.”
Proponents of same-sex marriage are holding out hope that the Supreme Court will take up the issue soon. A federal judge has ruled in favor of same-sex marriage rights — either by striking a ban or by ruling states must recognize marriages performed elsewhere — in each of the four states within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which plans to hear cases from each state on Aug. 6. The states in the 6th Circuit are Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.'George Osborne has gone to Europe to bat for the bankers, but he's been bowled first ball,' says tax campaigner
Europe's highest court dealt a blow to George Osborne's attempts to defend the interests of the City when it threw out Britain's legal challenge to a tax on financial transactions.
The European court of justice said the UK could not block attempts by 11 countries to use a financial transaction tax because it was not yet in operation.
The Treasury insisted that it would still be possible to challenge the levy if and when it was introduced and that it had been vital to put down a marker before plans for the FTT were finalised.
But the UKIP leader Nigel Farage said the decision showed that the government was impotent to protect the country's biggest industry from outside interference.
"The court dismisses the United Kingdom's action," the ECJ said in a statement. "... the contested decision does no more than authorise the establishment of enhanced cooperation, but does not contain any substantive element on the FTT itself."
David Hillman, spokesperson for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which supports an FTT for the UK said: "George Osborne has gone to Europe to bat for the bankers, but he's been bowled first ball.
"This futile legal challenge tells you all you need to know about the government's misguided priorities: it would rather defend a privileged elite in the City than support a tax that could raise billions to tackle poverty and protect public services.
"Instead of trying to stop other countries taxing their financial sectors, our government should follow their lead, stand up to vested interests and harness the City's excessive wealth for the wider benefit of society.
"Complaining that the City will be hit by a European FTT is a clear case of double standards - almost half of the £3bn revenue from our own FTT, the stamp duty on shares, comes from non-UK residents."
Farage said: "This FTT judgement shows that the UK cannot act to protect the UK's biggest interest. It is impotent and at the mercy of an antagonistic federalist court – the ECJ.
"It shows Cameron's argument that the UK government can negotiate a better deal for British business from within the EU as a fraud and a farce. The only way to protect the UK financial interest is to withdraw from the tax-hungry EU and stop giving Brussels power over us."
Osborne has insisted that this bank levy and tougher supervision of the City is the way to respond to the financial crisis of 2008-09. The Treasury lodged a challenge to the FTT when it became clear that a number of EU countries, including Germany and France, were determined to press ahead with the idea, first floated by the US economist James Tobin, to levy a small tax on financial transactions such as foreign exchange and derivatives trades.
A Treasury spokesperson said: "Today's decision confirms the UK will be able to challenge the final proposal for a financial transaction tax if it is not in our national interest and undermines the integrity of the single market. We risked not being able to do that if we had not made this challenge now.
"The government is determined to continue to ensure that the interests of countries outside of the single currency but inside the single market are properly protected as the euro area continues to integrate, including with any proposal for a financial transactions tax."
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey said: "George Osborne is forcing austerity on the British people so his friends in the City don't have to clean up the financial wreckage they caused.
"It's no surprise that the government has confirmed that it will challenge the European court of justice's decision just as the government is opposing the EU cap on bankers' bonuses in the courts.
"It's clear proof that this government will back spivs and speculators at the expense of our schools and hospitals. What should make the people of our country really angry is that this government will use our taxes to support legal challenges on behalf of the very people who wrecked |
beacons just before their batteries died.
A robotic submarine has now assumed the arduous task of scouring a vast patch of ocean floor that is still largely a mystery itself. The sub is using sonar to map out a potential debris field, but after five dives this week covering more than 110 square kilometers (42 square miles), it has come up empty.
This “is one of the largest search and rescue, search and recovery operations that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Houston told reporters this week. “We’ve got to be realistic about this. It may be very difficult to find something, and you don’t know how good any lead is until you get your eyes on the wreckage.”
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Associated Press writer Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and news assistant Fu Ting in Shanghai contributed to this report.
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Follow Margie Mason on Twitter at twitter.com/MargieMasonAPUK-based LazyCoins announced its official launch on March 2. Lazycoins is a digital currency exchange offering fully licensed platforms for both trading and merchant payments in GBP and euro markets.
LazyCoins Managing Director Peter Heigho told Cointelegraph that they received their MSB credentials on January 2, one of only a couple exchanges in the UK to do so. This allows them to offer the “rare” service of fast payments and same-day deposits.
Speedy transactions are rare in the UK because banks there have historically acted with strict policies toward Bitcoin businesses, either refusing to open accounts or closing them without warning or explanation. LazyCoins says they have successfully secured a banking relationship, but out of respect to firms in the crypto space that this has been difficult for, they would “rather not” yet say which one.
In the meantime, their “careful decision” to launch comes after more than six months spent in beta, “learning from the mistakes of others,” conducting extensive security testing, and seeking customer feedback. Heigho said:
“The platform has been very well received by our users, although [they are] a fairly small number (a little over 10,000 registered users). It is our users who dictate what is good or not. The purpose of the six-month beta was to allow for that feedback and make the necessary changes that had been suggested.”
Based on this consultation with their users, CEO and founder Danial Daychopan says they incorporated suggestions that included the “interface, security, license, cold storage, and, most importantly, keeping the exchange exclusive to best market pairs.” This means they will limit the number of altcoins on the exchange, adding them based upon “merit, innovation and community support.”
These limits and others come from the team’s desire to learn from and avoid the scams and failures that the bitcoin and altcoin communities have seen over the years. For this reason, they focused strongly on implementing security features, and ethical principles that will help prevent them from repeating mistakes seen in the space in the past.
They have included features like multisignature transactions, two-factor authentication, and 100% cold storage at the outset. Their goal has been to “get things right” from the beginning. According to Heigho,
“We always knew we had a secure and robust system. We felt it wise (for both ourselves and our users) to have our system tested in detail by an external company. Although they had some very minor suggestions (which have been implemented) for improvement, overall the system was passed as Fit for Purpose with flying colours.”
He says their long-term goal is that the Lazy brand, which includes the soon-to-launch LazyPay merchant app and the LazyTV news site, will operate “at the heart of day-to-day [cryptocurrency] use.” They plan to accomplish this by being “the first to offer all.” Heigho says,
“A user will be able to pay for their cryptocurrencies, either store or trade with them on our platform, or send them to our consumer-based mobile wallet app. In turn, very shortly, they will be able to use them to pay for meals at restaurants, or for day-to-day household needs such as bread or milk, all within a single system.... It won't be long before everybody uses [cryptocurrencies] every day, without thinking about it.”
On the eve of the launch, Daychopan says “customer service” is most on his mind. With this, he crosses his company’s launch-day milestone maintaining the “ethos” he and his team say they have strived for along the way. “It will be our users who will dictate our success. All we can do is listen and respond. So far the indications are very good,” says Heigho.
They have built their company on top of what they call “the three pillars of LazyCoins”—community, integrity and security. The self-funded company aims to be, in the words of its founder, “the exchange people just trust.”
Did you enjoy this article? You may also be interested in reading these ones:Portland State University planning professor Ethan Seltzer thinks it’s a “misconception” that urban-growth boundaries make housing more expensive. “This claim has been addressed and dismissed since Gov. Vic Atiyeh’s administration,” he claims, though without offering any actual evidence.
“By law,” he continues, “there must be enough land in the UGB to meet needs for residential development for the next 20 years.” The law says it, so it must be true. Never mind that Metro decided not to add any land to the growth boundary last year even though Portland was in the midst of a housing crisis.
Planners such as Seltzer may have convinced themselves that they are immune to the laws of supply and demand, but economists disagree. The end of this post lists more than half a dozen economic papers that conclude that growth management and land-use regulation explain most if not all the differences in housing affordability among cities.
In Portland’s case, median home prices were 1.8 times median family incomes before planners drew the growth boundary. Since then, the population inside the growth boundary has grown by 60 percent but the boundary has been expanded to add only 14 percent more land. As a result, median home prices today are 4.1 times median family incomes. Because all Oregon cities must have growth boundaries, Oregon in 2014 was the fifth-least-affordable state after Hawaii, California, New York, and Massachusetts. Of course, higher prices also have to do with increased land-use regulation, stiffer development fees, and other costs, but cities like Portland wouldn’t dare to impose those restrictions and fees if there weren’t an urban-growth boundary to prevent people from escaping to low-cost housing elsewhere.
Like too many other urban planners, Seltzer also thinks density is the solution to every problem, including reducing “energy use, farmland preservation and economic vitality.” In fact, density is often the problem, not the solution, and even when density helps there are other solutions that work better and cost less.
For example, multi-family housing uses more energy per square foot than single-family housing. Mid-rise and high-rise construction uses more energy per square foot than low-rise. The only way that density saves energy in housing is because people in dense, multi-family housing live in smaller homes. Why? Because such housing is so expensive!
If you want to save energy, encourage people to build zero-energy homes that cost about $125 per square foot. That’s $250,000 for a 2,000-square-foot house (plus the cost of the land, which isn’t very much if you don’t have an urban-growth boundary). By comparison, in Portland you can spend $369,000 on a 705-square-foot high-rise condo, or $465,000 on an 1,157-square-foot mid-rise condo. Saving energy in a single-family home is vastly more affordable.
Farmland preservation? Why? According to the 2012 data from the US Department of Agriculture, Oregon has 14.8 million acres of non-federal agricultural lands and only grows crops on 3.5 million of those acres. About 24 percent of the state is agricultural, while developed areas (including urban areas and rural roads, railroads, and any other developments more than a quarter acre in size) only cover 2.3 percent of the state. All of Oregon’s urban-growth boundaries cover just 1.5 percent of the state, and if there were no urban-growth boundaries, urbanization might have extended to about 2 percent. In other words, planners like Seltzer raise threats to farmlands only as a sort of bogeyman to scare the public.
Density is hardly needed for economic vitality. In terms of sheer numbers, the fastest-growing urban areas in America are Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Atlanta, and none of them are very dense. The Houston urban area alone grows by more people every six years than live in the entire city of Portland. Most people think Houston’s heat and humidity make it undesirable, but the lack of planners has made it one of the most economically vital regions in the nation and the headquarters for 27 Fortune 500 companies.
Portland is the headquarters for just two Fortune 500 companies (Nike and Precision Castparts), both of which have had conflicts with land-use regulators. Unlike Houston, Portland is near mountains and canyons and has a mild climate, yet too much planning and regulation has made it an economic basket case, with people working shorter hours for lower pay than elsewhere (and the new minimum-wage law sure isn’t going to help).
The dirty little secret that planners have known about since at least 1999 is that the impacts of high housing prices fall hardest on the poor, which is why some people call Portland’s system “economic apartheid.” Census data indicate that, from 2010 to 2014, the black population of the city of Portland shrank by 6.3 percent while the black population of the urban area as a whole shrank by 1.4 percent.
Many low-income blacks who have stayed in Portland have been forced into lower-quality housing. Between 2000 and 2010, the share of households headed by whites living in single-family detached homes declined by 3.3 percent, but the share of households headed by blacks living in such homes declined 16.1 percent. While white homeownership rates fell by 2.2 percent, black homeownership rates fell by 12.6 percent.
It is time to stop defending the indefensible. Oregon’s land-use planning system and similar growth-management laws in California, Hawaii, Washington, and other states make housing unaffordable yet provide few to no compensating benefits. These laws should be repealed.
Economic Papers Finding That Land-Use Regulation Increases Housing CostsGo about 130 kilometers East by Northeast from Toronto – and you are into the rolling countryside of Northumberland Hills – where the last days of Fall means it is that Perfect Pie Time of Year again. Just check the local time and location: Its time for the 30th Perfect Pie Feast and Festival in Warkworth Ontario.
The order is actually feast first – then festivities, prizes and pie auctions. And as can be seen there are plenty of Pie-goers ready to Feast:
Lots to chat about and chomp on at the the Pie Feastings.
And the service is gracious:
But the real “problem is what to choose – there are over 110 pies this year, and they make my mouth water:
One has to decide among Savories, Mincemeat, Fruit pies of every kind, Custards, local Maple Sugar adorned with pecans and walnuts …
There is enough sweet meats to make any pie judge take pause.
And so we shall, stay tuned for more about the Warkworth Pie Fest later this week.Alabama to rule on legality of teachers having sex with students if both are of legal age
>>Click to see Texas teachers caught up in sex scandals. less An Alabama high school teacher arrested on two counts of engaging in a sexual relationship with students under the age of 19 is challenging the state's law.
>>Click to see Texas teachers caught up in sex... more An Alabama high school teacher arrested on two counts of engaging in a sexual relationship with students under the age of 19 is challenging the state's law. Photo: Decatur Police Department Alabama Photo: Decatur Police Department Alabama Image 1 of / 33 Caption Close Alabama to rule on legality of teachers having sex with students if both are of legal age 1 / 33 Back to Gallery
An Alabama judge Tuesday will rule on the constitutionality of the state's law that prohibits school employees from having sex with students who have reached the age of consent.
Anyone who violates the law must register as a sex offender and could face with up to 20 years in prison.
ABOUT THE ARREST: Alabama cheerleading coach arrested for allegedly having sex with two teenage students
The rule's legality is being challenged by Carrie Cabri Witt, 43, who was arrested in March 2016 for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old student at Decatur High School in the Decatur City School District.
Her defense team, attorneys Robert Tuten and Nick Heatherly, say the 2010 law improperly treats school employees differently from other civilians and violates teachers' 14th amendment equal protection rights.
NEED TO KNOW: Five facts you should know about Sarah Fowlkes
"Had Witt been a volunteer coach and not a school employee, the statute would not even apply. She exercised no power over them. She never tried to use her position of authority over them," court documents obtained by AL.com said. "(The law) should be an attempt by the Alabama legislature to protect students from being victimized by teachers who abuse authority and influence to coerce or fraudulently obtain consent for sex acts."
Judge Glenn Thompson is expected to rule on the statute's legality Tuesday afternoon in the Morgan County Circuit.
See the video above about a Texas teacher in trouble with the law.ACHAEMENID SATRAPIES
ACHAEMENID SATRAPIES, the administrative units of the Achaemenid empire. In modern research the use of the term satrapy follows that of the word satrapeia (satrapēiē) in Greek sources. In the extant Old Persian (OP) texts, there is no word that is an equivalent to satrapy with regard to both etymology and meaning. Only the title xsaça-pā-van-, which combines pā (protect) and xsaça- (empire, sovereignty) with the suffix -van- and thus describes an administrator as the “protector of empire” or “protector of sovereignty” (Schmitt, 1976, p. 373), is found in the OP inscriptions. From the title of this official an OP *xsaça-pā-vana- can be deduced (Hinz, 1975, p. 134). Notwithstanding this reconstructed Persian form, the Greek word satrapeia (satrapēiē) was derived from a Northwest Iranian (Median) dialect. In the OP inscriptions dahyu- (pl. dahyāva; see below the section on Terminology), and not *xsaça-pā-vana-, is employed for the administrative units that formed the empire, and this usage may indicate that *xsaça-pā-vana- had a more specific meaning, making dahyu- the apparently appropriate term.
The satrapies formed a system which made it possible to rule over the whole Achaemenid territory, to raise and forward taxes, to recruit military forces, and to control local bureaucracies. Dealing with crises and uprisings was also the responsibility of satraps, as was defense against external threats. In order to guarantee control over an empire which expanded rapidly between 550 and 522 BCE, Cyrus the Great (r. 559-530; see CYRUS ii) and his son Cambyses (r. 530-522; see CAMBYSES ii) adapted the existing structures of predecessor empires on a large scale. These structures in turn determined the hierarchical construction of the satrapal system which, remaining essentially unchanged, proved a successful instrument of administration throughout the entire Achaemenid period.
SOURCES
Three groups of sources play a specially prominent role in the reconstruction of satrapal administration: (1) The so-called nomoi list of Herodotus (Histories 3.90-94; 5th century BCE; cf. HERODOTUS, in EIr. XII, p. 266). (2) The lists of satrapies given by the Alexander historians in their accounts of the empire’s division at Babylon (Arrianus, Succ. 5-6 = Photius, Bibl. 92.69 a-b; Curtius, 10.10.1-4; Dexippos apud Phot., Bibl. 82.64 a-b; Diodorus, 18.3.1-3; Pompeius Trogus apud Justinus, 13.4.10-24; Orosius, Hist. 3.23.7-13), Triparadisus (Arr., Succ. 34-37 = Phot., Bibl. 92.71b; Diod., 18.39.5-7) and, later on, Persepolis (Diod., 19.48.1-6), together with the lists appearing in the so-called testament of Alexander the Great (Test. Alex. 117), the Alexander romance (Ps.-Callisthenes, 3.33.13-22; 52-61; Julius Valerius, 3.94; Leo Archipresbyteros, 3.58), and medieval sources (Georgios Synkellos, Chron. P 264 D-265 B; Georgios Kedrenos, P 155 D). (3) The inscriptions of the Achaemenids, and in particular their dahyāva lists (DB par. 6, DNa par. 3, DNe, DPe par. 2, DSaa par. 4, DSe par. 3, DSm par. 2, DSv par. 2, XPh par. 3; cf. Stève, 1974-75 and 1987; Schmitt, 1991; 2000; Lecoq, 1997) and, in addition, the enumerations on the base of the statue of Darius I (r. 522-486) from Susa and on the Suez Canal stelae (Yoyotte).
To these sources are to be added several hundred passages in Greek and Latin literature, as well as sporadic information in inscriptions (e.g., the Droaphernes inscription, see Briant, 1998; the Payawa sarcophagus inscription TL 40 d, see Laroche, p. 139), in archives (e.g., Hallock; Stolper, 1990; Koch), and on coins (e.g., Alram, pp. 101-20, pls. 10-12).
(1) Herodotus’s list of satrapies (Histories 3.90-94). This list continues to be claimed as the basic source for the reconstruction of satrapal administration (for summaries of previous research, see: Jacobs, 1994, pp. 9-29; 2003b). Even very recently this controversial passage provided the basic data for the expositions of Achaemenid provincial administration in large-scale historical works (Briant, 1996; Debord, 1999). But the chaotic arrangement of the nomoi list, which conflicts with geographic reality, its over-emphasis on the western regions, which shows that Herodotus had no authentic source at his disposal, and the fact that the data in the paragraphs in question are in conflict with all other sources, Greek and Latin texts included, force us to take a different methodological approach.
Similar reasons already led Franz Altheim (pp. 140-45) to provide a detailed proof that the list is of no use as historical testimony. From the viewpoint of literary history it is an insertion from another genre, the epic, and is to be evaluated accordingly (Armayor). In the light of recent research on Herodotus (for summaries, see Bichler and Rollinger, pp. 109-202; Rollinger in EIr. XII, pp. 255-57), this is no surprise, since that research throws ever more sharply into relief the way in which the fashioning of material is a decisive component in Herodotus’s historical work (Bichler and Rollinger, pp. 161-63). The catalogue of Herodotus is as incompatible with the lists of the Achaemenid inscriptions as with those of the Alexander historians or with the numerous attestations of the Greek and Latin authors.
(2) Satrapy lists of the Alexander historians. These vary in reliability, but, taken together, they do allow reconstructing the empire’s divisions at Babylon and Triparadisus (Jacobs, 1994, pp. 39-51). As a result, a very considerable degree of continuity is detectable from the time of Darius III (r. 336-mid. 330). This is due to the fact that, during the conquest of the Achaemenid empire, Alexander (356-323) preserved existing administrative structures everywhere, except in the extreme west. He either retained in their posts the officials he came upon or replaced them with people who enjoyed his trust. In the course of his campaign we can therefore detect a kind of staffing schedule of late-Achaemenid satrapal administration (Jacobs, 1994, pp. 52-88) that was still the standard point of reference at the time of the empire’s divisions. A direct continuity is thus established between late Achaemenid times and the era of the Diadochi, and, conversely, the staffing schedule of Alexander’s time is largely valid at least for late Achaemenid times.
(3) The dahyāva lists. Herodotus’s suggestion that peoples were the constituent elements of the satrapies has led to the idea that the Achaemenids understood their empire as the sum of its peoples and did not define it territorially. Correspondingly the dahyāva lists have been interpreted as lists of peoples (Junge, pp. 28-31; Cameron, 1973; Cook, pp. 244-45; Bernard, 1987, p. 185; Tuplin, p. 113; Balcer, 1988, p. 1; Young, p. 87), and even quite recently Pierre Lecoq (1990) has tried to provide this interpretation with a philological foundation. But this interpretation can now be regarded as definitively refuted, because OP dahyu- stands for territorial units (Schmitt, 1977, pp. 91-99; idem, 1999, pp. 443-52; Vogelsang, 1992, pp. 169-73). As satraps like Dādaršīš in Bactria and Vivāna in Arachosia ruled districts that appear as countries on the OP lists, Schmitt has convincingly argued that the term dahyu- (country) was an “altpersische Sprachregelung” for administrative units (Schmitt, 1976, p. 373).
An interpretative problem arises because the discrepancies between the Bisitun list (see BISOTUN in EIr. IV, pp. 299-305) with, at most, 23 items and the list in XPh with 32 are at odds with the observation that the empire’s territory remained substantially unchanged. Similarly in pictorial versions of these lists, where individual dahyāva are represented by a delegation or the figure of a throne-bearer, the number of those involved also varies considerably (Calmeyer, pp. 107-12, 139-59; Roaf, 73-91; Jacobs, 2002, pp. 357-62, 374-78). The conclusion was drawn that the lists were more or less incomplete, especially in view of the omission of names that were regarded as indispensible, such as Cilicia, Hellespontine Phrygia, and Syria (Krumbholz, p. 11; Calmeyer, p. 194; Vogelsang, 1985, p. 88; Lecoq, 1990, pp. 133-34; Briant, 1996, p. 189), and as a result they are often supposed to be ideologically determined declarations, not historically reliable sources (Frye, pp. 110-11; Cook, p. 246; Briant and Herrenschmidt, p. IX; Briant, 1996, pp. 185, 194, 399-400; Sancisi-Weerdenburg, 2001).
Assessment. Only the Achaemenid inscriptions are primary sources, yet the items they enumerate are not designated as satrapies but as dahyāva. Since the term satrap does after all figure twice in the Achaemenid inscriptions (DB 3.14, 58), the absence of a technical term satrapy was noted by many scholars, and it was believed that the OP lists did not offer what seemed to be present in the two other groups of sources, i.e., an enumeration of the provinces of the empire (e.g., Hdt., 3.89: “... in Persia he established 20 domains (archai) that they called satrapies (satrapēiai)”; Diod., 18.39.5: “Afterwards he distributed the satrapies (satrapeiai) anew...”). Besides, as was already mentioned, the lists were thought of as incomplete.
Consequently, a clear majority of scholars accorded Herodotus’s list precedence over the dahyāva catalogues. Herodotus was also preferred over the Alexander historians, both because, as a contemporary, he was thought to have had more direct information and because of the traditional esteem he enjoyed among modern scholars. This was already so in the case of Paul Krumbholz (1861-1945), the first who—at least for Asia Minor—attempted a more comprehensive treatment of satrapal administration. But even then there were voices that questioned the usefulness of the list (Krumbholz, 1883, pp. 6-7), a position which since has been adopted by a growing number of scholars (Altheim, pp. 140-45; Gignoux; Armayor; Jacobs, 1994, pp. 93-96; Rollinger, 1998, p. 342).
As a way of allowing both the OP inscriptions and Herodotus’s list to count as reliable, the possibility was repeatedly considered of assigning administration and fiscal matters to two different bureaucratic systems (Balcer, 1989, pp. 4-5; Sekunda, 1989, p. 92; Petit, 1990, p. 175; 1991, p. 161; Briant, 1996, p. 404). But such a compromise is impossible, since assessment, collection, and transport of taxes were just as much part of the satraps’ duties (Corsaro) as the military protection of their districts against internal and external attacks (Jacobs, 2003a).
The putative incompleteness of the dahyāva lists and the increase in number of entries in later lists contributed substantially to the non-use of these lists for the reconstruction of imperial administration. Yet the oldest catalogue originates from the Bisitun inscription, a text whose aims included historical documentation. Moreover, the inscription on Darius I’s tomb at Naqš-e Rostam (DNa 38-42) suggests that the list it gives had a programmatic character: “But if you shall think: ‘How many (are) those countries which Darius the king held?’ look at the sculptured figures which bear the throne platform” (Schmitt, 2000, p. 30).
The assumption of incompleteness, however, proves to be invalid if one accepts that the administration was structured hierarchically, a proposition that is both obvious and demonstrable for local bureaucracies and in the imperial administration. To document the extent of the empire completely, it would be quite sufficient to enumerate all provinces of one specific level of the administrative hierarchy. Full use could be made of such a list for the reconstruction of the imperial administration, and it would match the claim of its authors to control all territory within the empire, including autonomous regions and inaccessible areas of refuge such as mountains (Jacobs, 1999). This is surely the sort of list we have in the Bisitun text. Any names missing among the enumerated countries belonged to a lower level of the hierarchy, and so their mention was unnecessary. If some names were nevertheless added in later inscriptions, it was to foster the illusion that, now as before, the rulers were augmenting their territorial property, although the process of extending the frontiers had been stagnating since the last decade of the 6th century BCE. Among the names added after Bisitun those which do represent a real gain of territory need to be isolated with care. But this is unproblematic, because the history of the empire, especially in the times of Darius I and Xerxes I (r. 485-465), is well documented (on the dating of inscriptions with dahyāva lists, see Sancisi-Weerdenburg, 2001, pp. 1-7; Jacobs, 2003b, pp. 327-31): After 515 the inscriptions register a newly acquired province in the shape of the lower Indus valley (Hinduš), and after 512 they add the three provinces Thrace (Skudra), Libya (Putāyā), and Nubia (Kūšiyā), yet there are no extant lists from the periods in which, for example, the Thracian possessions, parts of Ionia, or even Egypt had been lost.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION
Continuity or discontinuity. Those who give precedence to the Herodotean list are bound to take an entirely different historical approach from those who prefer the OP lists of countries. Attempts have been repeatedly made, and continue even today, to harmonize the sources (Bernard, 1987, pp. 177-91); most scholars consider the effort futile. The entirely isolated position of the Herodotean list in terms of content leads to the supposition that Darius I undertook a fundamental reform of the administration, and the phrase archas katestēsato eikosi in the opening passage (Hdt., 3.89) is interpreted correspondingly, although the formulation is far from being unambiguous. The OP lists, in contrast, record a basic set of countries that remains essentially identical from the times of Cambyses until the early years of Xerxes I. If these lists are taken as evidence for the imperial administration, they document continuity across the reign of Darius I, which in turn excludes that a reform of Darius I made deep inroads into administrative structures that had grown up (Jacobs, 1994, pp. 93-96).
Moreover, compared with Herodotus’s list, the OP lists, especially the one on the Bisitun rock, and the satrapy lists of the Alexander historians, which reflect conditions in the time of the Successors, are very similar (Jacobs, 1994, pp. 100-2). Some differences, such as the absence of Arabia (see ARABĀYA) and of the Saka regions, can be explained in terms of losses during Achaemenid times or of their not having been conquered by Alexander. A stronger emphasis on the western regions in the later lists reflects that, in the course of the ‘liberation’ of the Greeks of Asia Minor, the hierarchy of the administrative apparatus in this region was removed, and governors of lesser rank could in some circumstances play quite an important role, as happened for example in the case of Eumenes (ca. 362-316). In the rest of the empire, however, whether in Egypt, Babylonia, or Bactria, during the secession movements under the Seleucids—for example in Parthia and Media—and in still later times, it is in the geopolitical entities named in these groups of sources that political developments took place (e.g., Just., 41.6.3; Ammianus Marcellinus, 23.6.14-73). They must also have been the constituent units of the imperial Achaemenid administration.
The continuity from the beginnings of the Achaemenid empire in the second half of the 6th century BCE until its collapse demonstrates that this administrative system was a construct that not only regulated administrative processes in peacetime, but proved effective during crises as well (Jacobs, 2003a).
Terminology. Investigation of the use of satrap and satrapy in primary and secondary sources reveals that they are not precise terms at all (Schmitt, 1976). At least, the twenty or so satrapies of the divisions of the empire at Babylon and Triparadisus and the 127 (or 120) satrapies in the Bible (Esther 1:1, 8:9; Dan. 6:2) cannot have belonged to the same level of administrative hierarchy. The words correspond approximately to the general terms “governor” and “province.”
The word dahyu- shows similar characteristics: it can signify “district” or “state” in a general sense, as well as more specifically “province” (Schmitt, 1999, p. 446). In that regard, dahyu- is comparable with the words “country” (Eng.) and “Land” (Ger.). In Greek a considerable number of terms (archē, nomos, satrapeia, huparchia, eparchia or satrapēs, stratēgos, karanos, archōn, huparchos, dunastēs) signify areas or persons of authority (Tuplin, p. 114, n. 22). The terminological variety is in itself evidence for the existence of posts of different rank—in other words, for the existence of an administrative hierarchy. Moreover, the classical secondary sources testify repeatedly to the existence of higher- and lower-ranking positions.
Genesis of that administrative hierarchy. This is most plausibly to be explained by the process of expansion of the Achaemenid empire. The campaigns of the two most important conquerors, Cyrus the Great and his son Cambyses, aimed at acquisition of the entire territory of the empires they were attacking. Thus, the expedition against Croesus of Lydia (r. ca. 560-546) was preceded by the annexation of Cappadocia and followed by that of the coast of Asia Minor, and the attack on Egypt was followed by campaigns against Libya and Nubia. In other words, conquest of the ancient Oriental empires included their provinces: Lydia came with Cappadocia and the coastal provinces on the shore, Babylonia with Assyria, Media with Armenia, and so forth. As a rule, Achaemenid imperial administration involved no primary administrative (re-)organization of the conquered territories but simply adaptation of existing structures. The respective king—whether Croesus, Nabonidus (r. 556-539), Amasis (r. ca. 570-526), or Astyages (r. ca. 584-550)—was replaced by a governor, who controlled a large territory and received the corresponding extensive executive powers. The governors of the former provinces became his subordinates, while remaining superior to the administrators of still smaller units.
In the case of Media, of course, the existence of older state-organized orbits of power, as reconstructed for instance by Wolfram Nagel (1982, pp. 39-45, 48-51, 102-5) and Igor Diakonoff (1985, pp. 114-15, 126-27), has been doubted. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, for example, denied that there were any state structures in Media before Cyrus the Great (Sancisi, 1988; cf. Brown, 1986; 1988; and the discussion in Lanfranchi et al., 2003).
Still deeper are the doubts about the existence of comparable governmental structures in the regions east of the central Iranian salt deserts that the sources hardly ever mention (reconstruction by Christensen; for critique and commentary, see Lommel; Kellens; Nagel, 1982, par. 10; Jacobs, 1994, pp. 273-78). But the evidence gleaned from the archeological inspection of some extremely extensive pre-Achaemenid collective ventures, such as defense systems directed against the nomads of the Turanian steppe or water-supply installations, makes the case for pre-Achaemenid governmental organization quite compelling, and thus the postulate of a Kayanid empire centering on Bactria more reasonable (Yt. 13.132, 19.71-74; Bundahišn, tr. Anklesaria, p. 232, 1-10; cf. Lyonnet, 1990; Gardin, 1995; 1997; 1998). The Thamanaean empire in Arachosia with its supposed capital Arachoti in the region of modern Qandahar remains nebulous (Nagel, 1982, p. 54; Jacobs, 1994, pp. 34-5).
Sound evidence is nonetheless extant to prove that major administrative complexes in Achaemenid times originated from earlier structures: Persia herself, Babylonia, Egypt, and Lydia. Analogous conclusions about Media, Bactria, and Arachosia impose themselves. In the following, those major complexes are called Great Satrapies. They are in part still recognizable as blocks in the Bisitun inscription, although there the central areas of the older empires and their main provinces—Lydia as well as Cappadocia, Babylonia as well as Assyria, Media as well as Armenia, and so forth—already form standard units in the imperial administration, hereafter referred to as Main Satrapies. A third level of administrative hierarchy, the components of which are here called Minor Satrapies, is recognizable in large parts of the empire, though not everywhere. Because of the source material, the construction of the imperial administration can seldom be followed further down, but in the west it can be stated that Mysia belonged to Hellespontine Phrygia and Lycia to Caria as still minor entities, just as Phoenicia belonged |
Platform), re-creates and integrates the central and peripheral nervous systems, the blood-brain barrier and the heart.
“Bioprinting adds another dimension to tissue–on-a-chip platforms,” said Lab research engineer Elizabeth Wheeler, the principal investigator for iCHIP. “Having the ability to control the 3D structural environment, along with growing vessel networks to support the growing tissue, is one part of replicating the complexity of the human body.”
Currently in the final year of a three-year project funded by Laboratory Directed Research and Development, an internal program, Moya has used bioprinting to create an unorganized (think: “a spaghetti bowl”) network of blood vessels, but she wants to go a step further, engineering a directed hierarchy similar to those that exist in the body.
Soon, Moya and other researchers will be able to utilize a brand new 3D bioprinting lab containing a more precise printer capable of higher resolution and larger structures.
The technique, despite being in its infancy, is already opening doors to valuable research opportunities previously unavailable to science.
“Although printing implantable organs is not in the immediate future, our bioprinted tissue patches can be applied to toxicology studies, medical treatment testing and provide a test bed for fundamental science,” Moya said.
Editor’s note: The researchers in this story — Monica Moya and Elizabeth Wheeler —will field questions from the public about this research on the popular social media website Reddit on Thursday, Dec. 3, from 10 a.m. to noon PST.Aspiring filmmakers and creatives often let the contract and business details be an afterthought, thinking “that’s not fun. Or creative. And I don’t have the budget for that un-fun, un-creative stuff. I’m working with my friends… it’ll all be fine.”
But they’re unlikely to do so again after the many problems that arise (which they always do) and perhaps render their hard work practically and commercially unusable. Neglecting contracts and business formalities may prevent getting investors for your project, or may cause a host of other problems that mean a film or creative project cannot get interest or distribution.
What follows is a brief list of critical “what and why” business details that filmmakers must do, from the outset, to minimize obstacles to a film or project’s success.
1. Form a Production Company through which the film must be made. Why?
First, that will be the legal entity into which development/investment money is deposited. Why not take money/investments personally? Because of the second primary reason – liability. Liability in film development and production can come from multiple angles – from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for taking investments without the proper paperwork (a “prospectus” or “private placement memorandum” – VERY different from a “business plan”), or from an accident involving the cast or crew on set, or to a bystander not part of the cast or crew (think a lighting element falling onto a passerby), or to the production “losing” funds needed to pay cast and crew.
This “parade of horribles” isn’t fiction – it happens all the time. And if it happens without the legal protection of an LLC or similar legally separate production company, the legal liability will likely fall personally on the producers and those heading up the project, and potentially onto the investors – meaning that personal assets will be responsible for whatever harm or legal claims.
The third reason is that the legal entity will be the “person” (a legal “person” under the law) that contracts with all those involved in the film – from the producer(s), directors, cast and crew, transportation, catering, etc. If anything goes sideways with these contracts, it is the legal person that is held accountable instead of the actual persons heading up and investing in the project.
2. Get a contract with the writer(s) for the legal acquisition of the script or story –a literary acquisition agreement (a/k/a an “option/purchase” agreement). Failure to do this means that the production does not have formal rights to the intellectual property it is making – meaning the writer/creator may have the ability to withdraw his material and prevent the production from doing anything commercial with footage already shot. So it is critical that this be accomplished before any production – or even development – takes place.
Think that you are “friends with the writer” and you’re therefore “in this together?” Are you willing to bet the entire project and all your hard work on that assumption? What is it that they say when you “ass-u-me” something?
Creative partnerships crumble all the time. Without a written agreement in place from the VERY beginning, the entire project is at risk.
3. Investments – get lawyer drafted investment documents. Or risk having to refund all investments, fines, jail time, and lawsuits by the investors themselves.
Under the SEC and state securities rules, if you have taken someone’s money and have given them an expectation of a “return” on that money, you’ve probably sold a “security.”
Yes, even selling shares of your little film may well constitute a “security” in the eyes of the federal and state governments. That doesn’t mean you can’t take such investments. But it does mean that if you do so without following the proper legal requirements, you may have to give back ALL of the money taken for the project (yes, all investments – not just the one that the gov’ment found out about), and it may mean fines or even jail time.
And independent of those terrible consequences, failing to have the right legal language in investment documents leaves the production open to lawsuits by the investors if they become dissatisfied with… all sorts of things – how you’ve spent the money, how long it has taken to get a return on the money, the size of the return (or lack thereof).
Proper investment documents are as much for the protection of the film and filmmakers as they are for the protection of the investors.
4. Production contracts – use them – ALWAYS. Without exception! Like it or not, a film is a business. Even the “auteur,” if he hopes to continue making filmic masterpieces, cannot ignore the business realities that filmmaking is expensive (even in this digital age), it takes money, and money rarely comes to one who does not handle it in a businesslike manner.
So even first effort indie films are a business – a proving ground to show that you can handle the business, artistic and technical demands of being a filmmaker. And as such there are contracts that MUST be used in the work of this business; contracts that clearly state who owns what, who has rights to what, profit/interest divisions, etc. The who, what, when, where, why (perhaps) and how much regarding the business transactions involved: the script/story option purchase agreement, cast and crew agreements, talent/interviewee release agreements, name and likeness releases, licensing agreements for use of the intellectual property of others (music, photographs, products, film or video clips (no – YouTube does not mean it’s in the public domain)), location agreements, craft services contracts, transportation agreements, insurance (workers comp, liability, errors and omissions, defamation protection), sponsorship and product placement agreements, distribution (foreign and domestic) agreements, appropriate trademark registrations, and the list goes on and on and on.One topic guaranteed to inflame passions in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan is land and China. China has taken land from Central Asia and farmers from China are already working rented fields in Central Asia and that has not sat well with locals.
It's playing a role in the recent widespread protests in Kazakhstan. Personally I'm inclined to agree with those who see Kazakhstan as a simmering pot at the moment. There are many issues right now that are causing discontent in Kazakhstan. The issue of privatization of land and suggestion Chinese might acquire, even temporarily, some of that land just turned up the heat a bit under the simmering pot.
Which makes it the more surprising that Kazakhstan's government, faced with its worst economic crisis in some 20 years, would choose at this time to bring up land privatization and not make crystal clear from word one that foreigners, including Chinese, could not own any of Kazakhstan's land.
Officials are paying for that and now are working overtime to explain the privatization plan and soothe the tensions that erupted when rumors spread that Chinese workers would be coming for Kazakhstan's farmland.
Such concerns on the part of people in Kazakhstan, and in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan also, are not without foundation.
And to see why, we need to go back some 20 years to an agreement aimed at easing tensions.
In late April 1996, the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan met in Shanghai to sign an agreement to pull back military forces from the former Sino-Soviet, now Sino-CIS border. It was a confidence-building gesture. The deal was cemented with a decision to form the Shanghai Five, which five years later and with the addition of Uzbekistan, became the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
Many Central Asian analysts have noted the SCO became China's vehicle for entering Central Asia economically and now China is at least a, if not the, leading trade partner of all five Central Asian states.
The Shanghai Five agreement also opened the door for China to make claims on land along its borders with Central Asia. The 1996 deal essentially scrapped the line that was the Sino-Soviet border and necessitated new demarcations. Then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in July 1996 to discuss the delimitation. Jiang skipped Tajikistan, which was three years into its civil war at the time.
By early 1999, Kazakhstan was prepared to cede nearly half of the 34,000 square kilometers of what China claimed was disputed territory.
It was a very unpopular decision in Kazakhstan. There were legitimate opposition deputies in parliament back then, and there were also social movements and an independent media that, compared to today, had far more room to maneuver. These groups criticized the move.
State media repeatedly focused on the fact Kazakhstan had received "56.9 percent" of the disputed territory but critics pointed out that the remaining 43.1 percent had been Kazakhstan's land until the new deal with China.
The Mazhilis, the lower house of parliament, passed the border treaty with China on February 3, 1999; the Senate passed it on March 10 and President Nursultan Nazarbaev signed it on March 24.
The Sino-Kyrgyz border agreement was more complicated. The deal for Kyrgyzstan to hand over 1,250 square kilometers of its land to China was signed in 1999.
There was ample, vocal opposition at the time, including calls to impeach then-President Askar Akaev, and it lasted for several years.
The demarcation process started in June 2001. Within days the parliament's Legislative Assembly, the lower house (Kyrgyzstan had a bicameral parliament then), voted to stop demarcation and then prepared a draft law denouncing the agreement.
It was not until late May 2002 that President Akaev finally had an agreement to sign and he left the next month to China to formalize it with Chinese officials. Even as late as February 2003 some Kyrgyz parliament deputies were demanding the agreement be rescinded.
Tajik Disputes
Tajikistan and China also signed a border-demarcation agreement in 1999, but it was not until 2002 that Tajikistan acknowledged it was prepared to cede some 1,122 square kilometers of disputed territory to China. As was the case in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, there were many opponents to the agreement in Tajikistan, including people in Tajikistan's eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region. The land to be given to China was in Gorno-Badakhshan and the region's autonomous status technically demanded local approval of the deal.
Tajikistan's parliament did not finally approve the deal until January 2011 amid renewed criticism, particularly from the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), which still had two seats in parliament at the time. IRPT Deputy Chairman Saidimir Husayni said at the time that "there should have been a referendum on the issue, as this area has never belonged to China. Tajikistan is recognized as an independent country by the UN." As for China's claim, Husayni dismissed it. "Such claims exist all over the world and they cannot be regarded as proof."
Local authorities in Gorno-Badakhshan were not consulted.
The issue resurfaced in April 2013, when the leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party of Tajikistan, Rahmatullo Zoirov, gave an interview to Iran's Radio Khorasan and said the Tajik government had given up more land than it admitted.
The Tajik government rejected Zoirov's statements, but then canceled the accreditation of three Radio Khorasan correspondents.
Less than one week after Tajikistan's parliament approved the controversial demarcation agreement with China, the Tajik government had other news. Some 2,000 hectares of land in the Khatlon region, vacated by migrant laborers who headed to Russia, was to be leased to Chinese farmers.
'Renting' No Better
And that brings us back to Kazakhstan and the possibility of Chinese farmers tilling Kazakhstan's soil. At the end of 2009, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev said China had requested renting up to 1 million hectares of land. That idea sparked protests and Kazakh officials spent the next many months denying Kazakhstan planned to "give" land to China.
So Kazakh officials should have known what would happen when land privatization was brought up in 2016. Qualifying the proposal by saying foreigners could only rent the land for up to 25 years is unlikely to assuage the population's fears that China intends to devour Kazakh lands.
Why would that work when China has already acquired 16,000 square kilometers of what was once Central Asian land in just the last 15 years?
RFE/RL's Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik services contributed to this reportGloria Steinem challenges BBC presenter on violence against women
On Tuesday, Gloria Steinem, who originated WMC’s Women Under Siege, spoke to BBC “Hardtalk” presenter Stephen Sackur about the women’s movement. But I wanted to do more than point you to the video (which you can watch here) and highlight something I found particularly interesting about their chat.
Below is the full transcript of the segment, which starts out with a simple question of relevance—with all of Steinem’s experience, where does she see the movement now? However, as you’ll read, the back and forth devolves quite quickly, with Sackur interrupting in seeming disbelief when Steinem suggests that feminism is more urgently needed than ever before because of what we’ve learned about violence against women and war.
When she explains her thinking (and ours) that “the root of democracy outside the home is democracy inside the home,” Sackur interjects, arguing that most women in what he terms the “Western, developed” world would say they “have democracy in the home.”
Steinem in a screenshot of her BBC interview with Sackur.
I’ll leave it to Steinem to answer this assertion in her own, powerful words, but first I want to show you why what she’s saying about the home vs. the public realm is essential to figuring out how to stop the horrifyingly high rates of sexualized violence against women—and its attending victim-blaming and shaming—in conflict and in public spaces around the world. It is a concept emphasized by Valerie Hudson, a professor of government at Texas A&M University:
“The template for living with other human beings who are different from us is forged within every society by the character of male-female relations,” Hudson writes in Foreign Policy. “In countries where males rule the home through violence, male-dominant hierarchies rule the state through violence.”
When nearly a third of men surveyed in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the so-called “rape capital of the world”—tell researchers that women “sometimes want to be raped and that when a woman is raped she may enjoy it,” we might want to consider this concept carefully.
When 17 senior cops across India are caught on camera “blaming everything from fashionable or revealing clothes to having boyfriends to visiting pubs to consuming alcohol to working alongside men as the main reasons for instances of rape” in a country that recently witnessed the public Boschian rape and murder of a young woman, we may want to take a close look at what is going on beneath the surface.
When a husband in Burma chastises his wife, newly raped by a soldier and returned home: “Prostitute! If you want to sell sex, we will build you a small hut in the jungle. You can sell sex there,” and her own children say to her: “Whore, you are not our mother, don’t come see us anymore,” we really, probably should pay attention to what Steinem, one of the world’s great thinkers on the struggles of women for safety and equality, is saying.
This morning, I was talking about this concept of democracy in the home vs. in the street with my friend, writer Soraya Chemaly. She emphasized that we spend way too much time ignoring commonplace gender inequality—that most of us don’t even see it, as if misogyny is the white background noise of our existence, that is, until something like the evisceration of the Dehli gang-rape briefly breaks through the unheard, continuous hum.
"What is processed in everyday life at the household level emerges as structure in society,” Chemaly explained. “We don’t think of them as inequities because they are invisible: traditionally, culturally sanctioned ways of organizing and behaving.”
Now, here’s what Steinem said to Sackur:
Stephen Sackur: Does the feminist cause feel as urgent to you today as when you rose to international prominence in the late ’60s, early ’70s?
Gloria Steinem: More. Because when we began, we were talking more about personal injustices, about domestic violence, about things that were within our ken, and now we’ve come to understand through length of work and also through international studies that the single most important factor in whether a country is violent within itself or willing to use violence against other countries, is violence against females. Because that normalizes—it’s the earliest, it’s the biggest…it’s not that female life is worth more than male life, it’s not, but that subject-object, conquered-conqueror kind of paradigm in varying degrees normalizes it everywhere else. And that now has been proved in depth. So in a way we’ve gone deeper now and seen how much more important it is.
[Click here for a story by Chemaly that explains more about the relationship between gender imbalance and propensity to engage in war.]
SS: So are you saying that the priorities of the women’s movement, if I can loosely call it that, have fundamentally changed, away from the sort of nuts and bolts sort of equal-pay-for-equal-work and, and, control of fertility, to something that is perhaps less tangible?
GS: No, no, no, what I’m saying is that the root of democracy outside the home is democracy inside the home, so it’s even more important. The root of violence elsewhere is the normalization of violence in an intimate way in the home.
SS: Sorry to interrupt, but when you put it like that it just makes me wonder whether most women these days in Western, developed societies would feel the same way that you do. Because when you talk about the importance of democracy in the home, wouldn’t most women in the developed world today feel that—
GS: No. Of course not.
SS: —they have democracy in the home.
GS: Of course not. Are you kidding? Do men raise children as much as women? No.
SS: But do women feel oppressed today in the way that they did in the ’60s and ’70s?
GS: Yes, more so because now, for instance, when we started we didn’t have a word for “domestic violence.” It was just called “life.” People would constantly say, “Why didn’t she leave?” “What did she do?” Now we understand that domestic violence is original violence.
And, for instance, in my country, there are…if you count up all the people who were killed in 9/11, plus Americans who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you count up all the women who were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in the same amount of time, more women were murdered by their husbands and boyfriends than were killed in those three events.
To read more about Steinem’s thoughts on the normalization of violence in the world, take a look at this Q&A we did in 2012.WHEN YOU THINK OF THE FINEST LA LIGA STRIKERS over the past 20 years, you would include the Real Madrid trio of Raúl, Ronaldo and Morientes. Then Kluivert, Eto’o and Suárez from Barcelona. A few others would certainly make the grade – Diego Tristán of Deportivo and David Villa. However, aside from the obvious El Clásico duopoly, Atlético Madrid have been especially blessed in this department over this period.
Torres, Forlán and Agüero; Falcao, Diego Costa and Griezmann: it’s a constant conveyor belt of acceleration, dynamism and goals. It has become a massive part of the club’s DNA – something that they are now known for. All of these strikers could make a serious claim to be among the best in the world at some point in time during their Atlético years. So what is it about the smaller, less glamorous of the two Madrid clubs that let their forwards succeed so often?
It is a club that has always had a strong South American connection; from Rubén Ayala in the 1970s, to Maxi Rodríguez in the mid-2000s, to with Luis Perea, the defender who amassed the most appearances for the club as a non-Spanish player from 2004 to 2012. There was also Diego Simeone. His first spell with the club was from 1994 until 1997. In 1996 he was part of the team that achieved the La Liga and Copa del Rey double. He then returned from success in Italy to play with Atlético from 2003 to 2005. In his last two years there he saw the rise of prominent young striker, Fernando Torres.
El Niño is one of Atleti’s favourite sons. He worked his way up through the youth ranks of the club and made his debut in Spain Segunda División in 2001. A week later, he opened his goalscoring account with a late back-post header against Albacete. He then continued to play the starring role in an often-struggling team, captaining them by the age of 19.
Many were hoping Torres’ top performances as a strong yet agile striker with a lethal early finish would propel him to be Spain’s next great striker after Raúl. He kept improving and impressed many with his link-up play and ability to play up front alone. He was also catching the eye at international tournaments – a shining light in the midst of Spain’s disappointing Euro 2004 campaign.
Read | Fernando Torres and the cyclical journey of a cult hero
Torres was only used as an impact sub in the first two games against Russia and Greece, before ousting an in-form Fernando Morientes in the group decider against Iberian rivals Portugal. Two years later in Germany, he netted three goals at the 2006 World Cup. Already on the radar of every big club, unfortunately for the red, white and blue half of Madrid, it seemed only a matter of time before he moved on. Finally, in July 2007, after regular summer flirtations with the Premier League, Rafael Benítez sealed the Spaniard’s signature for Liverpool. Torres completed a £20 million move to Merseyside and went on to form a telepathic relationship with Steven Gerrard.
The pragmatism of the board at the Vicente Calderón was evident to see in the way they handled Torres’ departure. The summer before, in 2006, they started laying the foundations for the likelihood of their star man moving on. They signed a 19-year-old striker from Independiente, who many described as the new Romário – one Sergio Agüero. Then, when Torres finally was sold, they secured Diego Forlán’s signature. The player, who struggled at Old Trafford for three years, went on to win the Pichichi on Spain’s east coast with Villarreal, forming an era-defining partnership for the club with Juan Román Riquelme.
Forlán and Agüero’s partnership worked perfectly. The Argentine was young and had a lot to learn about the European game, and who better to teach him than a fellow Spanish-speaking South American who’d had his fair share of difficulties with adapting on the continent. It was brilliant planning by the Rojiblancos board.
In 2007, Diego Forlán was fast becoming one of the most feared strikers in Europe. He displayed dynamism all around the penalty area with a habitual ability to score from long range with both feet. At their peak, Forlán and Agüero wreaked havoc for defences in La Liga and the UEFA Cup. One of their best displays as a partnership was in the 4-2 demolition of Barcelona at the Vicente Calderón in March 2008.
Forlán was the perfect foil for Agüero’s unpredictability and burst of acceleration as the Argentine struck two and set up one. During the following season, Pep Guardiola’s first in charge at the Camp Nou, Atlético once again beat La Blaugrana. This time a 4-3 win, Forlán and Agüero were again mesmerising, each netting twice. Forlán’s first goal, in particular, was one of real quality.
Read | How Diego Forlán gave hope to late bloomers everywhere
He received the ball midway inside Barça’s half and, with Carles Puyol and the rest of the defence back-peddling, he unleashed an outward curling shot with his left foot. The ball looped past Victor Valdés’ right side and into the top corner as the deep nets of the Calderón bulged. In their four years together they amassed 142 goals for Atlético, as well as proving instrumental in bringing Champions League football back to the club after 11 years. They were also the standout performers in Atlético’s UEFA Cup triumph of 2010.
The tide changed in 2011 as Agüero joined the revolution at Manchester City and Diego Forlán moved to a declining Internazionale. This paved the way for Colombian Radamel Falcao to join from Porto, joining one Diego Costa who had been re-signed to the club after a promising season at Rayo Valladolid.
In only two seasons at Atlético, Falcao’s reputation grew ten-fold. His change of direction in the box and the ability score with finesse or force made him the best poacher in Europe. He was yet another player who scored a remarkable goal against Barcelona for Los Rojiblancos. This time, however, it was at the Camp Nou.
Lionel Messi was dispossessed in Atlético’s half by Diego Costa, who swiftly moved the ball to an advancing Falcao. The Colombian swept past Sergio Busquets with the outside of his right boot and proceeded with a blistering curved run towards goal, with Barcelona’s high line trickling behind. With the goal ahead, he opted for a nonchalant chip over the top of Valdés to score the best visiting goal at the Camp Nou that season. The way in which he married unpredictability with a delicate finish was spectacular; it was a goal that summed up Falcao at the time perfectly.
The lure of bigger wages and more glamorous surroundings dictated Falcao’s move to the province of Monte Carlo by joining Monaco in 2013. However, the wheels kept turning for the conveyor belt of forwards at Atlético. This time Diego Costa, who first joined the club’s ranks in 2007, stepped forward. The addition of an ageing David Villa was certainly a help, but it was Costa who grabbed – sometimes literally – La Liga by the scruff of the neck in the 2013/14 season with his 27 league goals leading them to the title. Under the guidance of Simeone, Atletico became a club that finally realised it’s staggering potential.
Read | In defence of Diego Costa, the master of war
Costa’s introduction to English football was in the Champions League semi-final first leg between Atlético and Chelsea. With seven minutes on the clock, a throw-in from the right-hand side reached the Brazil-born striker as John Terry came in from behind with a firm clearance. Costa immediately turned around and barged the defender’s chest. However, this wasn’t just any defender – this was John Terry, the last of his kind. It didn’t matter to Costa. It was a signal to José Mourinho’s Chelsea that even though they might be playing the underdogs, it would not be an easy passage to the final.
This proved to be true as the game ended 0-0. In the second leg, Costa was instrumental, scoring one and inadvertently assisting another. It solidified Mourinho’s thoughts about Costa being the missing piece to his Chelsea jigsaw. When he moved to Chelsea that summer, one would assume the striking prowess at the club might cool off, and it might have been the case had it not been for Antoine Griezmann, now amongst the world’s most feared and in-demand players.
So why do Atlético’s strikers flourish? One of the common denominators over this period has been the South American connection. At a club like Atletico, where the freedom to play your game and fire from within is cherished, they have been given the chance to adapt to the European game in front of loyal, passionate supporters. The managers have also played a strong part; from Luis Aragonés and Javier Aguirre to Quique Sánchez Flores and Simeone, they have all been adept at protecting their strikers, giving them the confidence to play their natural game, and setting up their teams to be solid behind them.
Tactically, Atlético have also been an anomaly at the top end of the game. Unlike most other sides they’ve played two up front for much of this period, giving strikers a chance to build partnerships and work together. Instead of one man roaming alone – like Torres did for much of his first spell at the club – managers since have stuck to the trusted two-man strikeforce, and never was that better seen than in the days of Forlán and Agüero. Additionally, the counter-attacking style of play, particularly away from home, has benefitted their forwards in this period, many of whom like to burst into space and stretch the defence. The way Costa bullied defenders and ran in behind the was the perfect example for Atlético in 2013/14.
Every club has a unique identity in football. Indeed, it has now become such an integral facet of the globalisation of the sport – a unique selling point. It could be the Galácticos of Real Madrid, the tiki-taka of Barcelona or the Total Football of Ajax. For Atletico Madrid, it’s their unforgiving style of play under Diego Simeone, one which marries defensive stability with world-class strikers, given the freedom to express themselves within the remit of the team’s tactical plan. This has enabled the club to build a reputation as the foremost hotbed of striking talent in Europe.
By Ruairí GregoExhaust fans and open windows only go so far toward eliminating foul odors. Making your sniffer happy oftentimes requires something extra, like baking powder, vinegar or special charcoal. For smells that make you run out of the room holding your nose, try these tricks:
1. ID the source and remove it
"The key to odor removal is removing the source of the odor," says Bob Smolka, restoration manager for ACR, Inc., a specialized cleaning services company in Wheeling, Ill. If mold, mildew, faulty plumbing or an animal carcass in your chimney is causing the smell, then spraying air fresheners and burning candles will only temporarily overpower the stench. You need to eliminate the source of the problem for a true fix.
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2. Wash away foul dishwasher smells
Fill a dishwasher-safe cup with white vinegar, place it on the top rack, and run it through a cycle without any dishes. If you don't have a safe cup, pour two cups of vinegar into the bottom of the dishwasher. Be prepared for the vinegar to smell for an hour or so, but then all smells will be gone.
3. Cover temporary kitchen odors, like burnt toast and fried bacon. Turn on the exhaust
fan, open the windows and spray an air freshener.
4. Tame pet odor, including the kitty litter box
Activated charcoal, which is a form of carbon that has been "activated" to make it extremely porous, is great for absorbing a range of odors, especially those caused by pets. You can buy activated charcoal specifically designed for pet odors for $7. Put them in or near your litter box to help mitigate the stink.
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5. Eliminate washing machine mold smells
The door on front-load washing machines seals so tight that air never circulates inside, allowing mold and mildew to grow-and stink up the laundry room. Wash away the mold and the smell by running a cycle with
only two cups of bleach and warm or hot water. Or buy tablets like Affresh (three for $8) that you stick in the washer to clean it. Whichever method you choose, leave your door open between washings.
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6. Keep your garbage disposal from smelling like garbage
Just because you stick waste in your disposal doesn't give it permission to foul up your kitchen. Cut a lemon, lime or orange into chunks and drop them into the running disposal. The citrus will get rid of most odors. If not, follow up with half a cup of white vinegar with cold water-if you can put up with a brief round of vinegar smell.
7. Deodorize the fridge
The age-old solution to tame fridge odors is to open a box of baking soda and stick it on a shelf or along the back. Change it annually and keep it away from vegetables since the sodium bicarbonate in the baking soda can cause leafy veggies to wilt quickly. Sodium bicarbonate has a unique chemical property that attracts and absorbs odors.
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8. Rub out urine and bacteria smells in carpet
Vinegar is highly acidic, which enables it to kill bacteria and also remove urine smells. Mix one part vinegar with three parts water and rub it on the carpet with a cloth. Then rinse the carpet with water and let it air dry. Then train your pet to stop peeing on your carpet.
9. Overpower curry, fried fish and other food smells
If you do a lot of spicy or fried cooking, the smells can become ingrained in your cabinets, which you'll need to wash with warm water and soap. But for immediate relief after cooking, boil a cup of vinegar on the stove. The vapors that release into the air cut the other smells, although the vinegar will cause the kitchen to smell bad for a bit.
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10. Remove cigarette smoke stink
For an occasional infraction of someone lighting up in the house, an air freshener and open windows will eliminate the smell. But heavy smoking over a long period requires washing, sealing and painting the walls, Smolka says. It may also require cleaning the duct system. "There's no magic solution," he says, but there is a misconception that clean air machines—also known as air purifiers and ozone machines—are a good solution for getting rid of these types of heavy, ingrained smells. But Smolka recommends against those units; they can produce dangerous levels of ozone that can kill plants, deteriorate rubber and cause eye irritation and other health problems at high concentrations.
11. Hide embarrassing bathroom stank
Your fan can only do so much. For goodness sake, light a candle. Or better yet, use a long-term odor remover, like a Glade PlugIn.
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12. Be proactive
To keep odors at bay, regularly use an air freshener like Febreze not only in the air, but also by lightly spraying, or misting, curtains or couches in a room. Be sure to read the label first—some products will stain cotton.ATHENS, Greece – Rioting broke out in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Tuesday, as police temporarily lost control of the site. Black smoke was seen rising from the camp as refugees and migrants burnt bins and built barricades at the main fence.
Fences were torn down and some refugees and migrants fled the Moria camp which has been a closed detention centre since 20 March, when parts of the EU – Turkey deal on migration began to be implemented. Greek police responded by deploying riot control units and firing tear gas.
According to sources inside the camp, violence began at around 4pm local time after a Greek police officer assaulted a teenage Syrian refugee. The teenager was part of a group of Syrian and Afghan minors who approached police and demanded to be released from a closed facility for minors in the camp.
Shamshaid Jutt, a 21-year-old man from Pakistan, described the scene to MEE over the phone: “The minors kept saying to the police ‘give us freedom, give us freedom,’ but the police were saying ‘no’. Then one policeman kicked a Syrian minor, and then older guys [refugees] came and attacked the policeman. Then police came and started using tear gas and then it just increased and increased.”
“The police are outside the gate and they are throwing tear gas at the guys who are protesting. People have broken windows and doors. They have set fire to blankets and bins. Everything is broken,” Jutt added.
Ayesha Keller, a humanitarian volunteer on Lesbos, told MEE by phone that youths are put in a separate closed facility in the camp for their own protection. “The idea is that they are vulnerable and need to be held separately,” she said. “They are meant to be released after just two weeks but the system is back logged so some have been there for over a month.
“I saw a lot of teargas and people bleeding. There were a lot of flying objects: tear gas canisters, stones, chairs, bits of glass.”
The BBC reported that the clashes broke out shortly after the Greek migration minister and a Dutch minister visited the facility originally built as a temporary holding centre.
About 3,000 people are being held in Moria, waiting to hear if they will be allowed to apply for asylum or deported.
“[The minors] want freedom from detention. Because some have been there one month, some two months and they cannot leave,” said Jutt. “They are bored and are constantly requesting to the UNHCR and the police: ‘Please let us out, into the main area [of the camp].' |
] came up to the president, he was sitting in one of those tiny elementary school chairs, and Eddie said, “We need to get you to Air Force One and get you airborne.” They’d determined this might be an effort to decapitate the government.
Dave Wilkinson: We ended up with a compromise—Andy Card said we have a whole auditorium full, waiting for the next event. There was no imminent threat there in Sarasota, so we agreed [the president could give a statement before we left.]
Brian Montgomery: It was the fear of the unknown. We didn’t know if someone had put a biological agent or chemical agent at the school. He went to the auditorium. I remember looking at the students when he said, “America is under attack,” and these girls, their faces were saying, “What’s he’s telling us?”
Andy Card: He gave a very brief statement, he started off and I cringed right away. He said, “I’m going back to Washington, D.C.” And I thought, you don’t know that. We don’t know that. We don’t know where we’re going.
Gordon Johndroe: I told the press we’d be leaving right for the motorcade. We have this joke, mostly with the photographers—no running. No running to catch the president. This time, I told them, “Guys, we’re going to have to run. We’re going to have to run to the motorcade.” Going down the highway, our 15-passenger van was barely keeping up.
Dave Wilkinson: The motorcade left there and in a very aggressive fashion we got to the aircraft. Intelligence information is always sketchy. When we’re riding is the first time that we hear that’s there’s something vague about a threat to the president. That ratcheted things up.
Rep. Adam Putnam: On the motorcade back, there are all these protesters—it was still all about the recount—signs like, “Shrub stole the election.”
Andy Card: In the limo, we’re both on our cellphones—he’s frustrated because he can’t reach Don Rumsfeld. It was a very fast limo ride. We didn’t know that the Pentagon had just been attacked, so that’s why we couldn’t get Rumsfeld.
Dave Wilkinson: We asked for double-motorcade blocks at the intersection. Double and triple blocks. Not just motorcycle officers standing there with their arms up, but vehicles actually blocking the road. Now we’re worried about a car bomb. The whole way back, we were using the limos as a shell game, to keep the president safe. At the airport, we’re no longer worried about the president waving to people. No handshakes, no hugs goodbye, it’s out of the motorcade, up the stairs, we just don’t know what the hell is going on.
Mike Morell: When we got back to the plane, it was ringed by security and Secret Service with automatic weapons. I’d never seen anything like that before. They re-searched everyone before we could reboard, not just the press. They searched Andy Card’s briefcase, he was standing right in front of me in line. They went through my briefcase, which was filled with all these classified materials, but I wasn’t going to object that day.
Col. Mark Tillman: As the motorcade’s coming in, I’ve got the 3 and 4 engines were already running.
Andy Card: When the limo door opened, I was struck that the engines on Air Force One were running. That’s normally a protocol no-no.
Buzz Buzinski: You never lose the excitement of seeing the motorcade. I’m on the back stairs watching as they pull up. I was wondering, “What’s the president thinking? What’s Andy Card thinking? What are they doing to make it happen?” You could feel it. You could feel the tension. We’d been attacked on our soil. You could see it on their face—Andy Card, Ari Fleischer, the president.
Sonya Ross: They brought out the bomb-sniffing dogs. They were drooling all [over] the luggage. I had dog spittle all over my bags.
Buzz Buzinski: Everyone other than the president and his senior staff enter through the back stairs, so about 80 percent of the passengers came past us. You could see fear and shock. People couldn’t believe what they had just seen. They didn’t know what to do.
Sandy Kress: Getting on the plane was different than it ever had been. There was a lot of attention to our credentials, who we were. We had to show ID and our badge, not just the badge. And this even though the crew knew most of us.
Eric Draper, presidential photographer, White House: The Secret Service wanted to get him on the plane as quickly as possible. I figured that I’ve got to stick like glue to the president. Obviously, I know it’s going to be a big day. My goal was to find him as quickly as possible on board, but Andy Card said at the top of the stairs, “Take the batteries out of your cellphone. We don’t want to be tracked.” That brought me up. “Are we a target?” I wasn’t thinking of that.
Col. Mark Tillman: President Bush comes up the stairs in Sarasota, now you watch him come up the stairs every day, that famous Texas swagger. He was focused that day. No swagger. He was just trucking up the stairs. He was a man on a mission. As soon as the passengers are on board, I fire [engines] 1 and 2.
Andy Card: We’re starting to roll almost before the president gets into the suite.
Rep. Adam Putnam: There was one van, maybe a press van, that was parked too close to the plane’s wing. I remember a Secret Service agent running down the aisle; they opened the back stairs, he ran down to move the truck. He never made it back on board. They didn’t wait for him.
Gordon Johndroe: We took off and it was something out of [the movie] Independence Day. That thing took off like a rocket. The lamps are shaking they’d fired up the engines so much.
Karl Rove: [Col. Tillman] stood that thing on its tail—just nose up, tail down, like we were on a roller coaster.
Ellen Eckert: We were climbing so high and so fast I started to wonder if we’d need oxygen masks.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: It was the uncertainty. As we’re taking off, you’re still getting all this misinformation. Your head was spinning, trying to figure out what had actually happened. The only thing we knew for sure, because we’d seen it with our own eyes, was that the World Trade Center had been hit.
Aboard Air Force One, en route to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Pictured from left are: Andy Card; Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary; Blake Gottesman, Personal Aide to the President; Karl Rove, Senior Adviser; Deborah Loewer, Director of White House Situation Room, and Dan Bartlett, Deputy Assistant to the President. | U.S. National Archives
Col. Dr. Richard Tubb, presidential physician, White House Medical Unit: The people who are the permanent, apolitical staff—the medical unit, the flight crew, the military aide—they were all well-versed in their emergency action plans, irrespective of who the president was, but they—we—didn’t have the relationship yet with the political staff. That trust was still coming. It’s a very different worldview for each side. It’s only time over time that you build those relationships, and there hadn’t been that much time. It’s hard enough for any administration—but that particular transition was so abbreviated and ugly as the 2000 campaign was—it was even harder. Those guys were still trying to put their government together. Everyone was excited because they were just coming back from the summer vacation and felt that they were going to hit their stride.
Andy Card: I really think President Bush—I know President Bush took office on January 20, 2001—but the responsibility of being president became a reality when I whispered in his ear. I honestly believe as he contemplated what I said, I took an oath. Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. It’s not cutting taxes, it’s not No Child Left Behind, it’s not immigration, it’s the oath. When you pick a president, you want to pick a president who can handle the unexpected. This was the unexpected. That’s what the president was wrestling with that day. He recognized the cold reality of his responsibilities.
Eric Draper: Soon after we got on board, I see [the president] pop out of the cabin, he’s heading down the aisle. He says, “OK boys, this is what they pay us for.” I’ll never forget that.
Andy Card: Even before we left the school, there was angst from the Secret Service that we don’t know what’s out there. As we were boarding the plane, someone had picked a reference to “Angel.” That’s the code name for Air Force One. Is someone sitting around with a Stinger missile? Was someone waiting for us at Andrews? Mark [Tillman] was reluctant to fly us back to Washington.
Karen Hughes, communications director, White House: September 10th was my anniversary, so I had stayed back in Washington. I was scheduled to do a Habitat for Humanity event with [Secretary of Housing and Urban Development] Mel Martinez that required us to wear blue jeans. President Bush didn’t allow blue jeans in the West Wing, so I’d just planned to spend the morning at home. When the attacks began, the vice president sent a military driver to pick me up and bring me to the White House, because D.C.’s streets were so clogged.
Maj. Scott Crogg, F-16 pilot, call-sign “Hooter,” 111th Fighter Squadron, Houston: I had just gotten off alert at Ellington Field [in Houston], normally we pull 24-hour alerts, mostly for drug interdiction. I’d just gotten back into bed and was watching TV and saw the reports of a plane hitting the tower. Being an airline pilot, an air defense pilot, and the operations officer for the 111th, this was something that intrigued me. I wanted to stay up to see what happened. Then when that second plane hit, it eliminated any doubt. I had to get back to work.
II. Airborne, Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico
The president’s private cabin and office, the “airborne Oval Office,” sit at the front of Air Force One on the main deck; stairs lead up to the flight deck and communications suite. Other cabins house the White House Medical Unit, staff, guests, security, the press and crew.
Col. Mark Tillman: The initial conversation was that we’d take him to an Air Force base, no less than an hour away from Washington. Maybe let’s go ahead and try to get him to Camp David. That all changed when we heard there was a plane headed towards Camp David.
I made the takeoff, climbed out, probably 25,000 to 30,000—I gave it to the backup pilot. I had three pilots on board that day. I said just keep flying towards Washington.
Ari Fleischer: As we were flying out of Sarasota, we were able to get some TV reception. They broke for commercial. I couldn’t believe it. A hair-loss commercial comes on. I remember thinking, in the middle of all this, I’m watching this commercial for hair loss.
Col. Mark Tillman: Jacksonville Center [Air Traffic Control] was warning us about an unidentified plane in the area. I said let’s change direction and see if it follows. It didn’t.
Andy Card: Blake Gottesman was my personal aide, but he was filling in that day as the president’s aide. I said, “Blake, it’s your job to make sure that people don’t come up to the suite.” No one comes up unless the president calls for them.
Ari Fleischer: We got a report there are six aircraft still flying in the U.S. that aren’t responding and could still be hijacked. We’re thinking that there are still six missiles still in the sky. We’re getting a report that a plane “was down near Camp David.”
Karl Rove: Andy and I are there with the president. The president gets this call from Cheney—we didn’t know who it was at the time, we just knew the phone rang. He said “yes,” then there was a pause as he listened. Then another “yes.” You had an unreal sense of time that whole day. I don’t know whether it was 10 seconds or two minutes. Then he said, “You have my authorization.” Then he listens for a while longer. He closes off the conversation. He turns to us and says that he’s just authorized the shoot-down of hijacked airliners.
I’d never heard the word ‘decapitation attack’ before.”
Andy Card: The president is sitting at his desk, and I’m sitting directly in front of him. I witness the president authorize the Air National Guard to shoot down the hijacked airliners. The conversation was sobering to hear. What struck me was as soon as he hung up the phone, he said, “I was an Air National Guard pilot—I’d be one of the people getting this order. I can’t imagine getting this order.” There was a greater degree of reality than many other presidents would have experienced.
Karl Rove: He was so even-handed. He was just so naturally calm during the day.
Dave Wilkinson: We didn’t expect the breakdown of communications. Every kind of communication that day was challenged. Even the president talking to the Situation Room was challenged. The communications network did not hold up.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: All the comms that we would normally have, some of them are no longer available. We’ve got multiple systems—commercial and terrestrial systems—and they’re all jammed. I started to have tunnel vision: What the hell is going on? Did someone sabotage our comms? It wasn’t until later I realized all the commercial systems were all just saturated. It was all the same systems the airplane pilots were using at the same time, talking to their dispatchers. We as Air Force One didn’t have any higher priority than American This or United That.
Col. Mark Tillman: We started having to use the military satellites, which we would only use in time of war.
Ari Fleischer: I’d never heard the word "decapitation attack" before, but people like Andy, who had been there during the Cold War and had the training, he knew what was going on. The training and the thinking of the military and the Secret Service is just so profoundly different, but that was the psychology and mood that took hold aboard Air Force One. There are still missiles out there and the Secret Service says to the president, “We don’t think it’s safe for you to return to Washington.”
Maj. Scott Crogg: It was very somber [at the air base]. We got these cryptic messages from Southeast Air Defense Sector. We knew we’re on the hook now—it might not be for Air Force One, but for anything. Houston’s the fifth-largest metro region, it’s got all this oil and gas infrastructure. I asked maintenance to put live missiles and arm up the guns. Two heat-seeking missiles and rounds from a 20-mm gun isn’t a lot to take on a hijacked plane, but it was the best we could do.
Andy Card: Then we hear that Flight 93’s gone down. We’re all wondering, Did we do that? It wasn’t a big deal on the plane. It lingered deepest in the president’s conscience. Most people on the plane hadn’t been privy to that conversation.
Col. Mark Tillman: All of us thought, we assumed we shot it down.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: All the folks were coming up to the communications deck with various requests, a Secret Service agent comes up and says, “The president wants to know the status of the first family.” He had this look on his face. I have to tell him I don’t have a way to find out. I can’t fathom what that was like for the president.
Dave Wilkinson: Once we heard a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, that’s when we said, “Well, we’re not going to go back to Washington.” It’s all about that “direction of interest.” At the start, the threat’s right now in New York. Then the plane hit the Pentagon, and it was about our seats of government. Hearing all of this, we’re thinking that the further we’re away from Washington, the safer we are.
Col. Mark Tillman: We get this report that there’s a call saying “Angel was next.” No one really knows now where the comment came from—it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators. “Angel” was our code name. The fact that they knew about “angel,” well, you had to be in the inner circle. That was a big deal to me. It was time to hunker down and get some good weaponry.
Maj. Scott Crogg: We dispatched two fighters to go protect Air Force One.
Col. Mark Tillman: Now our security’s tremendous, but we had press on board, there were press that weren’t part of our regular traveling party. We put a cop at the base of the stairs. No one was allowed upstairs. That was something we’d never done before.
Buzz Buzinski: Will Chandler [the lead Air Force security officer] was summoned to the front. Then he stayed up there, providing security at the cockpit stairs. That got us thinking: Is there an insider threat? [Colonel Tillman’s] putting someone at the flight deck. You just don’t know who’s who.
Staff Sgt. Paul Germain: Colonel Tillman says at that point, “Let’s just go cruise around the Gulf for a little bit.” That was our Pearl Harbor. You train for nuclear war, then you get into something like that. All the money they pumped into us for training, that worked. We could read each other’s minds.
Buzz Buzinski: Will [Chandler] told us, “Guys, this is our time. 100 percent security, all of the time. We gotta get the president back.”
Dave Wilkinson: Colonel Tillman took us to a height where if an aircraft was coming towards us, we’d know it was no mistake. Talking to him, I was confident we were safer in the air than we were anywhere on the ground.
Col. Mark Tillman: I took us up to 45,000 feet. That’s about as high as a 747 can go. I figured I wanted to be above all the other air traffic, especially since everyone was descending to land.
Ann Compton, reporter, ABC News: We were standing in the press cabin. A lot of people were too nervous to sit down. A Secret Service agent was in the aisle and he pointed at the monitor and said, “Look down there, Ann, we’re at 45,000 feet and we have no place to go.”
Karl Rove: There was acrimony. President Bush doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t pound the desk. But as we made it across the Florida peninsula, they [Andy Card and Tom Gould] kept raising objections [about returning to Washington]. At one point, Cheney and Rumsfeld called [and advised against returning to Washington].
Ari Fleischer: Andy took the side of the Secret Service. Looking back, it’s pretty obvious that you don’t put Air Force One down at a known, predictable location when the attack’s still unfolding. You preserve the office of the president. It was pretty straightforward.
Dave Wilkinson: He fought with us tooth and nail all day to go back to Washington. We basically refused to take him back. The way we look at is that by federal law, the Secret Service has to protect the president. The wishes of that person that day are secondary to what the law expects of us. Theoretically it’s not his call, it’s our call.
Eric Draper: As a group, you had Tom Gould, Andy Card, and a couple Secret Service guys saying you couldn’t return to Washington. He was visibly frustrated and very angry. I was just a few feet away, and it felt like he was looking through me. It was really intense. He just turned away in anger.
Karl Rove: Gould came in and said, “Mr. President, we don’t have a full fuel load. We’ve got too many extraneous people on board. We can’t loiter over Washington if we need to.” He suggested, let’s get to a military base, drop off the unessential personnel, fill up with fuel, and reassess. The president got the argument, but he wasn’t happy about it.
Ari Fleischer: We didn’t have satellite TV on the plane. The news would frustratingly come in and go out. So I was not aware of the punishing coverage that the president was receiving for not returning to Washington. The anchors were all asking, “Where’s Bush?” They instantly criticized him.
Sonya Ross: We didn’t know where we were going, but they must’ve been circling, because we kept watching the local feed of a Florida station going in and out. That was our tiny window into the outside world.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: We had limited communications, that’s for sure, but the president and Air Force One were never without secure communications. We just had two lines—one for the president and one for the mil aide. We were never out of touch entirely. All the other staff or the other Secret Service agent, we just couldn’t provide them the calls they needed. There were a couple times when the vice president wasn’t available, but we never lost communications with the ground.
Andy Card: One of the president’s first thoughts, from Sarasota to Barksdale, was Vladimir Putin.
America could have had no better ally on 9/11 than Russia and Putin.”
Gordon Johndroe: [Putin] was important—all these military systems were all put in place for nuclear alerts. If we went on alert, we needed Putin to know that we weren’t readying an attack on Russia. He was great—he said immediately that Russia wouldn’t respond, Russia would stand down, that he understood we were under attack and needed to be on alert.
Ari Fleischer: Putin was fantastic that day. He was a different Vladimir Putin in 2001. America could have had no better ally on September 11th than Russia and Putin.
Ellen Eckert: We were watching that second plane hit on a replay. It wasn’t hitting me yet what had happened, until I saw that second plane hit. I remember thinking “Holy mother of God.” I was sitting back with the press corps and they said, “Go find out what’s happening.” I’m like, “Oh, right, they’re going to tell the steno what’s happening.” Ari came back to the press cabin, and said, “Please don’t call anybody, please don’t tell anyone where we are for national safety, keep our location secure.” Everyone said, “Absolutely, how’s the president?” Everyone was really obedient.
Sonya Ross: Khue Bui [one of the photographers] was crouched in front of me and we were talking about our families, people we knew in New York. Ann [Compton of ABC News] and I were trying to come up with timelines—what time was it when Andy Card came in and whispered to the president. Ann’s time and my time were about two minutes apart. We were listening through headsets to the television, but we weren’t really paying attention. Then I heard the reporter say, “The tower’s collapsing.” I looked at the TV and had a completely shocked reaction. I heard Khue’s camera snap.
Eric Draper: We were in the president’s office when the Towers fell. You knew that there’d be a loss of life in a catastrophic way. The room was really silent. Andy Card, Ari, and Dan Bartlett were there. There’s an image of the president, with his hands on his hips, just watching. Dan had a friend who worked in the Towers. He was very emotional. Everyone peeled off one by one and the president just stood there, alone, watching the cloud expand.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: There were times when the emotion would just well up. Just that sick feeling, that sorrow. It was the overwhelming stress, like when a friend or family member is dying. That’s the closest thing I can explain what it felt like that day.
Andy Card: I asked the military aides, “Where are we going?” I want options. I want a long runway, a secure place, good communications. They came back and said Barksdale AFB. I said, “Don’t tell anyone we’re coming.”
Dave Wilkinson: Colonel Tillman said, “What about Barksdale?” It was about 45 minutes away. We discussed it, it’s the perfect compromise—it’s close and it’s secure and we can let off a lot of passengers there. We needed somewhere that had armored vehicles.
Bush confers with, from left, Karl Rove, Andy Card, Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer, prior to delivering remarks at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. | U.S. National Archives
Andy Card: I went into the president’s cabin and told the president, “We’re going Barksdale.” And he said, “No, we’re going back to the White House.” He was pretty hot with me. “I’m making the decision, we’re going back to Washington, D.C.” He’s firm as can be. I just kept saying, “I don’t think you want to make that decision right now.” He went back and forth. It wasn’t one conversation, it was five, six, seven conversations. He was really frustrated with me.
Eric Draper: I remember following the president and Andy Card into the nose of the plane, the president’s cabin. They’re in a very heated discussion over returning to Washington. They’re arguing, but also having the president take telephone calls at the same time. They’re watching the live news coverage. It was controlled chaos.
Andy Card: We were all thinking about the very credible idea that there was more to come. Is there a plane heading to Los Angeles? A plane headed for Chicago? Something on the train? Is there a truck bomb heading across the George Washington Bridge? We had lots of angst over the White House itself. We even had the fog of war trying to figure what was going on in the White House. There’s a fire in the Eisenhower Office Building—well there was, but it was just in a garbage can.
Col. Mark Tillman: We asked for the fighter support. We heard, “You have fast movers at your 7 o’clock.” They were supersonic, F-16s from the president’s guard unit. They led us into Barksdale.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: We’re flying around, all we still have is local TV. The only benefit was that anything broadcasting was broadcasting the attack. Whatever I locked into, it’d only be good until we flew out of range. We were trying to understand from those pictures like anyone else. It was a whole paradigm shift from what I’d thought about conflict and war growing up. It was a new age.
Sandy Kress: There was a lot of discussion about who did it. There was nothing anybody knew. But it was lots of talk—and some fear. I remember the plane banking back across the Gulf. We knew there was a change of plans and direction, but something was diverting the plane.
Rep. Adam Putnam: [Rep. Dan Miller and I] went up to the president’s cabin and he gave us a briefing. He told us that “One way or another” all but a couple planes were accounted for. That was his phrase “one way or another.” He told us Air Force One was headed to Barksdale and was going to drop us off there. When we left the cabin, I turned to Dan and said, “Didn’t you think that was an odd phrase?” He didn’t notice it. I said “‘One way or another,’ that sounds like that there’s more to it than that.” I said, “Do you think there’s any way we shot them down?” We were left hanging.
Lt. Gen. Tom Keck, commander, Barksdale Air Force Base, Shreveport, La.: I was the commander of the 8th Air Force. We were in the midst of this big annual exercise called GLOBAL GUARDIAN. They loaded all the bombers, put the submarines out to sea, put the ICBMs at nearly 100 percent. It was routine, you did it every year.
A captain tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sir, we just had an aircraft hit the World Trade Center.” I started to correct him, saying, “When you have an exercise input you have to start by saying, ‘I have an exercise input.’ That way it doesn’t get confused with the real world.” Then he just pointed me to the TV screens in the command center. You could see smoke pouring out of the building. Like everyone else in aviation that day, I thought, “How in a clear-and-a-million day could someone hit the World Trade Center?”
Karen Hughes: Since I was home, I saw quite a bit of TV coverage just like the American people were seeing it, and I realized that it looked like the American government was faltering. I was on the phone with my chief of staff at the White House when she was told to evacuate. I could actually see the Pentagon burning. But I knew that lots of government was functioning—planes were being grounded, emergency plans were being implemented. I thought someone should be telling the American people that, so I wanted to talk to the president.
When I called the operator to try reach Air Force One, the operator came back on the line and said, “Ma’am, we can’t reach Air Force One.” Mary Matalin had passed along that there was a threat against the plane. It was just chilling. For a split second, I was so worried.
Gordon Johndroe: I was sitting across the table from Mike Morell in the staff cabin. I asked, “Mike, is something else going to happen?” And he said, “Yes.” That was a real gut punch. We were going to be attacked all day long. There were so many rumors—the State Department, the Mall, the White House.
Brian Montgomery: I asked [Mike Morell] who he thought this was. He said “UBL.” No hesitation. “Who’s UBL?” Those of us not up on the lingo of Langley, we had no idea.
Mike Morell: The president called me into his cabin. It was packed with people. The Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine had issued a claim of responsibility for the attack. The president asked me, “What do you know about these guys?” I explained that they had a long history of terrorism, but this group doesn’t have the capability to do this. Guaranteed.
As I was leaving, he said to me, “Michael, one more thing. Call George Tenet and tell him that if he finds out anything about who did it, I want to be the first to know. Got that?” I said, “Yes sir.”
Sonya Ross: I got the first readout [report] from Ari. The answers we were getting there were pretty incomplete. Ari and his team were giving us the best answers they could. I was nervous. I was thinking—it seems really morbid—but I was thinking, “What if they come after the president? We all turn into ‘and 12 others.’ No one knows your name if you go down with the president. But Eric Washington, he was the CBS sound guy, he had his seat reclined, his feet up. He said, “What are you worried about? You’re on the safest plane in the world.”
Air Force One was the safest and most dangerous place in the world at the same exact time.”
Gordon Johndroe: [Air Force One] was the safest and most dangerous place in the world at the exact same time.
Karen Hughes: When I finally did reach Air Force One and spoke with the president, the first thing he said to me was “Don’t you think I need to come back?” He was just champing at the bit to come back. I told him, ‘Yes, as soon as you can.’ Everyone has different roles and I wasn’t thinking about the national security side—I was just thinking about it from a PR perspective.
Andy Card: Mark [Tillman] said, “I don’t care what he says, I’m in charge of the plane.”
Dave Wilkinson: The president once told me that the biggest piece of advice he’d gotten from his mother when he became president was always do what the Secret Service says. I reminded him of that several times that day. The president and I knew each other very well—we’d spent a lot of hours at his ranch—and kind of tongue-in-cheek several times that day, I said, “Remember what your mother said.”
Ari Fleischer: One of the recurring themes of September 11th is how much of the initial reporting was wrong. I keep that in mind every day now as I watch President Obama and world events. In normal situations, there are many ranks and many filters in government, so that only that which is proven and vital reaches the president. All of that broke down on 9/11. No one in the security apparatus wanted to be negligent in not passing things along. The media was part of that too. All those filters broke down.
Andy Card: The fog of war is real. You can be in a car accident and everyone in the car crash has a different perspective. Take that and multiple that a million times. The first estimates of the casualties were so way off. 10,000 people in New York, 1,000 people at the Pentagon.
Master Sgt. Dana Lark: There were so many people coming up to the upper deck, because we weren’t picking up the phones downstairs. It got too crowded. Finally, someone came up and told everyone to get out. The only member of the staff that was up with us was Harriet Miers—she was sitting at one of the CSO seats, with a legal pad taking historical record.
Andy Card: The president’s wondering about his wife, his kids, his parents. Then he’s wondering, is there another city? What’s next? And we’re all thinking, we can’t do anything about it. We’re in a plane, eight miles high in the sky.
Dave Wilkinson: We called Mark Rosenker up to the front of the plane and told him to get us on the phone with the commander at Barksdale. He gave us full assurance that the base would be locked down.
Andy Card: I was comforted to find Barksdale was already on alert. It was going to be secure. No random terrorist would have mapped that Barksdale was where the president was going to go. We didn’t have to ring some bell and everyone would run out of the firehouse. Everyone was already out.
Lt. Gen. Tom Keck: We were already in a practice THREATCON Delta, the highest threat condition. I said lock her down for real. My deputy came in, Lt. Colonel Paul Tibbets—his grandfather was the pilot who flew the Enola Gay [which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima]. He told me that at THREATCON Delta, general officers have to wear sidearms. I tried to refuse, but he insisted. So I was wearing my sidearm, which I never do.
We got this radio request—Code Alpha—a high priority incoming aircraft. It wanted 150,000 pounds of gas, 40 gallons of coffee, 70 box lunches, and 25 pounds of bananas. It wouldn’t identify itself. It was clearly a big plane. It didn’t take us long to figure out that the Code Alpha was Air Force One.
Ann Compton: We were landing going into Barksdale, Ari came back to the press cabin and said, “This is off the record, but the president is being evacuated.” I said, “You can’t put that off the record. That’s a historic and chilling fact. That has to be on the record.” It was a stunning statement, about the president trying to hold the country together but facing a mortal enemy. The president cannot be found because of his own safety. That sent chills down my spine.
III. Barksdale Air Force Base, Shreveport, La.
Col. Mark Tillman: Going into Barksdale, there’s this plane that appears. The initial fighters were with us. I still remember the F-16s starting in on this guy. Bearing, range, altitude, distance. You see the F-16 rolls off, they ask, “Hey, who has shoot-down authority?” I say, “You do.” That was a big moment. It turned out just to be a crop duster, some civilian flyer who didn’t get the word.
Gordon Johndroe: You cannot hide a blue-and-white 747 that says “United States of America” across the top. You can’t move it secretly through the daylight. Where does local TV go when there’s a national emergency? They go out to their local military base. We’re watching ourselves land on local television. The announcer’s saying, “It appears Air Force One is landing. We don’t have any specific information whether the president was on board, but Air Force One was last seen leaving Sarasota.” The pool is looking at me like, “We can’t report this?”
Brian Montgomery: As soon as we landed, Mark Rosenker [director of the White House Military Office] and I went off the back stairs. There’s this guy who looks like General Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, big guy, all decked out in a bomber jacket. He was straight out of central casting. We said, “What do you need?” He said, “See those planes? Every one is loaded with nukes—tell me where you want ’em.” We look over and there are just rows of B-52s, wingtip to wingtip. I joked, “Gosh, don’t tell [the president!].”
We got this radio request—Code Alpha—a high priority incoming aircraft. It wanted 150,000 pounds of gas, 40 gallons of coffee, 70 box lunches and 25 pounds of bananas. It wouldn’t identify itself.”
Buzz Buzinski: Barksdale was going through a nuclear surety inspection. They already had these cops in flak jackets and M-16s. They were all locked and loaded. It’s pretty no-joke when you’re assigned to a nuclear base already. But you still knew that this was going to be different. As soon as we landed, |
interaction.
First, the variables:
var idleTimer = null, idleState = false, idleStatePrev = true, idleWait = 10000; 1 2 3 4 var idleTimer = null, idleState = false, idleStatePrev = true, idleWait = 10000 ;
These variables get set outside of all functions so they can be accessed globally.
idleTimer is our place holder for the timer function. It is initially set to null so we can define the timer when needed.
idleState is our reference to whether the user is idle or not. Iitially set to false so the user does not start out idle.
idleStatePrev is our reference to the previous idle state. Used to determine non-idle state.
idleWait is our idle timeout duration in milliseconds. 10000 = 10 seconds.
Next, the binding:
$('*').on('mousemove keydown scroll', function () { // this is where we put the magic }); 1 2 3 $ ( '*' ). on ('mousemove keydown scroll', function ( ) { // this is where we put the magic } ) ;
$('*') targets all elements.
.on(...) binds the elements to triggers.
'mousemove keydown scroll' defines the specific triggers we are looking for.
function(){... } is called when a trigger is fired from a bound element.
Finally, the timer:
clearTimeout(idleTimer); if (!idleState &&!idleStatePrev) { // Reactivated event $("#timer span").html("You are not idle"); alert("Welcome Back!
You're awesome!"); $('*').css('background-color', '#' + Math.floor(Math.random()*16777215).toString(16) ); idleStatePrev = true; } idleState = false; idleTimer = setTimeout(function () { $("#timer span").html('You are idle'); idleState = true; idleStatePrev = false; }, idleWait); 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 clearTimeout ( idleTimer ) ; if (! idleState &&! idleStatePrev ) { // Reactivated event $ ( "#timer span" ). html ( "You are not idle" ) ; alert ( "Welcome Back!
You're awesome!" ) ; $ ( '*' ). css ( 'background-color', '#' + Math. floor ( Math. random ( ) * 16777215 ). toString ( 16 ) ) ; idleStatePrev = true ; } idleState = false ; idleTimer = setTimeout ( function ( ) { $ ( "#timer span" ). html ( 'You are idle' ) ; idleState = true ; idleStatePrev = false ; }, idleWait ) ;
All of the following code goes inside the binding function declared above.
First, we need to clear out our idle timer variable using clearTimeout(idleTimer);
Next, if (!idleState &&!idleStatePrev) { checks to see if both the idleState and idleStatePrev are false which shows that the user has left the idle state.
If both arguments return false, it will preform the following:
$("#timer span").html("You are not idle"); prints out indicator text in the navigation of this page.
alert("Welcome Back!
You're awesome!
I hope you like your surprise...") welcomes the user back with a nice message.
$('*').css('background-color', '#' + Math.floor(Math.random()*16777215).toString(16) ) sets the background-color of all elements to a random hex color (just for fun).
And, we set idleStatePrev = true to reset the idle status.
idleState = false basically resets the idle status.
Then, we define our idleTimer variable with a setTimeout function.
$("#timer span").html("You are idle"); prints out indicator text in the navigation of this page.
idleState = true lets us know that the user is now idle.
idleStatePrev = false helps us determine if the user is still idle (see if condition above).
...}, idleWait) tells the setTimeout function how long to wait as defined in our global variables.
Summing up:
var idleTimer = null, idleState = false, idleStatePrev = true, idleWait = 10000; $('*').on('mousemove keydown scroll', function () { clearTimeout(idleTimer); if (!idleState &&!idleStatePrev) { // Reactivated event $("#timer span").html("You are not idle"); alert("Welcome Back!
You're awesome!
I hope you like your surprise..."); $('*').css('background-color', '#' + Math.floor(Math.random()*16777215).toString(16) ); idleStatePrev = true; } idleState = false; idleTimer = setTimeout(function () { $("#timer span").html('You are idle'); idleState = true; idleStatePrev = false; }, idleWait); }); $("body").trigger("mouseover"); 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 var idleTimer = null, idleState = false, idleStatePrev = true, idleWait = 10000 ; $ ( '*' ). on ('mousemove keydown scroll', function ( ) { clearTimeout ( idleTimer ) ; if (! idleState &&! idleStatePrev ) { // Reactivated event $ ( "#timer span" ). html ( "You are not idle" ) ; alert ( "Welcome Back!
You're awesome!
I hope you like your surprise..." ) ; $ ( '*' ). css ( 'background-color', '#' + Math. floor ( Math. random ( ) * 16777215 ). toString ( 16 ) ) ; idleStatePrev = true ; } idleState = false ; idleTimer = setTimeout ( function ( ) { $ ( "#timer span" ). html ( 'You are idle' ) ; idleState = true ; idleStatePrev = false ; }, idleWait ) ; } ) ; $ ( "body" ). trigger ( "mouseover" ) ;
Lastly, we need to fire an initial trigger of mousemove on the body to initiate the idle monitoring.
Here is the entire code.
Weird Chrome Bug Note:
There is a weird bug in Google Chrome that will fire mousemove every 1 – 5 seconds ONLY IF you have some specific things running on your machine. Particularly, programs that monitor on a frequent basis (Task Manager, Resource Managers) or music players can shift focus (iTunes).
[bananas]President Barack Obama hosts an event with Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative fellows, Monday, June 1, 2015, at the White House. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(CNSNews.com) - "People don't remember, when I came into office, the United States in world opinion ranked below China and just barely above Russia," President Obama told a gathering of young Southeast Asian leaders on Monday.
"But today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth, and part of that I think is because of the work that we did to reengage the world and say that we want to work with you as partners, with mutual interest and mutual respect.
"It's on that basis that we were able to end two wars while still focusing on the very real threat of terrorism, and to try to work with our partners on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan."
Republican critics, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), say President Obama's failure to leave a residual U.S. troop presence in Iraq has contributed to the ongoing disintegration of that country as well as the rise of the Islamic State.
President Obama's so-called "re-set" with Russia has resulted in the worst relations with that country since the Cold War. His antagonism toward Israel's prime minister has elevated tensions with that close ally. The leaders of Iran sneer at the Obama administration, even as the president tries to negotiate a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. And anarchy has engulfed Libya, after President Obama ordered air strikes to topple Moammar Gaddafi. And more recently, Americans were chased out of Yemen as the security situation deteriorated.
"He says we're the most respected country in the world once again. You wonder what world, what planet, he is living on?" Charles Krauthammer told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly Monday night.
"And it is not just, as you enumerated, our enemies who have no respect for us -- the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, of course, ISIS -- you can go all the way down. It is our allies.
"You think the Ukrainians respect us, or the Poles, the Lithuanians? How about Saudis? How about the Bahrainis? The king of Bahrain was supposed to come to the summit in Camp David with the president of the United States. He stiffs the president and the foreign ministry of Bahrain issues a statement saying on that day, where was the king? At a horse show in England. Now if that's a sign of respect, we've got problems."
Krauthammer also pointed to Egypt: "Where did the president of Egypt go several months ago? For the first time in 40 years he goes to Moscow looking for assistance and for weapons. We had a monopoly in that area of influence. That is not only gone and dissipated, but there's been a revulsion against the United States because we have checked out under Obama. And these allies who have depended on us for so long are finding themselves left hanging in the wind."
When Obama made those remarks on Monday, he was responding to a question, "How do you want the world to remember you?"
"Fondly, I hope," he said to laughter.
"I still have twenty months in office, so I've got a lot of work still to do," he said.
"Obviously there are things I've been proud of." He mentioned the economic recovery, avoiding a "terrible depression," saving the auto industry and averting an international financial crisis.
"That's an important legacy for me," the president said.
He also mentioned providing health insurance (now challenged in the Supreme Court) and "educational opportunity" (he's proposed universal pre-school and free community college for Americans, but he opposes voucher programs).
"Internationally, we've reinvigorated diplomacy in a whole variety of ways," the president insisted, as he launched into the remarks printed above.
He also noted that the U.S. is in the process of normalizing relations with Cuba, and trying to negotiate a deal with Iran.
And he pointed to his administration's efforts to help encourage democracy in Myanmar.
"I think the people of Myanmar deserve the credit for this new opening, but my visit there didn't hurt in trying to reinforce the possibilities of freedom for 40 million people. So that direct engagement, the work that we've done to build and strengthen international organizations, including on issues like public health and the fight against Ebola that is just the most recent example of that -- I think we've been able to put our international relationships on a very strong footing that allows us then to work more cooperatively with other countries moving forward to meet the important challenges ahead.
"But I've still go a lot of work to do, so maybe in 18 months I'll check back with you, and let you know."
'Terribly unfair'
Earlier, Obama told the group that "Democracy is hard. I think that many of the things that are said about me are terribly unfair. But the reason Americans democracy has survived for so long is because people, even if they're wrong, have the right to say what they think.
"George Washington, our first president, he complained terribly about some of the foolishness that was said about him. But part of the reason he's considered one of our greatest presidents is because he set an example of recognizing that if democracy was to work, then you had to respect the rights of even those people who you disagree most with. Because otherwise there's no way that a democracy can flourish over the long term."By Sgt. 1st Class Gina Vaile-Nelson, 133rd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Tucked away in a supply office at Armory 1 in Frankfort, Staff Sgt. Billie Jacobs, a supply sergeant for Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 63rd Theater Aviation Brigade tries to stay under the radar.
She’ll lend a hand to anyone who asks, but would rather not bring any attention to herself. That’s probably why you didn’t even know that recently, Jacobs graduated as the first female 13-F fire-support specialist in the U.S. Army.
“I never cared to be the first in anything, but being a grunt and leading troops has been where my heart was from the beginning,” Jacobs said.
When she reported to the Oklahoma National Guard’s 189th Regional Training Institute in Norman, Oklahoma, Jacobs said it was as routine as checking in to any duty station. Running through her mind was the “same thing that has been there as the only female since I was 13.
“I wrestled on an all-male team, infantry certainly didn’t appreciate females being around and my last re-class was all men,” she said. “It’s no biggie.
“If you go in there and prove yourself as a Soldier, the actions will speak louder for yourself than words; and their words meant nothing in the big scheme of things,” she said.
A transition into any new Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) is difficult. But for Jacobs, the tough academic schedule and physical demands weren’t the issue.
“There were a lot of opinionated males who thought females literally shouldn’t be allowed to even vote,” she said.
“Ninety percent [of my classmates] were supportive, but I had two that I’ll never forget because of their complete rebellion to the changes the Army is undergoing,” she said. “They’ll get used to it or they won’t, but that boat has already left the shore.”
The “boat,” Jacobs referred to is the January 2016 implementation of Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s plan that lifted all gender-based restrictions on military service. The decision opened more than 200,000 jobs across the military – roughly 10 percent of the force – to women. The 13F MOS was the only field artillery job that hadn’t been opened to women.
Other support roles, such as 92Y supply sergeant allowed women to serve alongside infantry or other male-dominated fields. This is where Jacobs spent her first years in the Kentucky Guard. She also volunteered for Joint Support Operations, Kentucky’s Counterdrug mission where she egressed from hollers and fields via static line attached to a UH-60. You could almost say she is as fearless as any other male counterpart.
The rigorous training schedule at 13F-school required hours of memorizing new military jargon used by field artillery and special operations. She had to become proficient at identifying weapons systems necessary to eliminate a threat and methods for remaining concealed. Students became experts in map reading and land navigation and understood that any mistake made on a map overlay could cause serious collateral damage. Ruck marches and field exercises would be enough for some to ring the bell and quit. Even the hardest of Soldiers.
But Jacobs said her mental capacity to never give up and not let down the people who believe in her is what kept her going then, through the 13F course and now.
“Mind over matter is real and having heart can push you through things your body swears it can’t,” she said.
Jacobs said she didn’t do anything extra to prepare for 13F-school. As a body builder, wrestling coach and all around “PT-stud,” Jacobs was already in prime shape.
“You should always be prepared for anything,” she said. “Were there moments where I knew I would have to shatter ceilings? Every opportunity I tried to, because I didn’t want to be looked at as weak or incapable.
“I tried to shatter ceilings in some aspect, everywhere I’ve been and with all the challenging things in life I’ve experienced,” Jacobs said.
Those life lessons and motivations not only impact her subordinates and leaders, but also her community. As a coach for the Anderson County Youth Club wrestling team, Jacobs helped coach a team of 48 young boys and girls. The team placed 13th out of 60 teams in the State Wrestling Finals for 2016.
“Billie is the type of person who you want as a role model,” said 1st Lt. Jonathan Strayer, training officer for the 751st Troop Command. Strayer asked Jacobs to assist with coaching the team this year.
“At work, if you task Billie with something, she does it without needing direction or guidance,” he said. “On the mats with the kids, she brings that same dedication and determination but easily tailors her lessons to individual kids’ abilities.
Even though Jacobs doesn’t have any children, Strayer said her interactions with them was natural, proving that her leadership qualities and dedication to building a successful team come from within.
“Her sportsmanship and professional nature taught the team that a female can do anything,” he said. “Just by doing something she loves (wrestling), she was able to teach these young men, and especially the young girls that women are equal and in many regards can even outwrestle us.”
Jacobs admits that sometimes it’s hard for men to be outdone by women – especially for her young wrestling students.
“Men who are out there to be Soldiers could care less (about a female in their ranks), because they know their capabilities and a woman being around won’t change those,” she said. “I think the men who struggle are extremely intimidated because no one – not even myself – likes to be shown up in any area by a female.
“But I’m just a person doing exactly the things I love,” she said. “I love wrestling and coaching, passing on my knowledge to a strong youth for the next generation. These are the same principles I use in the military.”
Now that she can hang a 13F diploma on her wall, Jacobs knows that being the first female to have the title is an honor, and she hopes other women will follow suit.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said to women who are considering joining combat roles. “Words can’t kill you but they sure can help motivate you.
“Get in there and just do it if you want to, but don’t go home a quitter,” she said. “Go home broken and bruised but not a quitter. It’s OK to cry at night, to curse the ones who intentionally try to make your life tough, but in front of them, act as if you are made of iron and be resilient.
“Push through. You literally can do anything you put your mind to, beating yourself is the first step.”By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry CEO
Enterprise software giant SAP has apparently poked around Blackberry and opted not to buy the troubled smartphone maker, Reuters reports.
SAP was one of a handful of big tech companies sniffing around, with others being Cisco and Google, sources told Reuters.
But in an interview with German magazine, Euro am Sonntag, SAP Chief Financial Officer Werner Brandt, said, "BlackBerry doesn't fit into our strategy."
An acquisition by SAP wouldn't have been that farfetched of an idea because a lot of enterprises like a BlackBerry product called Blackberry Enterprise. It helps enterprises secure fleets of fleets of smartphones owned the company and employees. SAP is already in this market, with a software product called Afaria.
Then there's the surprise hit app Blackberry Messenger, which lets users chat securely across different phones including iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. The company said that in the first week since making it available for iPhone and Android, 20 million new users signed up for it, giving 80 million users, including the ones using it on BlackBerry.
SAP is really trying to increase its visibility with mobile consumer apps. But of course, if it really wanted to buy chat users, it could make a play for WhatsApp, which last week announced that it had 350 million users, reports BGR's Zach Epstein.
In any case, a SAP/BlackBerry hookup is not going to happen. So BlackBerry seems to be still shopping for a new home, even reportedly asking Facebook to buy it.
More From Business InsiderHeinrich on crises—some background
A century ago, a discussion occurred in the Second International about the “disproportionate production” theory of crisis. This theory holds that crises arise because of disproportions between the various branches of industry, especially between what Marx called Department I, which produces the means of production, and Department II, which produces the means of personal consumption.
This led to speculation on the part of some Social Democrats that the growing cartelization of industry would be able to limit and eventually eliminate the crisis-breeding disproportions. This could, these Social Democrats speculated, give birth to a crisis-free capitalism, at least in theory. The revisionist wing of the International, led by such figures as Eduard Bernstein—the original revisionist—put its hopes in just such a development.
Assuming a rising organic composition of capital, Department I will grow faster than Department II. The Ukrainian economist and moderate socialist Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky (1865-1919), who was influenced by Marxism, claimed there was no limit to the ability of capitalism to develop the productive forces as long as the proper relationship between Department I and Department II is maintained. The more capitalist industry grew and the organic composition of capital rose the more the industrial capitalists would be selling to their fellow industrial capitalists and relatively less “wage-goods” to the workers.
Tugan-Baranovsky held that capitalism would therefore never break down economically. Socialism, if it came at all, would have to come because it is a morally superior system, not because it is an economic necessity. This put Tugan-Baranovsky sharply at odds with the “world-view Marxists” of the time, who stressed that socialism would replace capitalism because socialism becomes an economic necessity once a certain level of economic development is reached.
Sweezy and Tugan-Baranovsky
In his “Theory of Capitalist Development,” Paul Sweezy was horrified by Tugan-Baranovsky’s arguments. Sweezy was aware that a growth of Department I relative to Department II implied that the process of capitalist expanded reproduction would gain ever greater momentum over time. This was especially true because Sweezy, like Heinrich, did not believe that there was any particular downward tendency in the rate of profit. If the tendency of the rate of profit is downward, this implies a limit of capitalist accumulation in terms of value, since new capital is overwhelmingly formed out of accumulated profits.
Sweezy, who was a child of the Depression, had good reason to assume that the kind of crisis-free, ever-accelerating economic growth foreseen by Tugan-Baranovsky was simply impossible under capitalism. The industrial capitalists, Sweezy assumed, would not be able to find markets for the tremendous rise in the quantity of commodities that would be required by Tugan-Baranovsky’s model. Didn’t the Depression provide proof enough? But Sweezy found that he could not prove mathematically that Tugan-Baranovsky was wrong. As a result, Sweezy found himself unsatisfied with the chapters on crisis theory contained in the “Theory of Capitalist Development.”
Sweezy’s big mistake: trying to explain crises without explaining money
The big mistake Sweezy made in the “Theory of Capitalist Development” was his attempt to explain crises without examining Marx’s theory of money. In fact, a strong case can be made that Sweezy in this work should simply have stated that crisis theory lay beyond the scope of the work. This is especially true because the “Theory of Capitalist Development” was aimed at explaining the basic ideas of Marx’s economic theory to English-speaking economics students who, like Sweezy, had been educated in marginalist theories.
Sweezy should either have tackled Marx’s theory of money, which would have put him in a position to develop crisis theory if he chose to, or, alternatively, he should have avoided crisis theory altogether. Considering the nature of that work, the latter would probably have been the best course. If he had followed either of these two alternatives, the “Theory of Capitalist Development” would have been, in my opinion, a better book.
Sweezy also failed to tackle monetary theory in “Monopoly Capital.” Indeed, this work, unlike “The Theory of Capitalist Development,” largely ignores value theory altogether. In “Monopoly Capital,” Baran and Sweezy actually say very little about crisis theory. They were more interested in explaining “stagnation”—the persistence of unemployment and excess capacity across the industrial cycle—than they were in examining the industrial cycle and crises.
Heinrich and crisis theory
In contrast, Michael Heinrich in his “Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital,” unlike Sweezy in either of his two books, does analyze money. He even calls Marx’s value theory a “monetary theory of value.” The problem is, as we saw last month, that Heinrich analyzed money incorrectly, beginning with his failure to understand Marx’s admittedly difficult—especially for the philosophically uneducated—concept of “abstract labor.” Therefore, while Sweezy’s failure to analyze money in developing his theory of crisis left the door open to a correct theory of crisis once an analysis of money is added to it, Heinrich’s false theory of money closes the door to a correct theory of crisis.
In my opinion, Heinrich should not even have tackled crisis theory in his “Introduction.” He should have limited himself to saying that while Marx provides many clues to crisis theory in “Capital,” crisis theory as such lies beyond the subject matter of that work and consequently of any introduction to it.
However, since Heinrich did choose to tackle crisis theory in his “Introduction,” as in his polemic against the tendency for the rate of profit to fall that Monthly Review chose to publish in its April 2013 issue, some comments on what Heinrich did have to say on crises is appropriate here.
Heinrich, despite his grave mistakes in Marxist value and monetary theory, does make some correct points about crises. First, he realizes that crises involve the overproduction of commodities. Unlike most Marxists these days, who often talk about the “over-accumulation of capital”—presumably referring to crises of overproduction—Heinrich is not afraid to use the term “overproduction” when describing the nature of capitalist cyclical crises.
Heinrich also realizes, despite his false theory of money, that the existence of money does make crises possible. He explains quite correctly that neoclassical theory implicitly assumes an economy without money. If we assume that money does not exist, then it is indeed impossible to explain how there can be a “general glut” of commodities. Heinrich explains that neoclassical economists who either explicitly or implicitly deny even the possibility of the generalized overproduction of commodities—that is, Says Law—are obliged to blame real-world crises on incorrect government policies or factors that are external to capitalism. All this is very good.
Heinrich also correctly stresses, unlike the Social Democratic “disproportionality theorists” of the era of the Second International, that crises are indeed inevitable under capitalism. Since his “Introduction” is, after all, an introduction to the three volumes of “Capital,” a work that itself does not deal with crises in a systematic way, one would hardly expect Heinrich to develop a full theory of crises in his short book. Indeed, if anything, a strong case can be made that he should have avoided the subject altogether or simply limited himself to a statement that a fully developed theory of crises lies beyond the three volumes of “Capital.”
Heinrich, crises, and the fate of capitalism
“In crises,” Heinrich writes, “the unity between spheres (such as production and consumption) that belong together but become independent of one another (production and consumption follow different determinations) is violently restored.” (p. 174) Therefore, since crises solve in their own way the contradictions of capitalism, don’t crises actually strengthen capitalism in the long run? This indeed is Heinrich’s position. Crises, he explains, occur under capitalism, and they are not mere accidents but are inevitable. But, according to Heinrich, crises have no revolutionary implications. Instead, they periodically strengthen capitalism by freeing it of the contradictions between production and consumption that build up between crises.
What Heinrich ignores here is the role that crises play in the centralization of capital. Because the ability of all existing independent industrial capitals to develop production at any given time exceeds the ability of the market to expand, each successive economic upswing must end in a crisis of generalized overproduction. (1) When after a period of prosperity and overproduction a crisis inevitably breaks out, a number of the independent capitals must be eliminated. True, with the inevitable next upswing new capitals can again appear as the market expands for awhile more rapidly than production does. This is especially true in new branches of industry. Today or at least until the very recent past, smart phones and tablet computers were examples of this.
In the very near future, this will likely be the case with fully electric cars and perhaps three-dimensional printers as well. For the moment, the markets for these commodities is not very big, but these markets will likely in the not too distant future expand dramatically. If these markets (2) turn out to be duds, no doubt other new types of commodities will appear where the market for them will for awhile grow much faster than the ability of the industrial capitalists to produce them.
In the recent past, personal computers, both desktop and laptops, were examples where capitalist industry struggled to keep up with demand. But this is no longer the case. In this branch of industry, the phase of “consolidation”—the centralization-of-capital phase—has now arrived, and some very large industrial capitals such as the Hewlett-Packard Company, the world’s largest producer of personal computers, is now fighting for survival.
Indeed, when the period of the market growing faster than production in a new branch of industry ends—as it has now done in the personal computer market—the business press speaks of the industry “going through a period of consolidation”—that is, the centralization of capital increases after a period of decentralization.
Therefore, there are tendencies for both the decentralization and the centralization of capital. Marx pointed out somewhere that capitalism would quickly collapse if the tendencies toward the decentralization of capital did not exist. To understand capitalism, we must examine the tendencies toward the decentralization of capital as closely as the tendencies toward the centralization of capital.
However, as crises show, the ability of capital to increase production overall is much stronger than its ability to expand the capitalist market. As a result, the forces that work toward the centralization of capital are over time much stronger than the tendencies toward decentralization. In “Socialism Utopian and Scientific,” Engels viewed the successive crises as a spiral that is gradually closing, pointing toward the inevitable transformation of capitalism into a system of planned production by the associated producers—what we call socialism.
Capitalism comes into the world as a highly decentralized system of production where the producers relate to each other only through exchange. The system works best when it is highly decentralized. The presence of highly centralized production and monopolies undermines it. This is why the economists like to assume “free competition” and either deny altogether or at least play down the tendency toward the centralization of capital and monopoly. A good example is Keynes’ “General Theory,” which completely ignored this tendency.
Incredibly, as we will see, Heinrich denies the tendency toward the centralization of capital. This puts him at odds not only with “world-view Marxism,” but with Marx himself, and above all the Monthly Review school of Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, Michael Kalecki, Samir Amin, Harry Magdoff, and John Bellamy Foster, who all put monopoly at the very center of their analysis of contemporary capitalism. This brings us to Heinrich’s theory of imperialism, or rather Heinrich’s denial of imperialism.
Heinrich versus Lenin on imperialism
Heinrich explains that while there were various theories of imperialism, it is the theory of Lenin that has proved most influential. I agree. What is Heinrich’s attitude toward Lenin’s theory of imperialism?
“His [Lenin’s—SW] analysis,” Heinrich writes, “was largely borrowed from the left-liberal author Hobson [1902] and presented in a Marxist guise.” Therefore, according to Heinrich, Lenin’s theory of imperialism is not a Marxist theory at all but really a left-liberal one. Though he was indeed influenced by Hobson, who was a bourgeois underconsumptionist crisis theorist who also influenced Keynes, Lenin was also influenced by the German Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, particularly his book “Finance Capital.” (3) This work, despite Hilferding’s mistakes on the theory of money, was the first book-length attempt from a Marxist perspective to deal with the developing phenomenon of monopoly capitalism. Lenin did not hide his admiration for “Finance Capital” in his own pamphlet, “Imperialism,” first published in 1916.
The fact that Lenin went on to lead the Bolshevik revolution, of course, has something to do with the influence of “Imperialism.” But even if the Russian Revolution had not occurred, I think “Imperialism” would still have been an extremely important work in the history of the development of the Marxist theory of modern imperialism. To ignore the influence that Hilferding had on Lenin’s theory of imperialism represents a considerable falsification of Lenin’s work and the development of 20th-century Marxism—call it “world-view Marxism” if you want to.
Heinrich then summarizes Lenin’s theory of imperialism as follows. Lenin, as Heinrich correctly points out, argued that an increasing number of branches of industry are dominated by a handful of corporations that are closely linked to a few giant banks, giving rise to what Lenin called “finance capital.” As a result, monopolies are often in a position to slow technical progress.
In addition, the export of capital as opposed to the export of commodities grows tremendously. By the turn of the 20th century, a handful of imperialist powers had completed the division of the the entire world among themselves. From then on, re-divisions of the globe were possible. This led to World War I, and, after Lenin’s death in 1924, to World War II, as the imperialist powers fought one another to re-divide the world.
Under imperialism, an upper layer of the working class, or “labor aristocracy,” shares in super-profits of the monopolies, providing a material basis for opportunism. Heinrich, paraphrasing Lenin, puts the term “corrupted” in inverted quotes. Heinrich thus indicates that he disagrees with Lenin on this point. This criticism has been made by other Marxists as well, especially Marxists who live in the imperialist countries. (p. 214)
Heinrich’s falsification of Lenin
Heinrich then passes from (inaccurately) paraphrasing Lenin to completely falsifying him. According to Heinrich, Lenin concluded that “a change in the capitalist mode of socialization” meant that it was “no longer value, but rather the will of the monopolists that was supposedly dominating the economy.” Heinrich concludes, “What Lenin intended as Marxist analysis has ultimately almost nothing [emphasis added—SW] to do with Marx’s critique of political economy.” (p. 215) On the contrary, Lenin argued that while the growing socialization of production under monopoly capital undermines the law of value, the law of value still reigns.
Marxist criticism of Lenin’s ‘Imperialism’
Lenin’s pamphlet “Imperialism” has been criticized by various Marxists ever since it was written almost a century ago. A common criticism of Lenin—and Hilferding—is that he overestimated the role of banking capital. That is why a tendency developed to drop the term “finance capital” in Marxist writings on imperialism after World War II. Since the crisis of 2008, however, this criticism of Lenin has faded. John Bellamy Foster has revived the use of the term “finance capital” in part by coining the new term “monopoly-finance capital.”
Sweezy’s criticism of Lenin’s ‘Imperialism’ in his letters to Baran
In his letters to Paul Baran that Monthly Review published posthumously in its July-August 2012 issue, Sweezy indicated that he was confused when he first read Lenin because he assumed that Lenin was saying that pre-monopoly capitalism was not characterized by the exploitation of poor capitalist countries by rich capitalist countries. As Sweezy deepened his study of capitalism, he found that this was far from the case.
These kinds of criticism of Lenin, whether or not they are correct, have nothing in common with Heinrich’s “criticism” of Lenin, which essentially claims that Lenin’s “Imperialism” is virtually worthless and then falsifies what Lenin actually wrote.
Leaving Heinrich’s falsification of Lenin aside, his criticism of Lenin amounts to the denial that there is any tendency for the centralization of capital. Heinrich writes: “First of all is the alleged [emphasis added—SW] transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism. Trends, by the way, that are not at all universally dominant and that sometimes even reverse.” What Heinrich overlooks is that the tendencies toward centralization dominate the tendencies toward decentralization. As for an empirical refutation of Heinrich’s claims, I strongly recommend “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” by John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna,” which appeared in the April 2011 issue of Monthly Review.
The export of capital and imperialism
Heinrich distorts Lenin when making a point also made by Ernest Mandel among other post-World War II Marxists (4) that “the export of capital supposedly necessitated by imperialist policies [emphasis added—SW] did in fact occur, but the greater portion of this capital export went not to colonies and dependent territories but to other developed capitalist countries that also pursued imperialist policies.” (p. 215)
First, Lenin stressed that imperialism is not a policy at all but monopoly capitalism itself. Leaving that not unimportant point aside, no matter how much of the total capital exported goes to other imperialist countries, the capital that is exported to oppressed countries—colonies, semi-colonies and neo-colonies, where the value of labor power is far lower and the rate of surplus value consequently far higher—extracts super-profits that can be shared through various mechanisms with the upper layers of the working class. Therefore, the export of capital to oppressed countries has an economic, social and political significance that the export of capital among the imperialist countries does not have.
Finally, Heinrich tries to dismiss Lenin’s analysis of imperialism by pointing out that the United States has become the world biggest capital importer. If an imperialism based on the export of capital actually exists, Heinrich implies, why is the world’s most powerful imperialist power a net importer of capital?
What Heinrich overlooks is that most of the “capital” the U.S. imports is actually recycled dollars generated by |
in its arsenal (five in the last 3 years). The Xiaomi Mi Air Purifier Max comes with a massive size and is well suited to purify the air in a large room considering it comes with a CADR value of up to a 1000m³ / h.
The Mi Air Purifier Max features a design similar to the previous models that have so far been launched by Xiaomi, including the recently launched Mi Air Purifier 2S. It comes with an OLED display having a circular shape and is integrated with the operational design. As a result of its gigantic size, the Mi Air Purifier Max utilises a two-filter design. The design includes a left and right fuselage with a detachable top cover which allows users to replace the filters manually.
The CADR value of up to 1000m³ / h ensures the device can be used to purify the air in a room with an area of 120 square meters in just 3 minutes. Despite the large size, you won’t get bugged by noise as the Mi Air Purifier Max comes with Xiaomi’s patented silent noise reduction technology such that even in the highest mode, the noise is still reduced at just 34dB.
The new Air Purifier Max brings to six, the total number of air purifiers that Xiaomi has so far launched. The tech giant first launched the first-gen Mi Air Purifier in 2014, and the Mi Air Purifier 2 in 2015. Last year saw the launch of the Mi Air Purifier Pro and then the Mijia Car Air Purifier. Xiaomi also launched the cheaper and trimmed down Mi Air Purifier 2S this year.
Read Also: Xiaomi Launches Mi Air Purifier 2S Bringing New Features To The Mix
The Mi Air Purifier Max is priced at just 1,999 yuan ($304) making it the most expensive Air Purifier Xiaomi has launched. Also, remember that it is the largest and has twice the output of the Mi Air Purifier Pro which has a price tag of 1299 yuan ($197). The gadget would go on sale on December 26 and we expect it to be available outside China anytime soon via online retailers like GearBest.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Footage captured the moment a car rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville
One person has died and 19 others were injured when a car rammed a crowd of people opposing a far-right rally in the US state of Virginia, police say.
Earlier, street brawls erupted between white nationalists planning to attend the march and counter-protesters.
The mayor of Charlottesville, where the now-cancelled rally was taking place, said he was "heartbroken" at the death.
President Donald Trump has condemned the violence, and local officials have declared a state of emergency.
The car involved in the ramming incident was later located a few streets away and the driver is in custody, the city's police chief said.
In addition to those injured there, the Charlottesville Police Department said another 15 people were injured in other violence related to the far-right march.
Late in the afternoon, a Virginia State Police helicopter, crashed in woodland south-west of the city, killing two people; however, there has been no indication that this was related to the violence.
The "Unite the Right" march was called to protest against plans to remove a statue of a general who had fought for the pro-slavery Confederacy during the US Civil War.
'Car backed up and hit again'
Video posted on social media showed a car ploughing at speed into several slow-moving vehicles, which were surrounded by a densely packed crowd.
A witness said one girl got "tore up" after the car "backed up and hit again".
Officials said the driver had been taken into custody.
Image copyright AFP Image caption A number of people received first-aid after a vehicle drove into a crowd
Image copyright AFP Image caption Witnesses said the car backed up and hit the crowd more than once
Police earlier fired tear gas against demonstrators and said that arrests had been made after a declaration of unlawful assembly at Emancipation Park.
The far-right protesters, some waving Confederate flags, carrying shields and wearing helmets, are angry about the planned removal of a statue of General Robert E Lee from Charlottesville.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The US president ignored questions over whether his response went far enough
Gen Lee commanded the pro-slavery Confederate forces in the US Civil War of 1861-65.
The New York Times reports that some of them were chanting "You will not replace us," and "Jew will not replace us."
Anti-racism organisations such as Black Lives Matter also held marches.
President Donald Trump condemned "in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides".
"The hate and the division must stop right now," he told reporters, speaking in New Jersey, where he is on a working holiday. "We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation."
Democrats and Republicans alike have taken issue with his choice of words, noting that he failed to refer to the role of white nationalists.
Republican Senator Cory Gardner tweeted: "Mr. President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism."
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, also a Republican, felt similarly.
Right-wing blogger Jason Kessler had called for a "pro-white" rally in Charlottesville, and white nationalists promoted the gathering widely.
Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, said white power groups were present in Charlottesville - including neo-Nazis and factions of the Ku Klux Klan.
One picture tweeted by author J K Rowling showed a man on the street carrying a swastika flag.
The governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, said his only message for the white supremacists who had rallied in the city was - "go home." Speaking to reporters in Charlottesville, he said there was no place for white supremacist groups there, or in America.
At the scene: Bottles thrown
By Joel Gunter, BBC News, Charlottesville
There were very violent scenes at Emancipation Park and it took some time for the police to intervene.
Both sides were throwing bottles and rocks and using pepper spray.
The far-right protesters were a mix of different groups with shields and batons and the declaration of a state of emergency seemed to have had a significant impact on them, as they started to dissipate.
Shiquan Rah, a 21-year-old demonstrator who had joined the counter-protest, said about the far-right groups: "These people don't have a message, their message is hate and violence. This is a spiritual war we're in.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Joel Gunter describes the clashes, where groups were armed with shields and batons
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe urged calm tweeting: "The acts and rhetoric in #Charlottesville over past 24 hours are unacceptable [and] must stop. A right to speech is not a right to violence."
Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer had earlier called the rally a "parade of hatred, bigotry, racism and intolerance".
US Civil War and alt-right links
1861-65 US Civil War between the northern and southern states was principally caused by slavery
Southern Confederate forces, which backed slavery, eventually surrendered to Union army and slavery was abolished
A number of cities have grappled with Confederate symbols that still exist today, with flags and monuments becoming key venues for alt-right groups in recent months
Supporters say Confederate symbols represent freedom and liberty, but opponents say their roots are in slavery
The alt-right is a disparate group of provocateurs who hate political correctness and love Donald Trump, but critics say they are bigoted white nationalists
The rise of the alt-right
The hoax about desecration of US Civil War graves
On Friday, the white nationalists held lit torches - which some observers described as a reference to the Ku Klux Klan - and chanted "White lives matter" as they marched through the University of Virginia in the city.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Members of a white nationalist group were armed and wearing militia uniforms
Charlottesville is considered a liberal college town - and 86% of the county voted for Hillary Clinton in last year's presidential elections.
However, the town has become a focal point for white nationalists after the city council voted to remove the statue of Gen Lee.
Some observers also argue that Mr Trump's election to the White House re-energised the far right across the US.Who is needed: You, and all other available fans of the Tampa Bay Rowdies. Seriously, spread the word, carpool, whatever you need to do to ensure you and your fellow fans are present.
What: A presentation of the ideas being out forth to the St Petersburg City Council for the Downtown Waterfront Masterplan, including the redevelopment of Al Lang into a new stadium. Attendee’s will have the chance to express their support or disapproval for different aspects of the proposal. Aspects of the proposal will likely be ranked as a direct result of the feedback given in this meeting.
When: Thursday, January 29 6:30 pm – 8:00pm. You can RSVP to the event on the Facebook event page created by Ralph’s Mob by following this link https://t.co/xNeMXfsj8L
Where: University of South Florida St. Petersburg Harbor Hall Gallery. 1000 3rd Street South, 33701
Why: This meeting is crucial because it is the last opportunity to make it clear that a new multiuse facility should be a priority in the St Petersburg Downtown Waterfront Masterplan that is scheduled to be adopted this summer. After Thursday’s meeting the proposal formed from all the feedback received will be sent to City Council where it will be used as a tool to formulate the official plan. At the moment a new stadium is part of the tentative plan to develop a new entertainment district on the waterfront. According to those who attended the most recent public meeting for the Waterfront Masterplan, the home stadium of the Philadelphia Union in Major League Soccer, PPL Park, is being used as an example of a waterfront multiuse facility. Anyone who lives in Tampa Bay, St Petersburg especially, knows how quickly things can go pear shaped for major projects once they enter the public input phase. Throw in the perception of soccer as a second class sport, usurping the long cherished tradition of baseball in the city, and the notion held by many that owner Bill Edwards is simply looking to extend his control of St Petersburg and things start to look tenuous. The past two months have certainly been encouraging for all fans, but now is not the time kick back and relax. Unfortunately we can’t afford to do that with the still precarious position of the sport in this country, the NASL’s position in the American soccer landscape, and this team’s location on the totem pole of Tampa Bay sports. Those opposed to the idea of a new stadium will make try to make Mr. Edwards the face of this stadium movement, and his connections in the city are undeniably beneficial to the Rowdies continued growth. But the odds are never in your favor if a multimillionaire is the public face of a movement to build a new stadium for said multimillionaire’s professional sports steam. So the fans needs to be the face of this effort. If Rowdies fans are concerned about the team’s sustainability then they need to show up in force to any and all public forums to passionately lay out the reasons why a modern multiuse facility at the Al Lang site is good for St. Petersburg, and the entire Tampa Bay Area. Credit where it is due. The “Not in my backyard” will always show up in numbers for their cause. It’s time for Tampa Bay Rowdies fans showing up to make the case for the club’ future in St Petersburg to become just as sure a thing.
http://www.stpete.org/downtown_waterfront_master_plan/docs/Downtown_Waterfront_Master_Plan___Deciding_Workshop_Schedule.pdf
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Printall are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passi ng wall. This capacity to wonder at trif les—n o matt er the imminent peril—t hese as id es of th e sp ir it, th es e fo ot no te s in th e vo lu me of li fe ar e th e hi gh es t fo rm s of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. In this divinely absurd world of the mind, mathematical symbols do not thrive. Their interplay, no matter how smoothly it works, no matter how dutifully it mimics the convolutions of our dreams and the quantums of our mental associations, can never really express what is utterly foreign to their nature, considering that the main delight of the creative mind is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly dom ina nt gene ral iza tio n. Whe n com mon sen se is eje cte d tog eth er wit h its cal cul ati ng machine, numbers cease to trouble the mind. Statistics pluck up their skirts and sweep out in a huff. Two and two no longer make four, becau se it is no longer necessa ry for them to make four. If they had done so in the artificial logical world which we have left, it had been merely a matter of habit: two and two used to make four in the same way as guests invited to dinner expect to make an even number. But I invite my numbers to a giddy picnic and then nobody minds whether two and two make five or five minus some quaint fraction. Man at a certain stage of his development invented arithmetic for the purely practical purpose of obtaining some kind of human order in a world which he knew to be ruled by gods whom he could not prevent from playing havoc with his sums whenever they felt so incli ned. He accept ed that inevita ble indete rmin ism which they now and then intr oduced, called it magic, and calmly proceeded to count the skins he had bartered by chalking bars on the wall of his cave. The gods might intrude, but he at least was resolved to follow a system that he had invented for the express purpose of following it. Then, as the thousands of centuries trickled by, and the gods retired on a more or less adequate pension, and human calculations grew more and more acrobatic, mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world to whi ch th ey ha d be en me re ly ap pl ie d. In st ea d of ha vi ng nu mb er s ba se d on ce rt ai n phenomena that they happened to fit because we ourselves happened to fit into the pattern we apprehended, the whole world gradually turned out to be based on numbers, and nobody seems to have been surprised at the queer fact of the outer network becoming an inner skeleton. Indeed, by digging a little deeper somewhere near the waistline of South America a lucky geologist may one day discover, as his spade rings against metal, the solid barrel hoop of the equator. There is a species of butterfly on the hind wing of which a large eyespot imitates a drop of liquid with such uncanny perfection that a line which crosses the wing is slightly displaced at the exact stretch where it passes through—or better say under —the spot: this part of the line seems shifted by refraction, as it would if a real globular drop had been there and we were looking through it at the pattern of the wing. In the light of the strange metamorphosis undergone by exact science from objective to subjective, what can prevent us from supposing that one day a real drop had fallen and had somehow been phylogenetically retained as a spot? But perhaps the funniest consequence of our extrav agant belief in the organic being of mathematic s was demonstr ated some years ago when an enterprising and ingenious astronomer thought of attracting the attention of the 3If you ever pine for a simpler time, move this elegant glass pencil sharpener as far from your Mac as possible and spend a few minutes sharpening your pencils from H to B.
If you need any assistance with your order or have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us directly at shipping[at]handeyesupply.com. We aim to respond to all emails within 48 hours.
Core77's Hand-Eye Supply is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. When you use our website, we collect personal information such as your name, e-mail, billing & shipping address, telephone number, and payment details. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. It is solely used to correctly & fully process your order. All transactions are secure and encrypted, and we never store your credit card information.
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Prior to returning your item, please email us for R eturn Authorization from our shipping manager. We cannot be held responsible for any unauthorized returns. Returns should be sent with your return form to the address below:
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You can create a wish list just for you or to show all your friends how they can get on your good side. By storing them in a nice and tidy digital box, a Wish List is a great way to keep track of products you like.
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Traditionally used for weddings, our gift registry lets your friends and family know what you need and want. Set up a gift registry on our site and fill it with all the pans, apparel, and tools you need. Then your friends and family know exactly what you’re looking for. No more concerns about receiving four different toasters.
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Because we usually work with small manufacturers, sizes vary from company to company and even batch to batch. We measure all clothing flat on the table upon arrival in our store to give you the most honest measurements. To determine which size is best for you, we recommend you measure a similar piece of your own clothing to compare to the measurements of the item you’re considering.
Is all of your apparel gender specific?
While we designate gender for apparel on our website for easier navigation, we offer apparel for everyone and embrace the term unisex. Some items have gender-specific cuts & fits, so please refer to the product details for more information.
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Core77's Hand-Eye Supply is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. When you use our website, we collect personal information such as your name, email, billing and shipping address, telephone number, and payment details. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. It is solely used to correctly and fully process your order. All transactions are secure and encrypted, and we never store your credit card information.
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Hand-Eye Supply is required by law to collect sales tax on orders shipped to New York and Connecticut. If you are shipping to these states, taxes will be added to your merchandise total and displayed during checkout.
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We aim to ship your order within 2 business of being received if we do not require any further correspondence after your order is placed. We do not ship on the weekends. Shipping times may take between 7-10 days on typical domestic deliveries with Standard Shipping and 2-4 business days on orders with Expedited/Priority shipping.
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We ship orders every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our shipping department is closed for the following holidays (please plan accordingly as orders will not be shipped out on these dates):
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If for any reason you are unhappy with your purchase, you may return the items within 14 days for an online merchandise credit or refund less the shipping charges. Returned items must be unused, unworn, unwashed, and undamaged. Discounted items are ineligible for refund. Discounted apparel may be exchanged in some circumstances.
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Please email our shipping manager at shipping@handeyesupply.com for a Return Authorization. Include a description of the item and a reason for the return. We cannot be held responsible for any unauthorized returns.
How do I exchange an item?
If you would like to exchange an item, we suggest that you place a new order for the item you want before returning your original purchase. This will ensure that your exchange item is in stock. Once we receive your return, we will process a refund for the cost of the returned item and send you an email.
Are international orders eligible for returns & exchanges?
We honor our 14-day return & exchange policy for all regular priced orders. All international returns should be shipped to us at your cost.
I returned an item to you, when will I receive my refund?
We normally process returns within 2-3 business days upon arrival to our shipping department. Please allow up to 7 business days during peak times.
You can expect your refund within 3 weeks of shipping your package back to us. In most cases, you will receive a refund sooner, but we estimate 3 weeks because of the time required for return shipping (up to 14 days), product inspection at our returns facility (up to 2-3 business days), and processing from your bank or credit card company (up to 5 business days).
Once your return has been accepted, you will receive a confirmation email with the details of your refund. We issue refunds in the form of payment used to make the purchase.foreign coins are not acceptable lucre in most vending machines in this country
Recent Examples on the Web
Some of that lucre reportedly came from a company with ties to a Russian oligarch—and some from major blue chip companies, including AT&T and Novartis. Clifton Leaf, Fortune, "Novartis Put Money In Michael Cohen’s Cookie Jar. Did It Get Any Cookies In Return?," 9 May 2018
Does this ragtag band of misfits, coached by a renegade named Goona (Maisie Williams), stand a chance against a bunch of hot shots with flowing locks, fancy uniforms, and all the talent and training that Nooth’s lucre can buy? A.o. Scott, New York Times, "Review: ‘Early Man’ Is a Very Funny Trip to the Past," 15 Feb. 2018
In some cases (see: Bouchard, Genie) sponsors expect social media activation in exchange for their endorsement lucre. Jon Wertheim, SI.com, "Mailbag: Alexander Zverev's Grand Slam Breakthrough Is Next Step for Next Gen Star," 16 Aug. 2017
In 1821, Captain William Parry, commander of the second Arctic expedition of the modern era, published a best-selling account of that voyage which propelled him on a book tour of Tom Friedman-like scope and lucre. Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, "Literature’s Arctic Obsession," 24 Apr. 2017
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'lucre.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.With Las Vegas officially out of the running to have an Major League Soccer franchise for the foreseeable future, two cities are now at the forefront of the league’s expansion plans.
Sacramento and Minneapolis.
[ RELATED: Vegas officially out ]
Both cities already have teams in the lower leagues of the North American soccer pyramid, possess ambitious stadium plans and have plenty of financial backing from renowned owners of other major league sports franchises. More importantly, both cities have solid soccer fanbases which could easily expand if an MLS team was granted to them.
Right now, Minneapolis appears to be a real frontrunner as MLS Commissioner Don Garber has spoken about the importance of having a team in Minnesota geographically, while Sacramento may be a little too close to the San Jose Earthquakes’ fanbase in northern California. Despite all of that, the race to become MLS 24th franchise is well and truly on as an announcement is expected this summer. With plenty of uncertainty around David Beckham’s franchise in Miami, plus new teams in Los Angeles and Miami to arrive in 2017, this may be the last expansion opportunity for a while.
There’s plenty to consider, so let’s take a close look at both potential MLS expansion cities…
Sacramento
WHO: USL club Sacramento Republic FC.
FINANCES: Backed by Jed York, CEO of the NFL’s 49ers. Plus a huge group of wealthy investors.
STADIUM: Plans for downtown stadium in place. Huge fan support, highest average crowd in USL history.
HISTORY: That history is just one (albeit very impressive) campaign. Is California’s capital soccer mad?
POPULATION: 480,00
POTENTIAL MLS RIVALS: San Jose, LA Galaxy, LA FC (LA teams five hour drive, two to San Jose)
RATING: 7/10 – After winning USL in 2014, having Preki as coach and a host of wealthy investors, there doesn’t seem to be much risk here. However, they’ve only had one season as a team. That’s the only sticking point.
Minneapolis
WHO: Two groups – Minnesota United of the NASL and the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings.
FINANCES: Minnesota United backed by Dr. McGuire, Timberwolves, Twins; the Vikings.
STADIUM: The Vikings will house the team in their new stadium, United want a downtown S.S.S.
HISTORY: United founded in 2010, formerly known as the Minnesota Stars, other pro teams since ’94.
POPULATION: 400,00
POTENTIAL MLS RIVALS: Chicago, Sporting KC (both a six hour plus drive away)
RATING: 8/10 – With two competing groups, a young population and sustained crowds for lower leagues over a long period, they have the edge. But which group will get the MLS franchise?
Follow @JPW_NBCSportsAt the same time, human rights activists at the conference said they had grave concerns about domestic efforts to counter violent extremism, known inside the government by the acronym C.V.E. They said that programs to spot potential homegrown terrorists could morph into fearmongering closet surveillance efforts that trample on civil rights and privacy, and that the administration could also be giving tacit approval to foreign governments that abuse human rights in the name of countering terrorism.
A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to the White House on Tuesday raising their concerns, and some Muslim-American community groups boycotted the meeting.
“The government must behave in a way so that victims of hate crimes and violent extremism know that government agencies are there to protect their rights and safety, not just monitor their religious and political expression,” said Samer Khalaf, the president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “This focus solely on attacks committed by Arabs or Muslims reinforces the stereotype of Arab- and Muslim-Americans as security threats, and thus perpetuates hate of the respected communities.”
American intelligence officials have long believed that the greatest terrorist threat in the United States is no longer from meticulously plotted events like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that originate overseas, but from American citizens who become radicalized on their own or by a foreign terrorist organization.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama said that other countries had a responsibility to help.
“If we’re going to prevent people from being susceptible to the false promises of extremism, then the international community has to offer something better,” Mr. Obama said, adding that the United States would “do its part” by promoting economic growth and development, fighting corruption and encouraging other countries to devote more resources to education, including for girls and women.
“When governments oppress their people, deny human rights, stifle dissent or marginalize ethnic and religious groups, or favor certain religious groups over others, it sows the seeds of extremism and violence,” Mr. Obama said. “It makes those communities more vulnerable to recruitment.”
Part of the business of the conference on Wednesday was to bring together leaders from Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Boston, where federal pilot programs underway are aimed at helping target disaffected young people who might be susceptible to extremist messages.Your Vive has been preordered. You are trying to wait patiently. How about you distract yourself with a project? Let’s get your VR space setup!
Setting up a room-scale Vive VR space isn’t as simple as you think. Plugging in the headset is the easy part. Moving furniture and barricading pets shouldn’t be too hard. The tricky thing will be locating and mounting the Vive base stations so that they’re functional but still out of the way.
The Vive Pre User Guide has a detailed explanation of setting up your VR space. Let’s start from the beginning!
The Space
There many VR spaces like it but this one is yours. Your Vive space should follow these rules:
Minimum area of 5′ x 6.5′ (1.5m x 2m)
Have blinds to block pesky sunlight
Free from reflective surfaces
Free from furniture, pets, children, Lego
I would recommend laying down a nice square rug to claim your VR space. This will provide a nice visual indication of your area for those around you. It will also provide some tactile feedback for the space boundary when you have the headset on.
The Base Stations
The Vive base stations need to be mounted diagonally across from each other and mounted above your head level. They also must be solidly mounted so that they won’t vibrate or wobble. Each base station needs to be plugged into an electrical outlet and will be powered on automatically via Bluetooth LE. The base stations also come with a sync cable but it shouldn’t be necessary in most mounting situations.
There are a few different ways to mount the base stations. Each base station comes with a 1/4″ standard tripod mount in the bottom and rear of the unit.
A more permanent solution is to directly mount the base stations to your wall using the included brackets (consumer version to be determined) and drywall anchors. If you’re not thrilled with the stock mounts any set of threaded speaker mounts should work.
If you don’t want to drill any holes a less permanent solution is to mount the base stations using 3M Command tape. A word of caution, this is not proven to be a long-term solution – vibration from the base station may eventually loosen the tape.
As seen in Polygon’s Vive Pre Preview
If you don’t want to mount anything to your walls then consider using tripods to mount your base stations. These are a little more obtrusive when set up but can be easily disassembled and put in a closet when not being used.
A smaller tripod can be setup on your desk or book shelf while a taller light tripod can be located in a corner and still reach above head level. The smaller tripod has a head that can pivot to aim the base station but the larger tripod will likely require a separate pivoting tripod mount.
As seen in Hover Junker’s Dev Blog
If you’re interested in something less obtrusive than a tripod you can also consider a floor to ceiling tension rod. A vertical tension rod will easily fit into a corner and shorted version can fit horizontally into alcoves or window frames. Use a pipe clamp tripod mount to position your base station freely along the length.
Conclusion
That should be everything you need for a great VR room! You have a lot of options for mounting your base stations and many people will mix and match solutions for their own space. Start building your VR room now!Rights group demands independent inquiry into why boy and girl were taken away by police and health authorities
Ireland's ombudsman should investigate how the police and health authorities mistakenly took two children from two Roma families because they wrongly believed the boy and girl were victims of trafficking, a human rights organisation has demanded.
Pavee Point, the main advocacy group for the Roma community in Ireland, said an independent inquiry was needed rather than "self-investigation" by the Garda Síochána and the Heath Service Executive.
The seven-year-old girl and two-year-old boy were returned to their families on Wednesday after DNA tests proved their familial relationship.
The father of the boy, who was taken from his home in the Irish midlands by officers on Tuesday, produced a photograph showing that his blond son shared the fair colouring of his maternal grandfather in Romania.
Iancu Muntean was able to speak about the case because a judicial order that barred the other Roma family in Dublin from revealing their names does not apply to the Athlone family.
Muntean, having protested unsuccessfully to garda officers who arrived to take the child, said he told them: "You have the power. I don't have power. What can I do? I don't make trouble."
As his child was being driven away, he told the officers: "Please don't make him cry, please don't make him upset … Please bring my son home, I'll just give you whatever you want, just take me, not my son."
He said his wife and four-year-old daughter were extremely distressed and had been unable to sleep while his son was in the care of the HSE.
The 22-year-old Roma man, who has lived in Ireland since 2005, said he willingly offered DNA samples to prove the child was his son.
Alan Shatter, the Irish justice minister, has asked for a report on the incidents from Martin Callinan, the police commissioner, but said the officers involved had acted in good faith.
Pavee Point, however, stressed the need for a fully independent inquiry into what they described as "two state abductions".
Aisling Twomey, Pavee Point's spokeswoman, said: "We believe that this inquiry needs to go to the office of the ombudsman for complete independence and an entire review of the events of the past few days.
"The framework of that inquiry must take into account the actions of all state authorities to consider how these events came about and what could have, or should have, been done differently. We are pushing for this full and complete independence and anything less is insufficient."
Twomey said the Roma families had received a mixture of "support, concern and vitriol in relation to these cases" through |
bus has been completely destroyed after the explosion followed by fire in NE Paris, not clear if there were passengers on board. pic.twitter.com/4RsazLhwtU — Breaking News (@BreakingNLive) June 26, 2017
UPDATE:
Here’s a report that suggests it was a fire, not an explosion:
Reports of an incident on a bus in northeast Paris: Engine caught fire and engulfed the bus. 1 person injured. No link to terrorism. — BNO Newsroom (@BNODesk) June 26, 2017
Here’s more from BNO News:
The incident happened at around 7:30 p.m. local time on Monday when fire crews were called to reports of a fire on board a bus in Tremblay-en-France, which is a suburb of northeast Paris in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. Footage from the scene showed thick smoke coming from the vehicle, and at least one witness claimed there had been an explosion or loud boom, though authorities could not immediately confirm that. Photos taken after the fire was extinguished showed that the bus was completely destroyed. Local fire officials said the engine of the bus caught fire and spread quickly, causing minor injuries to one person. It was not immediately clear if any passengers were on board the bus when the fire broke out, but authorities said there was no indication of a link to terrorism.
I’m still looking for verifiable reports on this, but so far not much is coming across Twitter. It may be that this was just an engine fire as BNO suggests.
FINAL UPDATE:
Ok I think we can call this one a wrap:
#Tremblay rien d'alarmant : le moteur du bus a pris feu, un blessé léger, situation sous contrôle un peu après 20h selon les pompiers. — GuillaumeNB (@GuillaumeNB) June 26, 2017(CNN) They say they have no problem with refugees and they're not un-American. They just want to protect the US against terror attacks, and they think President Trump's travel ban is a good first step.
"I do feel safer," said Dotty Rhea, 68, a retiree from Savannah, Tennessee. "Nobody's angry with them (immigrants), nobody hates them. We just need to protect ourselves."
Trump's executive order temporarily suspending refugees and banning immigrants from seven countries has sparked criticism and protests nationwide. But many Americans and members of Congress say they stand by the President's decision.
'They can wait'
Supporters of the ban point to prior terror attacks on American soil and say they want stronger vetting.
"We are just thrilled that President Trump has issued this ban and he's taking measures to protect us," said Debbie Meiners, 67, of Jacksonville, Florida. "We really believe in securing our borders and being a nation of safety.
"We love refugees, but we want only those coming here who love us and want to assimilate into our culture and way of life."
We love refugees but we want only those coming here who love us and want to assimilate into our culture and way of life. Debbie From Florida
Jessica Herrmann, 50, of Coronado, California, said she is "perfectly fine" with immigration and has friends on all types of visas. But she thinks Trump's executive order will help ensure that nobody comes in without proper checks.
"We're not mean, we're not anti-American," said Herrmann, who is part of a military family. "It's kind of sad that we're going to automatically assume that what Trump's doing is a horrible thing when we're just checking who's coming in (to the country)."
We need to look at our country first right now... a country without borders is no longer a country. Jessica From California
Even some former refugees support Trump's actions. Helen Megido, a 43-year-old registered nurse in Federal Way, Washington, is herself a refugee who came to the US from Latvia in 1989.
She said she waited six to nine months to get refugee status.
"[If] you want to get here, you wait your chance. You wait your turn," she said. "If they want to get to America, 3 months, 6 months -- it's nothing. They can wait."
I am a refugee from Latvia, I immigrated a long time ago... I went through the right way to be selected, get my documents, and I wish everybody will do the same. Helen From Washington
Daniela Otero, a 37-year-old student from Rio Rancho, New Mexico, said her ancestry is Spanish and that she has Mexicans and Native Americans in her family. She said she supports Trump's policy because she wants a safer country for her children and future grandchildren.
"I think Islam is a threat to our constitutional laws. I know that a lot of people including myself feel that in ways we've been infiltrated in our government," she said. "I'm fully supporting Trump on this."
Me and my whole family support him, and we are Hispanic and Mexican and Native American and we support Donald Trump. Daniela From New Mexico
'They don't have constitutional rights to be here'
Robert Lastra told CNN he was born and reared in South Florida after his father fled Cuba in 1960. He said a wave of Cubans who came to Florida in 1980, many of them released convicts, ruined the place where he grew up.
"I sat there and watched my entire community turn into a literal Dodge City because of all the violence and killing and drug trade," said Lastra, who now lives in east Texas. "I've seen that happening in Texas too."
My background is not Muslim, but it's Cuban... I am glad that Donald Trump is doing what he's doing. Robert From Texas
He supports Trump's plan to build a wall along the Texas-Mexico border, saying it will be a deterrent to people coming into the United States illegally.
"Thank god that somebody is tightening the borders and they're going to properly vet these people, even if it means keeping most of them out," Lastra said. "They don't have the right to be here to begin with. They don't have constitutional rights to be here. They're here by the grace of God, just like I'm here by the grace of God."
James Hitt, a retired 63-year-old from Woodburn, Iowa, said it makes sense to "vet the hell out of" refugees and immigrants from those seven predominantly Muslim countries.
"You look at the rape crisis in Germany, in Sweden, it's almost entirely related to Middle East refugees," he said. "I'm certainly more concerned about our homeless veterans than I am about refugees from Syria."
I really like what Trump's doing. You look at the rape crisis in Europe, I don't want that for America. James From Iowa
Rhea, who calls herself part of "average Middle America," also lived in South Florida and said she witnessed the dangers of illegal immigration when she saw people arriving on boats. Trump's executive order will make America safer, she said.
"Just as people came way back when and came through Ellis Island -- they were vetted," the Tennessee woman said. "They weren't just allowed to flood our borders."
I feel so much safer on an airplane now, I feel so much safer walking around the United States of America. Dotty From Tennessee
Republican politicians back ban
Trump also has support from some -- but not all -- fellow Republicans, including Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, who called the move a "useful" temporary measure.
Pro-ban members of Congress say the top priority should be to keep Americans safe.
JUST WATCHED Tears and uncertainty after travel ban Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Tears and uncertainty after travel ban 01:51
"I would not support a travel ban on Muslims," said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri. "I do support increased vetting on people applying to travel from countries with extensive terrorist ties or activity. These seven countries meet that standard."
"We are at war with Islamic extremists and anything less than 100 percent verification of these refugees' backgrounds puts our national security at risk," said Sen. Steve Daines from Montana.
Some conservative pundits agree. David French of the National Review argued that what's been lost in the outrage over the ban is that the mandates of the order are short-term until new screening guidelines are surmised -- and that exceptions can be made.
"We know that terrorists are trying to infiltrate the ranks of refugees and other visitors," French wrote. "A short-term ban on entry from problematic countries combined with a systematic review of our security procedures is both reasonable and prudent."Two months back, FADER premiered "Read My Mind," the third track on Chicago map-maker J Fernandez's debut full-length, Many Level of Laughter. Today, we're streaming the entire classic-sounding, American-feeling, self-recorded thing.
Fernandez, who was born in Arkansas but lives in Chicago, writes songs in a musical language that's seemingly influenced by folk, krautrock, and sunny 1960s pop. The resulting aesthetic is calmly psychedelic, a stew of sleepy organ melodies, hypnotic grooves, and multi-tracked vocals. It's definitely pleasant but also, at times, kinda sad: You laugh at everything/ there is no joke, Fernandez sings on gauzy highlight "Apophis," just a few measures before the song melts into a moody, 90-second instrumental "breakdown." The section perfectly demonstrates the way the record is strange and inviting at the same damn time. Many Level of Laughter officially drops next week via Joyful Noise.There's a sign across the glass door at the entrance of the police station in the Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI) area that says "Be Safe / Feel Safe". It's the kind of sign that, any other day, would crack me up, which I guess is why my friend Karth pointed it out in the first place. To lighten to mood. But that particular Sunday evening, I wasn't in the mood.
Karth, a practicing lawyer, came to my aid just an hour before when two police officers stopped me outside of Souled Out restaurant in TTDI for a random check.
Having been living in Malaysia for a little over ten years, I'm very familiar with these random checks. The kind of random where, for example, you're walking on the street and a police officer sees you from the other side and makes a run for you.
The kind of random where you're in a car with your friend at the traffic light and you make eye contact with the cops in the car next to you, and then they follow you for a kilometre or two; they turn on their sirens, and order you through the PA system to stop, only to ask after you've stopped if your Malaysian Indian friend who's driving is your girlfriend.
In this instance of random, the cops — true to script — were riding past when I made eye contact with one of them and they turned their bikes around. The first officer, whose name starts with an S, asked for my passport. I gave him my i-Kad, which should suffice since it has my name and immigration details on there. But he was not pleased.
"When you came into this country, did you show them this at the airport?" he asked.
"No, but the Malaysian immigration gave this to me after I came in."
He asked me to empty my pockets. I complied.
The other officer, whose name starts with an R, came over and pat me down.
All this, I should mention, was happening at the side of the road, at 6:15 PM with the sun still up and cars passing by.
Officer S took my messenger bag and started going through it. He found my iPad and asked me to unlock it.
Normally, this isn't something I would do because, for one, I'm not under arrest. It's not an investigation, and it's a huge invasion of privacy. But I didn't want to cause trouble. I just wanted to do what I was told so I could get it over with and be on my way. Plus, I use my iPad only for reading, so there's nothing personal on it anyway.
Or so I thought.
Officer S went straight for the photos, which I didn't realise had been synced with my phone, and immediately, I felt sick.
I had a flashback to another random check from about three years ago. Five cops kept me in a smoky room at KL Sentral, passing my phone around, going through the photos, and asking if I'm here in Malaysia making blue films.
"Are you here sleeping with our women?"
I don't know if I have to mention that there was absolutely nothing on the phone to suggest that I was making blue films. But it's incredible how often these things always come down to protecting "their" women from black dicks.
Once, when my girlfriend at the time and I were stopped, the officer actually threatened to call her parents and tell them she was with me. She cried that whole night.
There's no place on the human body you can point to and say: “This is where my dignity is”, which is why it's very difficult to talk about it when it gets violated.
Back in the present, Officer R asked Officer S to ask me for my phone in Malay. I told them I won't give it to them. They started talking with each other, which was beyond my basic Malay comprehension. While they were deciding what to do, I asked them, straight up: "Why did you stop me?"
Officer S answered, "Just to check."
"There was a guy in front of me," I reminded them, "Why did you stop me and not stop him?"
"We can't stop everyone. There are only two of us."
I told them that I've complied. And they couldn't find anything.
"So give me back my ID and I'll be on my way," I told them. "Or tell me why you're keeping me, otherwise I'll just assume it's because I'm black."
Officer R seemed offended. "You're not Malaysian," he said. "I would be treated the same in your country."
Even if that were true, which he has no evidence for, it still doesn't make it right.
"I'm going to call my lawyer now," I said. They asked me to wait a second.
"Your work is in Bangsar," Officer R said, looking at my ID, "So, what are you doing in Taman Tun?"
"I'm here to eat," I said.
"But it's so far."
And that's when I called Karth.
She spoke to them on the phone, and apparently, they told her they stopped me because I looked suspicious, but then after they checked me and saw that everything was in order, they told me go, but I refused. They told her that I became emotional and started accusing them of being racist.
I told her that I didn’t trust these guys, especially since they lied about what happened. I told her that I wanted to make a report. She asked me to check their pockets for their police ID number. When I couldn't find those, I felt even more unsafe.
For the past few months, I've been training for a marathon, and often, friends and acquaintances ask where I train. I tell them I run on the streets around where I live at night. And the most common reaction I get is shock, followed by the question: "Is that safe?" I often answer in the affirmative, because what they're usually asking is if there's crime.
But the truth is, I don't feel safe when I run at night in my area because there are police flats nearby. And every now and then, when I'm running, I see the flashing blue lights and my heartbeat picks up pace. Nothing makes me feel more unsafe as a black man than flashing blue lights. Except, I don't know, maybe a sign on the door of a police station that tells me to "Feel Safe".
About half an hour later, Karth showed up dressed in black. When she got out of the car and took her jacket from the back seat, for that split second before the jacket was fully on, it almost looked like a cape. My own personal superhero.
I wish I could tell you that the story ended when Karth came over. But it didn't. I don't want to bore you with the details of how they still refused to give us their ID numbers. How they insisted on following us to the station where we'd be making the report, and how incredibly unhelpful and reluctant the officers in the station were to take my statements.
But I'll tell you how halfway through typing my statement, I turned around and saw Officer R standing beside me, his phone was in his front pocket with the back camera facing Karth and I.
"Did you see that?" I asked Karth afterwards. "Did you think he was recording us?" "Yes, I saw," she said, "but I think he was just using the phone to cover his name." But that didn't make sense, because the officer taking our report already gave us his name.
Recently, a friend of mine — who's also Nigerian — asked me how, after all these years, I've managed to stay sane in Malaysia. I told him that my secret is, not to expect anything from anyone. Not from my expat colleagues. Not from Malaysians. Not from anyone.
"The world doesn't owe me shit," I told him. "Therefore anything good that happens to me, I see it as a bonus."
I think that's a perfectly good way to live your life if you don't want to cause trouble. If you want to keep your head low and go unnoticed. And there are very good reasons why you wouldn't want to cause trouble. I, for one, have been conditioned, after all these years of living in a black body, to not want to inconvenience people with my existence. I've learned to keep the boat steady whenever I can and uphold the status quo. Even if the status quo isn't designed with me in mind — especially when the status quo isn't designed with me in mind.
The truth is, there are a lot of things you're owed. And it's true that some of those things you will not be able to get because of bureaucracy, or ignorance, or just good ol' fashioned power differential. But if your starting point is "I'm not owed shit" then you're a lot less likely to even try. And if you don't try, you can't know the difference between the things you're owed but cannot get, and those that you can.
I made a report that Sunday as a way of trying to salvage whatever dignity I had left after my encounter with the two officers. I didn't make the report because I thought they should have treated me with dignity because I'm not a criminal. I made the report because they should have treated me with dignity regardless; because I am a person.
And I don't think asking to be seen as one is too much to ask for.Acacoyagua, Mexico: Mining Equipment Burned, Road Blockaded
from No a la Mina
translated by Earth First! Journal
Upset about the environmental damage caused by mining waste, especially those discarded in rivers, people from Acacoyagua blocked the road into the rural town with the objective of suspending the extraction work.
The blockade and protest is happening in the Santa Anita community to impede the mining concessions, including exploration work, exploitation, and use of natural resources.
Luis Rojas, member of the Popular Front of Soconusco, said that the corporations whose licenses have been given by federal government are laying the Sierra Madre [mountain range] to waste.
“They’ve come here to posses the lands, they’ve even privatized some, but what stands out the most are the drilling holes they are making, since in the first place they damage and transform the environment, they also impact the ecology,” he added.
The protesters recognize that there are no reliable impact studies about what the work could cause; they fear the rivers from which they drink will be contaminated.
For over 24 hours they have blocked this road, [as well as] the entrance to the Magnolia community where the mine is located, so that work for the mining corporation is impeded.
Local authorities have stated that they are not aware of work being performed by the corporation there.
That said, they have directed themselves toward the location of the mining corporation and it became apparent that fire had been set to one of the machines; charges of break-in and damage to private property are [being investigated].
***ORIGINAL IN SPANISH***
Inconformes por el daño ambiental que ocasionan los desechos que son arrojados de las minas hacia los ríos, habitantes de este municipio bloquearon la carretera en la zona rural alta con el objetivo de solicitar la suspensión de los trabajos de extracción.
El bloqueo y protesta es a la altura de la comunidad Santa Anita, para impedir que las concesionarias mineras realicen trabajos de exploración, explotación y aprovechamiento de los recursos naturales.
Luis Rojas, integrante del Frente Popular del Soconusco, dio a conocer que esas empresas, cuyas concesiones han sido otorgadas por el gobierno federal, están arrasando con todo en la Sierra Madre.
“Han venido a posesionarse de las tierras, incluso las han privatizado, pero lo más impactante son estas perforaciones que están haciendo, pues en primer lugar dañan y transforman el medio ambiente e impactan en la ecología”, agregó.
Los inconformes reconocieron que no hay un estudio fehaciente de las afectaciones que esto podría causar, temen que se contaminan los ríos de los cuales consumen agua.
Por más de 24 horas han bloqueado este punto carretero en la zona rural en este municipio, pero también sentenciaron ingresar hasta el lugar donde se encuentra la mina en la comunidad Magnolia, en esta misma zona, para impedir los trabajos de la empresa minera.
Las autoridades locales dijeron desconocer de los trabajos que estas empresas realizan en el lugar.
Por ello, se dirigieron hacia el lugar donde se encuentra esta empresa minera y se dio a conocer que prendieron fuego a una de las maquinarias, por lo que también fueron denunciados por actos de allanamiento y daños en propiedad privada.
Fuente:http://www.noalamina.org/latinoamerica/mexico/item/16319-vecinos-de-acacoyagua-hacen-bloqueo-para-detener-la-explotacion-minera
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TumblrA billionaire conservative Trump donor also gave money to an activist organization that is now under new scrutiny for what critics say are underhanded techniques.
Tax filings reported by BuzzFeed on Thursday reveal that Robert Mercer donated $25,000 in 2012 to Project Veritas, the group accused of trying to plant a fake story in The Washington Post to undermine the paper's credibility.
Project Veritas was founded by right-wing activist James O'Keefe, whose undercover videos targeting organizations such as Planned Parenthood have been published and supported by Breitbart News, another conservative organization that Mercer has supported.
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The new funding connection was revealed days after The Washington Post reported that a Project Veritas operative had contacted the newspaper with an accusation of statutory rape against Roy Moore, the Alabama GOP Senate candidate at the center of a growing number of allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct of teenage girls when he was in his 30s.
In a statement, the paper said that inconsistencies in the operative's story had clued in the Post's reporters, and O'Keefe was criticized on social media by journalists for faking a story of sexual assault for the sake of politics.
Bloomberg reported this month that Mercer, who also stepped down as co-CEO of his firm Renaissance Technologies earlier this month, planned to sell his stake in Breitbart News to his daughter. He did not explain his reasons.
Mercer had also announced earlier in November that he would cease funding provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos following reports that revealed Yiannopoulos's connections to white supremacists.
Mercer rebuked both Yiannopolous and Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon in a statement announcing his exit from his company.
"I have great respect for Mr. Bannon, and from time to time I do discuss politics with him," Mercer wrote. "However, I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon's."
"In my opinion, actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate," he added. "I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him."An illustration of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. NASA The funny thing about the discovery of Proxima b— the closest planet to our solar system, which is also rocky, Earth-size, and potentially habitable — is that nobody has actually seen it.
Astronomers know it exists because they've seen its gravity tug on and "wiggle" Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star that it orbits.
But no telescopes in space or on the ground, nor any in serious stages of planning, can directly photograph Proxima b.
It's very distant at 4.2 light-years away from us. Also, its "year" lasts only 11.2 days — an orbit too tight to pick out a planet from the blinding glare of a star.
However, a photograph isn't necessary to ask the most important question about Proxima b, a world that Scientific American has (optimistically) deemed "the Earth next door": Does it have an atmosphere, or is it an airless, barren wasteland like the Moon?
Two researchers at Harvard believe that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2018, could get the job done in record time, and by merely sampling the star system's light.
"It would only take [11 days'] worth of observing time," Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told Business Insider.
"With the light we detect, we can ask if this world looks like a bare rock. If it doesn't, there might be an atmosphere, and there might also be an ocean, which life requires," says Loeb, who co-authored a pre-print study on arXiv with Laura Kreidberg, a Harvard astronomer who studies exoplanet atmospheres.
How to sniff out Proxima b's atmosphere
An artist's depiction of Proxima b. Planetary Habitability Laboratory/University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo
Proxima b orbits Proxima Centauri in a Goldilocks-like habitable zone, where the strength of light is just right to melt water.
However, its close distance to the star — just 4 million miles away, or roughly 17 times as far as the Earth is from the Moon — comes with a worrisome consequence.
Astronomers think Proxima b is tidally locked like the Moon, where one side of the world always faces Earth. But instead of always facing the Earth, one side of Proxima b always faces its star: awash in permanent daylight, the other side trapped in an endless cold night.
If Proxima b does have an atmosphere, though, says Loeb, it'd not only circulate warmth from the day side to the night side, but also prevent the planet's water from boiling off into space.
What a tidally locked habitable Proxima b might look like, also called an "eyeball Earth." A ring of habitability could exist between the day and night sides. Beau.TheConsortium/Wikia (CC-BY-SA) "We basically asked ourselves, 'what would a tidally locked Earth look like if you put it right next to Proxima Centauri?'" he said. "Clouds, wind, and water make that question complicated," he added, but said you could at least tell if it's a bare rock or is circulating heat using air.
"On Earth, at least a third of the heat is redistributed by the ocean and atmosphere," Loeb said.
He believes the trick to ruling out an atmosphere is to focus on infrared light — the same "color" of warm, invisible light that our bodies constantly emit.
When a rocky planet is warmed up by a star, it absorbs sunlight and re-emits it as infrared light. Yet rocky planets emit a different kind of infrared light than is given off by stars like Proxima Centauri.
And it just so happens that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is specially designed to observe infrared light.
So instead of trying to photograph a tiny planet in a flood of visible light, JWST may only need to hunt for specific wavelengths of infrared light in the glare.
"When we look at the Moon, it shows different phases illuminated by the sun. If you imagine planet going around the star, we'd see different phases of the planet," Loeb said. "Past the star, we'd see its day side. In front of the star, we'd see its dark side. As Proxima b moves around the star over 11.2 days... we'd see the temperature or 'color' of the planet changing with time."
If Loeb and Kreidberg's hypothetical observation reveals that the dark side of Proxima b isn't as cold as it should be, that would mean an atmosphere may be hugging the planet — and redistributing warmth to the night side.
If it doesn't, Proxima b may be a bare, lifeless rock.
Whatever the results, they'll be crucial: Red dwarf stars outnumber all other types of stars in our Milky Way galaxy by four-to-one.
"Situations like this must be common," Loeb says. "If you turn one stone and find a bug, there must be others around."
'It's not something we can guarantee'
The James Webb Space Telescope's gold-plated mirrors undergo cryogenic testing. Ball Aerospace
Although Loeb and Kreidberg's research has not yet been peer-reviewed, two leading scientists we contacted said it's "very promising work," "a good study," and "the best proposal on the table so far" — despite a number of uncertainties and hang-ups.
Ed Turner, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, told Business Insider that the study makes a lot of "ideal" assumptions about Proxima b.
"We've spent decades trying to figure out our own world's atmosphere, in terms of global warming and climate change. And now we're talking about studying an alien world," said Turner, who has worked with at least seven major observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope. "But the basic idea seems like a good one."
He said the biggest snag with Loeb and Kreidberg's method is that we don't yet know the inclination or "tilt" of Proxima b's orbit around its star.
"This assumes we're not looking down on the planet," Turner said. If that's the case — and we can only see its north or south pole — JWST wouldn't get clear day- and night-side views, or the evidence required to prove an atmosphere exists. "It's statistically unlikely, but possible."
And even if the method does work, Turner noted it couldn't tell you much about the atmosphere. The planet might be cozy like Earth, or a blazing hellhole like Venus (which has an atmosphere that's 90 times thicker) — and no one would be the wiser.
Mark Clampin, an exoplanet scientist at NASA and a project scientist for JWST, said the idea is "exciting," but emphasized the fact that NASA needs to get the tennis court-size telescope off the ground first.
"The telescope's instruments were designed in a time when we weren't doing these kinds of observations, so we'd really be pushing the limits of what can be done," Clampin told Business Insider. "We have to understand how the detectors perform in space. Until we can launch and fly JWST, it's not something we can guarantee."
Nevertheless, Clampin said he is "ready to take a shot at Proxima b with JWST" and that it's now the observatory's "target number-one."
Both Turner and Loeb said timing is also a legitimate concern, given years of delays with JWST — the telescope was originally supposed to launch in 2011.
A laser on Thirty Meter Telescope will help the observatory take space-quality images. TMT If the project sees further delays, monster telescopes like the European Extremely Large Telescope or Thirty Meter Telescope could pick up the slack.
But no such colossal observatory is slated to open for the next 10 years, give or take a couple of years.
"JWST could give something we can chew on for a decade, until those telescopes come online," said Loeb.
Loeb's obsession with Proxima b — and the presence of its atmosphere — goes well beyond your standard flavor of scientific curiosity.
"I'm trying to encourage my friends to buy property on Proxima b," Loeb said, joking. "[W]e'll either destroy our own planet, or a natural catastrophe like an asteroid will. And if that doesn't [kill us], the sun warming us too much will."
With the help of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, he's working on Breakthrough Starshot, a project that hopes to laser-propel "nanocraft" toward the Proxima Centauri star system sometime in the next 20 to 30 years.
"A spacecraft equipped with a camera and various filters could take color images of the planet and infer whether it is green (harboring life as we know it), blue (with water oceans on its surface) or just brown (dry rock)," Loeb previously told Business Insider.Congress holds its first hearings Monday on the "gunwalker scandal" that CBS News first uncovered back in February.
Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gun shops to sell thousands of assault rifles and other weapons destined for Mexican drug cartels.
On "The Early Show" Friday, CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reported those who defend the strategy say their goal was to let the little fish go -- to get the big fish. But insiders say, in the process, lives were needlessly put in danger.
Attkisson initially broke the story for CBS News.
Last June, about nine months into the ATF operation known as "Fast and Furious," suspects had "purchased 1,608 firearms for over $1 million in cash transactions at various Phoenix-area gun shops," according to internal documents obtained by CBS News. The documents indicate ATF already knew that 179 of those very weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, and 130 in the U.S.
Issa subpoenas ATF over gunwalking allegations
ATF agent cooperates in gunwalking investigation
Agent: I was ordered to let U.S. guns into Mexico
Yet, ATF allowed some of the same suspects -- accused of being middlemen for Mexican drug cartels -- to continue to buy and transfer assault weapons. Sometimes, agents say, they videotaped the buys, but didn't interdict the guns.
Documents indicate intentions were good. The idea, according to those documents, was to "allow the transfer of firearms" to pinpoint big cartel crooks rather than the small-time traffickers supplying them.
Former New York State Deputy. Secretary of Public Safety Mike Balboni told CBS News, "They want to change the dynamic and truly go after the kingpin, so give the kingpin something that they can't resist -- this flow of weapons over 15 months -- and then track 'em, find 'em and take 'em down."
But several ATF agents strongly objected to letting any guns "walk."
Darren Gil was ATF's lead official in Mexico during "Fast and Furious." He told CBS News, "We're in the business of interdicting weapons; we're not in the business of putting weapons out there for criminals to use. And that's what happened in this case."
Attkisson reported that sources say putting electronic trackers on the guns usually wasn't possible and the number of weapons let on the street in Fast and Furious grew to more than 2,500.
One suspect allegedly purchased 20, even 40 weapons at a time, and at least 220 over the course of about a year. That included 178 AK-47-type assault rifles and three Barret 50-caliber rifles.
"Using our sources, and reviewing documents provided to us over the past four months," Attkisson said, "we've been able to piece together a disturbing picture of where 'Fast and Furious' guns have turned up so far: at a dozen seizures and crime scenes along the U.S. border and in Mexico.
Most notably, two turned up last December at the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona.
And documents obtained by CBS news indicate some of the weapons were recently found at a drug cartel shooting of a government of Mexico helicopter, as shown on a Spanish language website.
Even insiders appeared awed by the scale. Six months into the investigation, in March of last year, a senior ATF attorney under the Justice Department commented, "Every time I read this case, I am amazed at the amount of firearms we are talking about."
Acting ATF director Kenneth Melson and his deputy, William Hoover, are said to have been "briefed weekly" on the investigation.
ATF Special Agent John Dodson worried about all those guns hitting the streets.
Dodson said, "I don't think anybody really fathoms how long we're gonna be dealing with this. The gun is not gonna go away. It's not a one-time use."
Dodson is expected to testify at a hearing Wednesday along with two other special agents. Attkisson said Monday's hearing will explore whether the Justice Department has obstructed justice in withholding certain information from congressional investigators. That agency has said it's cooperating with the Inspector General's probe.
"Early Show" co-anchor Chris Wragge asked Attkisson if the ATF's plan of going after the big fish -- or large drug cartels -- has paid off. He asked, "Is there any proof this actually worked in any instances?"
"Not yet," Attkisson said. "The idea was to try to take down a major cartel. That didn't happen. Insiders say they still hope evidence they have gleaned from some of this operation that went on over 15 months may eventually help do that. So far, it has not done that. And the argument on the other side, from the insiders who did not approve of the strategy, said you never let one gun walk. It's too dangerous. Even if you're trying to get the big fish."Photo Credit: ceedub13
2.13.61 isn’t just the company name listed on the back of Henry Rollins’ many books and CDs, it’s also the date that little Henry Lawrence Garfield came into the world in Washington D.C. Now he’s is in the midst of the 50 tour, taking his spoken-word act across the country to commemorate |
Rumalla also argued that his client was trying to get over from the left lane into the center lane when he saw the flashing lights so he could comply with the state's “move over” law, but there was no space for him to squeeze in among the other drivers.
Rachel Satow, who was driving near the accident that day, testified there was space to move over.
Larry Taylor, who was traveling back from Gainesville that day, testified that Owens' truck did not have a right turn signal on.
Owens' younger brother, Tristian, who was in the truck with him, testified that his brother did signal.
“I know that because of the sound it makes in the truck,” he said on the witness stand.
The defense argued that Owens was planning to get off the interstate at the County Road 484 exit, and said it does not make sense that he would still be driving in the left lane at a high rate of speed when he needed to exit soon after the accident site from the right lane.
A main point made by the defense was that as Owens approached the traffic he began to slow down but his truck was hit on the front passenger side by John Lindecamp's 2005 black Mercury Mariner.
Lindecamp testified that he saw the traffic and began to slow down but said his brakes locked, causing him to fishtail and possibly swerve out of his own lane a bit and into the left lane, where Owens was driving.
Owens said after he saw the stalled traffic he decreased his speed to the low 50s and had his turn signal on, but continued in the left lane as he passed about six or seven cars in the middle lane. When he came up near Lindecamp's vehicle, Lindecamp hit him.
“(He) hit me pretty hard, enough to push me off the road into the state trooper's vehicle,” Owens testified.
“We would point to the culprit in this case as John Lindecamp,” Rumalla said in his closing argument.
Before rendering his decision, Judge Thompson pointed out that between the truck and trailer, Owens' vehicle weighed more than 10,000 pounds. He also took note of testimony from witness Amy Barco, who was trailering horses southbound on I-75 that day and said she watched Owens enter the highway around State Road 40 in Ocala.
She said as soon as Owens entered the roadway, he immediately got into the middle lane.
“He cut right in front of me,” she testified.
Barco estimated she was doing about 73 mph at the time and then slowed to avoid a different accident. She testified that the black truck sped ahead and she lost sight of it.
She said she saw the truck a few miles later on the side of the road with two men standing next to it.
The judge noted her testimony because, he said, in only a few miles time Owens had an accident of his own and was already out of the car, which would be consistent with the argument he was speeding.
Thompson's voice became stern when he noted that FHP reconstruction experts showed that Owens was going 65 mph in the left lane, in a state with a move-over law, while a trooper was outside of a car with flashing lights.
He said whether Lindecamp or Owens caused the crash would be up to their own morals to determine, but before him was just the traffic citation case.
“Three people are dead because of the way individuals operated their vehicles,” Thompson said.
While Owens did not show remorse on the witness stand, Rumalla told the court during sentencing that his client regrets what happened.
Andrea Phillips, whose husband died in the crash, said she found it sad that Owens could not come to court and admit his actions and show remorse.
According to court records, this was the fifth time Owens was adjudicated guilty for a driving citation in recent years, including for unlawful speed and failing to drive in a single lane.The United States Mint has taken its first "small steps" toward striking coins to commemorate a half-century since the first moon landing.
As called for by Congress in legislation approved late last year, the U.S. Mint will issue curved gold, silver and clad metal coins to recognize the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in July 2019. The proceeds from the sale of the coins will benefit the Astronauts Memorial Foundation, the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and the National Air and Space Museum. [ Apollo 11's Scariest Moments: Perils of the 1st Manned Moon Landing ]
On Thursday (June 15), the Mint revealed three proposed designs for the coins' reverse, or "tails side," at a meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) in Washington, D.C.. The CFA advises the government on issues of design and aesthetics.
Following the criteria outlined in the law (Public Law 114-282, the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Commemorative Coin Act), the Mint's sculptor-engravers based their concepts on "the famous 'Buzz Aldrin on the Moon' photo captured by Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969."
"Their job was to try to represent the photo in as unique a way as possible," said April Stafford, director of the Mint's Office of Design Management.
The designs are all based on a close-up of Aldrin's helmet visor, showing in its reflection Armstrong taking the photo, with the lunar module Eagle to one side and the American flag that the two astronauts deployed to the other.
The reverse design will appear on the convex, or dome-like side, of the coins, to more closely resemble Aldrin's visor.
"The design is going to appear on hundreds of thousands of coins in a curved fashion, such that the efficiency or the ability to manufacture the design is a factor that has to be considered as well," Stafford explained in an interview with collectSPACE.com.
The three proposed concepts, though similar in their major features, differ in subtle but important ways. For example, one of the concepts reorients the lunar module from how it appears in the original photograph so that the hatch, porch and ladder used by Armstrong and Aldrin to descend from the cabin to the moon's surface is facing the viewer.
Another of the designs omits a solar wind experiment that is visible in the photo and moves the U.S. flag from behind Armstrong to a more prominent position.
"Our concern is to ensure the designs meet the legislative requirements and that the technical and historical accuracy and appropriateness is reviewed," said Stafford.
All of the designs include the inscriptions "United States of America" and "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One"), as well as the denomination, either spelled out or in numerical format.
The CFA preferred that the denominations be spelled out, said Stafford.
Prior to presenting the designs to the commission, the Mint consulted with NASA. The members of the CFA expressed their preference for the same design as was favored by the space agency, though offered a suggestion.
"The CFA implored us to go back and check the reference imagery to be sure that the perspective of the lunar lander was accurate," Stafford described. "They wanted to ensure that the depiction of the lander's forward leg was correct." [ NASA's 17 Apollo Moon Missions in Pictures ]
Another, similar review with the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC), is scheduled for Wednesday (April 21) in Washington, D.C.. The CCAC advises the United States Secretary of the Treasury on coin-related issues.
Stafford's office will compile the recommendations from the CFA and CCAC, as well as from NASA, and deliver it with the three designs to the Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, who will make the decision as to what will appear on the coins' reverse. Once the selection is made, the Mint will begin the process of preparing the sculpt for the coins' dies.
In the meantime, an on-going public design competition is now nearing the end of its first phase to find the artwork for the coins' obverse, or "heads side."
The Mint launched the two-phase competition in May. The first phase, open to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18, is still accepting art portfolios through June 29. From those, a jury of three CCAC and three CFA members, chaired by the Treasury Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget, will select as many as 20 artists to submit one design each.
"It is an interesting nexus," Stafford told collectSPACE.com. "It is now where a very specific design stipulated in legislation has been seen by the public and is moving forward into the research and development phase. But it's also at the same time the launch of a more creative competition, where we are calling for just pure inspiration."
The Mint hopes to have the coins' reverse design selected in time to share with the competition's phase two finalists, so they can see the flipside to their obverse designs.
"It is interesting to me that one side is very specific, down to it being based on an iconic photograph, while the other is wide open and simply needs to be emblematic of the United States' journey to get to the moon. I feel like those are two very different things — two sides of a coin, some might say — and I love how they're coming together at this particular intersection. I hope one yields inspiration for the other," said Stafford.
In a departure from prior similar contests, the CCAC and CFA will review the phase two submitted designs (at which point, they, too, will be made public), and then the jury will reconvene to pick a winner. All the phase two participants will receive a $500 fee, while the winning artist will receive $5,000 and have his or her initials appear on the coins.
See two more designs for the tails side of the U.S. Mint’s Apollo 11 50th anniversary coins at collectSPACE.
Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @ collectSPACE. Copyright 2017 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.Past computer simulations have given broad predictions for galactic masses, but these have been much bigger than the actual masses deduced from telescope observations. This discrepancy has long been investigated by astrophysicists.
About a decade ago, theorists came upon the idea that the black holes might have a role to play. The jets they emit were introduced as a means to expel gas out of galaxies, or to prevent gas from clumping together: jets can be 10 billion times more powerful than the radiation emitted by our sun.
‘It was a very beautiful puzzle that we’d solved.’ Dr Kalliopi Dasyra, Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Dr Kalliopi Dasyra at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and colleagues have provided the best observational evidence that these jets do indeed stir up and heat the interstellar gas.
‘We could see from the start that there was something exciting in the data,’ said Dr Dasyra, whose work is backed by a European Commission Marie Curie grant. ‘But the data were complex, revealing multiple gas components that moved with different velocities.’
Dr Dasyra and colleagues’ study focused on a nearby galaxy known as IC5063. Like most other galaxies, IC5063 is believed to have at its centre a supermassive black hole, which emits two jets of plasma in opposite directions. But unlike most other galaxies, the jet passes through a disk with dense gas clouds.
Analysing archival data taken from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the researchers managed to extract the velocity and the temperature of the interstellar gas at four points along the jet trail.
They found that these quantities were greater along the jet than elsewhere. Such volatile conditions could keep the region impacted by the jet from cooling fast enough for the gas to clump together and form stars, said Dr Dasyra.
‘Concrete evidence’
‘This result is very important because it provides concrete evidence that the jet is responsible for expelling a large quantity of gas that would have instead formed new stars,’ said Dr Francesco Tombesi, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, US, who was not involved with the work. ‘It provides a strong confirmation of the idea that supermassive black holes can significantly influence the evolution of galaxies.’
Evidence of the jets’ interaction with interstellar matter has previously been found. But the discovery of multiple winds along the jet provides the most ‘definitive’ evidence of this interaction. A large part of the inner star-forming disk experiences these winds, which are detected even at distances as large as 3 000 light years away from the black hole, Dr Dasyra said.
‘When everything came through, it was a beautiful puzzle that we had solved,’ she added.
Dr Dasyra has not closed the book on the galactic mass mystery, however. To do so, she needs evidence that there are indeed fewer stars being born in the jet region than elsewhere.
Finding that evidence will be tricky, because the researchers do not yet know whether the jets act long enough upon the gas to influence the formation of new stars. Dr Dasyra believes the possibility of finding the evidence will attract a great many astrophysicists.
‘Whoever succeeds in this project will contribute a lot to the field,’ she said.The new defense plans emerging from Tokyo and Washington, D.C. offer a high degree of convergence. In Japan’s December 2013 National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) and the United States’ forthcoming 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), both allies seek to address the short- and long-term challenge of a reemerging China, while placing military forces within a comprehensive framework. However, there remain at least three hard questions to be answered regarding future alliance cohesion: viz., how to forge a common China strategy, how to sustain extended deterrence, and how to integrate Japan’s increasingly independent capabilities, including offensive strike weapons. Absent candid and persistent reflection on these issues, what now appear to be acceptable gaps could develop over time into deep fissures.
Japan’s National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG)
Japan’s latest NDPG is the fifth such document to be published in the postwar period. The 1976 National Defense Program Outline (as it was called then) emerged in the midst of U.S.-Soviet détente and burgeoning strategic arms control agreements. A second was released in 1995 to update and rejuvenate the alliance after the end of the Cold War. A third was written in 2004 in the aftermath of the threat of global terrorism and growing nuclear and missile threats. A fourth, issued at the end of 2010 by the previous Democratic Party of Japan government, emphasized the rapid shift in the global balance. The latest document, perfectly synchronized with the release of Japan’s first National Security Strategy and a five-year Mid-Term Defense Plan, emphasizes the deteriorating security environment in East Asia: North Korea is unstable and better armed; mitigating the effects of major disasters requires better preparedness and civil-military crisis management; and China’s coercive diplomacy and military modernization are causing alarm.
Chief among Japan’s concerns is China’s growing maritime assertiveness. One aspect of the assertiveness is China’s resort to tailored coercion in “gray zone” areas of the East and South China Seas. Another aspect is China’s acquisition of anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities (a concept alluded to for the first time in an NDPG). The near-term challenge is mostly a probing and nibbling strategy to test reactions to China’s unilateral alteration of the status quo; but in so doing, China has effectively stiff-armed repeated high-level Japanese requests to develop a crisis prevention and response mechanism between Japan’s Ministry of Defense and China’s Ministry of National Defense. The long-term challenge is China’s apparent intention to exercise sea control over its “near seas,” and sea denial out to at least the first island chain of countries ringing these bodies of water.
Convergences with the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)
The Department of Defense’s new QDR is still awaiting official release, but the gist of the review is already in the public domain. From what is known, there appear to be at least three areas of major convergence with the NDPG: the large security challenge of deterring and dissuading Chinese assertiveness in the short- and long-run; a commitment to maintaining maritime and air superiority; and the desire to embed the military instrument of power within a whole-of-government policy. Of course there are limits to convergence: recognizing a China challenge is not the same as developing a coherent strategy for dealing with it; maintaining maritime and air superiority in the East China Sea may be more difficult than the United States’ maintenance of maritime and air superiority globally; and America’s comprehensive policy of gradually rebalancing to Asia is different in kind from Japan’s comprehensive policy of gradual defense normalization.
Like the NDPG, the 2014 QDR underscores the uncertain security environment, including the challenge posed by emerging power centers. Concern over a reemerging China is clearly shared on both sides of the Pacific. It may be possible to read the latest defense guidance as an interim blueprint for maintaining U.S. and U.S.-alliance primacy in the face of China’s hefty military modernization. Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox, in a revealing speech on February 11, noted that she and other leaders in the Pentagon are determined to preserve U.S. military superiority over near-peer competitors (read: China). Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in previewing the QDR, emphasized that the United States will invest more to maintain superior air and naval forces. The QDR remains committed to 11 aircraft carriers while building 2 new destroyers and two new submarines a year, sustains the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter acquisition, and invests in new technologies such as unmanned systems and cyber warfare.
Both the NDPG and QDR are part of a larger national vision and policy. Japan is in the process of effectively normalizing its security role. As early as April, Japan may act on a recommendation to adopt the right to collective self-defense, at least in some scenarios, and it is also looking to further relax its longstanding three principles regarding the non-export of military hardware. Although the United States will release its next National Security Strategy shortly after it rolls out the QDR, it remains committed to a policy of comprehensive rebalancing, including military assets and operations, to Asia. Critics might contend that the Obama administration is retrenching from global leadership and not following through with rebalancing. But such criticism ignores the need to make tough tradeoffs between retaining sufficient existing defense capability and investing enough to retain a cutting-edge defense force for the future.
Clearly, the latest QDR will decrease some types of readiness (for instance, to fight another Iraq or Afghanistan war). By downsizing the Army by 13 percent and eliminating the aircraft optimized for close combat support (the A-10), the QDR is thus proposing to absorb more near-term risk in this particular scenario. Conversely, the administration is simultaneously hoping to better prepare for the “deep fight” or long-term competition in Asia. Just as Japan’s NDPG is embedded in a chiefly economic approach to international security (with “Abenomics” and structural reform the key hope for reviving the world’s number three economy), the United States hopes to take advantage of the enormous economic opportunity of a dynamic Asia (and hence the pursuit this year of a multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement). Having survived a dreadful year of sequestration in 2013, the 2014 QDR recommits the United States to shifting its most advanced and the majority of its naval platforms to Asia.
Three Divergences
But there are some important issues left more unresolved than answered by the NDPG and QDR. The three major potential divergences concern the strategy for grappling with the China challenge; the ability to retain credible extended deterrence; and the level of complementarity and integration of U.S. and Japanese armed forces.
Crafting national strategy is difficult for any country, especially in today’s fragmented and fluid world. Alliance strategy is even harder, because of differences in security objectives, cultures, doctrines, experience, and geography. Japan is seeking to preserve the postwar system in East Asia while the United States is seeking to preserve it globally. Japan is worried about creeping encroachment in its waters and skies, while the United States has the luxury of observing general patterns of behavior from a distance. Distance creates different timelines. This explains why the NDPG is investing in the immediate creation of an amphibious capability, even though it means purchasing an amphibious vehicle (AAV7) not suited to the coral reefs surrounding most of the Senkaku Islands. The United States is trading in near-term readiness in order to free up more resources for the “deep fight,” or at least the long-term competition. Japan is not oblivious to the long-term challenge, but it has a sense of urgency because of the constant, near-term test being presented by China.
While the general outline of a comprehensive counter-coercive diplomatic strategy may be emerging, the United States and Japan, as well as other states in the region, have no clear consensus on how to counter China’s tailored maritime coercion while trying to build an inclusive, rules-based regional architecture. Some believe China was surprised by Japan’s purchase of leases to some of the Senkaku islands in 2012, and it opted to ratchet up the pressure to contest Japan’s claim to administration and sovereignty over what China calls the Diaoyu Islands. This is why President Xi Jinping might be willing to shelve the dispute indefinitely, provided Japan would agree that administration of the islands is in dispute. But the islands have become a symbol of national governance in both China and Japan, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is not going to back down in the face of Chinese assertiveness. Paradoxically, President Xi may find that acceptable, because some level of tension with Japan strengthens him at home, by distracting a highly nationalistic domestic audience from local problems of corruption, quality of life issues, and slowing economic growth.
The immediate question is whether the United States and Japan can forge a comprehensive and coherent counter-coercion strategy, not only for the East China Sea, but also for the South China Sea. But the overriding question is whether both the United States and Japan have a common vision for how to deal with the China challenge. Certainly Japanese are wary of any China-U.S. “new type of major power relations.” Some also find the U.S. rebalancing policy incompatible with China’s insistence that its “core national interests” are fully respected. These tensions are stoked by Chinese leaders who wish to place China on a par with the United States, and wish to isolate Japan and other neighbors who stand in its way. Because Japan is now a “front-line” state whose geography offers it no breathing space from China’s rise, officials in Tokyo may have less patience than those in Washington with respect to shaping a China that does not know how it will sustain fast economic growth or the legitimacy of the Communist Party.
A second apparent alliance gap emerging from the NDPG and the QDR concerns how to preserve American extended deterrence in the face of rising Chinese military capabilities. Both Japan and Korea are dependent on the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and upon the notion that U.S. military superiority will provide protection because the U.S. armed forces can maintain escalation dominance all the way up to the nuclear level. But such military superiority is not providing an effective response to China’s largely non-militarized coercion in maritime Asia. China is also using its growing A2/AD capabilities and a nascent blue-water navy to signal to the region that it is only a matter of time before the United States loses its conventional military superiority. And China may be acquiring a secure second-strike nuclear capability that will further dilute the psychological assurance that America will be able to protect Japan in a future conflict. At a minimum, China’s tailored coercion, China’s growing A2/AD capabilities, and China’s growing mobile ICBM capability complicate U.S. extended deterrence. If Japan starts to acquire some offensive capabilities, as seems likely, as well as other elements of what might constitute its own A2/AD defenses, and if China responds with more military pressure, where will this leave the alliance with regard to extended deterrence? So far, these are future problems, but they are not so futuristic that the alliance should not be debating them today.
A third potential divergence between Japan and the United States that can be gleaned from the NDPG and what we know of the QDR regards integration of forces. To what degree will Japan’s increasingly comprehensive and independently capable defenses—including potential offensive strike capabilities—be thoroughly integrated with those of the United States? The U.S.-Japan alliance has long tussled over the issue of “complementarity”—the idea that Japan should focus on acquiring forces that complement rather than compete with existing U.S. forces (JMSDF minesweepers to fill a U.S. Navy capability gap are a classic case in point). The good news in the alliance is that Washington is no longer vexed by Japan’s acquisition of more independent and comprehensive capabilities. Indeed, America’s relative decline makes some degree of greater burden sharing necessary. Thus, the question should not be choosing between complementarity and independent forces, but rather a question of integration of U.S.-Japan forces.
Given the U.S. and Japan defense guidance, Japan should undertake more responsibility for both its self-defense and as a “proactive contributor to peace.” This implies Japan taking greater responsibility for situations in areas surrounding Japan (Article 6 of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan). While the NDPG retains the U.S.-Japan alliance as a pillar of security, its innovation is to realize a new “dynamic joint defense force” that maintains local air and sea superiority and can rapidly defend and protect the Southwest Island chain. But the question is whether Japan, equipped with a more comprehensive military capability—to include the ability to strike back directly at North Korea or China should either commit aggression—will remain tightly integrated within an alliance strategy and military posture. This problem isn’t urgent, as Japan’s acquisition of such capabilities will be incremental and relatively modest. Nevertheless, its resolution is extremely important as it will form the consequential basis for many political, acquisition, and force structure and posture decisions. Conversely, with Japan now a frontline state, the U.S. will have to recalibrate its assumptions regarding the U.S. role in the defense of Japan per se, heretofore largely handed over to Japan. This will involve a greater than recognized resumption of American responsibility for Article 5 treaty operations in direct defense of Japan.
These three challenges of strategy, extended deterrence and offense are not insurmountable. Moreover, it would be unrealistic to expect the NDPG and QDR to provide satisfactory answers to such long-term and complex problems. But ultimately, if these issues are not to decouple the alliance, they must be fully joined. In that process of frank and sustained alliance debate, it will be necessary to begin with the basics to ensure that officials in both capitals are pursuing common political objectives, especially because there is virtually no basis in the alliance for such conversations, let alone understandings. Nevertheless, despite the concerns about divergent pathways, the NDPG and QDR validate and document a strong alliance. Putting this guidance into practice will begin by hammering out new alliance defense guidelines to replace those laid down in 1997. That process is already five months underway, and the expectation is that it should be finished by the end of the year. That is not a great deal of time to grapple with such vital issues, and even then only time will tell how well the architects of that document have succeeded.
Dr. Patrick M. Cronin is Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).Quote:
Zerglinator:
Each member of the Shadow Isles champions has at least 2 special capture quotes, 1 for each altar (not sure about Eve and Karthus, I think they do though).
Let's see which ones I can remember
Yorick
WEST: Do you feel lonely, Yorick?
As you wish, Gravedigger
Alas, poor Yorick. (k it's gonna take more than that to convince me to use Yorick...)
EAST: Slay them Gravedigger! Make them serve us!
Get to your task, gravedigger! Make our numbers endless!
Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! (brb using Yorick on TT all day)
Hecarim
WEST: Mordekaiser cannot be trusted, Hecarim!
I aid you because I must, Hecarim.
Remember who you once were, Hecarim!
EAST: Lead our charge, Hecarim, and let the living tremble!
They will fear the thundering hooves of the dead!
Mordekaiser
WEST: Mordekaiser, are you also a prisoner?
I serve you, as I must, Mordekaiser.
EAST: I serve you gladly, Mordekaiser!
Free me my lord so I may aid you!
Elise
WEST: Your power is not worth the price, Elise.
Your humanity traded away, and for what?
EAST: The spider welcomes you, Elise!
We thank you for your gifts, Elise!
Karthus
WEST: What kind of man embraces death?
No good will come from your sorcery, Karthus.
I also hear the songs of the dead.
EAST: Unleash us, Karthus!
I serve you willingly, Lich!
A man who chose to join us... Glorious.
The dark requiem will be the last thing they hear!
(Credit to Steelflame and Keirndmo)
Evelynn
None yet, according to kitae
If you know any, I'll put them up.
EDIT: Found a nice list, but it's organized by Altar rather than by champion, so I'll reformat it here. Credit goes to MrHarz.A rumor that started overnight on Reddit and social media regarding Roman Reigns failing a wellness test is completely untrue, a WWE source informed PWInsider.com.
The rumor from an anonymous user started on the r/SquaredCircle community around 1 a.m. ET and has since been removed, but claimed that Reigns had failed a random drug test, and was the reason Brock Lesnar grew angry and reportedly walked off Monday Night Raw this week.
As noted, there is no truth to the story and not a single legitimate source has noted otherwise. While it’s still unclear what happened with Lesnar on Monday, the leading theory is that the champion is frustrated over his WrestleMania pay being taken from the dwindling pay-per-view buys.
At the very least, the rumor wasn’t reported as true by any of the major news sites. It only picked up steam on social media, but I’ve been asked about it more than anything else today by a wide margin, so I figured it was worth dispelling the story. With regard to Lesnar, everything is speculation at this point, but frustration over WrestleMania makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard.KTM Ion has been designed to represents KTM’s vision of purity, adventure, performance, and extreme. It’s a modern motorbike for new audience. Currently, KTM motorcycles target relatively small audience, mainly professionals and motorcycle enthusiasts. The task here is to develop electric motorcycle to approach new target groups, urban commuters. This concept motorbike has been designed as a homage to traditional road bikes that use fixed frames without suspension, ION offers an extreme driving experience in urban environment. This new bike is hoped to solve issues related to conventional vehicles and become a lifestyle product that fits our way of living.
Designed and developed for city streets, ION features distinctive exo-structural frame that provides this bike with strength and precision while links it aesthetically to the road bike. The core idea of KTM ION is to blend the powers of fixie bike with technology of an electric motorcycle, but the characteristics of these roots should be kept visible. The essential factors are the fixed frame and the motorcycle heritage.
Designer : Daniel Brunsteiner
KTM ION gives you the idea of freeride motorcycle with “move extreme” factor. The restriction on using a fixed frame bares a lot of new challenges and requires an innovative suspension solution. The decision to use bullhorn handlebars does not allow for the traditional motorcycle throttle control therefore the acceleration will be done differently as well. The frame will play a major role in the design of KTM ION. It will serve as the chassis and bike body at the same time. All the elements are not covering the frame but serve as contrast design elements and keep the design interesting. Also not having too many styling elements keeps the weight low and the design minimalistic.
This is the kind of motorcycle that stands for crazy jumps, fast speeds, and versatility, it’s the ultimate urban transportation.Micah Lee is the 21st-century power player—not a gray-haired politician in a Brooks Brothers suit, but a casual, slightly awkward technologist. As Lee is quick to point out, there’s one reason why that role has changed.
“It’s all on the Internet,” he explains, “but… people just don’t understand how the Internet works.” According to Lee, people tacitly accept violations of their Internet privacy rights because they simply don’t understand what rights are being violated.
"It’s very dysfunctional from a government reform standpoint,” Lee continues as he sips his Americano. “A lot of what the [National Security Administration] does with dragnet surveillance is very blatantly breaking the Fourth Amendment right of every American. But they have their own rules.” He shrugs.
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Lee looks like any Berkeley grad student stopping in at Café Yesterday before heading to campus. He’s tall, lanky, and sports a T-shirt, jeans and a canvas messenger bag. He could be any regular 29-year-old, but he’s not -- he’s the technological brilliance behind First Look Media’s The Intercept and the initial contact for Edward Snowden’s 2013 intelligence leaks.
Lee began his career after dropping out of Boston University to pursue activism. He honed his technical skills as a method of protest and eventually landed a job at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now, Lee works as a technology analyst at The Intercept.
“I have a kind of unique job,” says Lee, “we actually just released First Look code. So [for example] one of the things I also help do is redact documents securely and make sure we don’t have any hidden information that we meant to not publish when publishing documents.” The early 2014 redaction failure of the New York Times is a good example of just why Lee’s work is so crucial.
And, according to Lee, there are still quite a few documents left that must be effectively redacted if they’re ever to be released for public consumption. “Yeah, there’s still a lot of documents,” he quips in reference to his 2013 trip to Rio de Janeiro. He visited Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald and secured his computers containing the remainder of the unreleased Snowden documents.
In fact, Lee was the first person Snowden contacted after struggling to connect with Greenwald. Lee proceeded to facilitate Snowden’s contact with journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras, who later broke one of the lead stories on the Snowden documents in the Washington Post. Why did Lee take Snowden’s initial anonymous encrypted email seriously when he admitted to receiving many each day?
“He sounded…” Lee pauses. “Sane,” he finally says, laughing nervously. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”
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Since the recent expiration of key Patriot Act provisions that the NSA claimed created legality for its metadata collection program and the subsequent passage of the USA Freedom Act, Snowden and his intelligence leaks have come to the forefront of public debate once again. “The legal reforms that have been passing have not been very substantial,” says Lee. “But there’s definitely a shift in debate even if there isn’t a very big shift in reform.”
In the days preceding the vote on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, many administration officials and members of Congress made public statements regarding the potential dangers of expiration. Even President Obama warned that expiration would threaten national security.
Lee sighs when asked about these statements.
“The legal justification for surveillance has always been terrorism,” he says. “I think that the reason why the Patriot Act provisions expired… is because there hasn’t actually been a very big terrorism problem recently… plus the Snowden documents have just shown how incredibly overboard the government has gone in surveilling everyone. So I think that those two combined make it so that just calling “terrorism” doesn’t always work anymore.”
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Even so, threats of terrorism still carry considerable weight in American political discourse, as evidenced by the passage of the Freedom Act shortly after the Patriot Act's expiration. Although the Freedom Act has been touted as a substantial reform to illegal surveillance, many have criticized it as insufficient or even counterproductive.
Lee refers to the Freedom Act as “kind of horrible,” explaining that “[The Freedom Act] for the first time tries to address mass surveillance but also for the first time legalizes chunks of mass surveillance that have always been illegal… [mass surveillance is] being addressed in a very bad way that’s sort of legitimizing all of the stuff that shouldn’t be legitimate.”
Is there hope for legitimately resolving privacy issues, both on a domestic and international level, for U.S. citizens? Not even slightly, according to Lee.
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“In terms of legislation, we’re never going to get privacy for everybody and the most we could ever ask for would be ‘it’s not okay to spy on Americans but it’s perfectly okay to spy on anyone else in the world.’ If the NSA were going to change things to start complying with the Constitution and the law, they would have to stop spying on Americans but they could continue to spy on the other 7 billion people. And… I don’t think that [a cessation of domestic spying] is even ever going to happen.”
The main issue, according to Lee, is that substantial efforts at reform have been largely rendered ineffective. “All of the oversight of the intelligence community that got set up in the 1970s… was a really big deal [at the time]… fast-forward 30, 40 years and it’s all backwards now.”
“The FISA Court is a rubber stamp and Congress is… just defending what NSA is doing against people who are trying to reform it.” Lee appears visibly frustrated at the lack of what he refers to as “meaningful oversight.”
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In order to strengthen these weak reforms, Lee suggests that the FISA Court stop using “secret legal interpretations” that “[go] against democracy.” He also urges Congress to “be a bit more adversarial to the intelligence community” and “regularly audit for abuse.” These reforms are all much easier said than done, though -- a point he makes before trailing into a glum silence.
Lee is also appalled by the Obama administration’s stance on surveillance and press freedom. “There’s definitely a different climate doing investigative journalism now than there used to be… the Obama administration has just gone overboard with Espionage Act charges on Snowden and several other sources and journalists.”
“The Espionage Act under the Obama administration is being used against journalists and sources when it’s never been used like that in history,” he finishes grimly.
In 2014, President Obama asserted that Snowden shouldn’t have leaked the NSA documents because the issue of illegal surveillance would have inevitably been brought |
second, but Buzsáki was dumbstruck. “I didn’t know what to make of it,” he recalled. It was as if he had been listening to a group of orchestra musicians idly tuning their instruments, and the next moment they abruptly united in the thrilling harmonies of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. “It was the most synchronous pattern I had ever seen,” he said.
In 1989, Buzsáki published a seminal paper proposing that the purpose of SWR brain waves in the hippocampus is to help organize and consolidate memories. He outlined a two-stage model of memory. In the first stage, called active learning, cells in different parts of the cortex — the outer layers of the brain — broadcast signals representing sensory information such as the screech of a seagull or the smell of the surf.
In Buzsáki’s second stage of memory, the consolidation stage, the hippocampus receives those disparate firing patterns and synthesizes them into a single SWR. The SWR encodes the memory, storing it in some other part of the brain for future retrieval. Just as an entry in a book’s index lists all of the pages that mention a particular word, an SWR seems to provide a distinct code that reminds the rest of the brain of a specific past event. “We call it the index code,” said Bruce McNaughton, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Lethbridge in Canada. With their unique codes, SWRs allow us to store a coherent memory assembled from a diverse array of sensory inputs.
In 1994, McNaughton and his colleague Matthew Wilson, now a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a paper in Science providing the first direct evidence for the memory consolidation theory. Scientists already knew that SWRs only crop up when animals are sleeping, under anesthesia, or in a period of immobility. They also knew that neurons fire in a certain pattern when animals run through a simple maze. McNaughton and Wilson inserted large arrays of electrodes into the brains of rats and monitored these patterns. They found that the specific neural patterns that rats produce while running through a maze will later repeat as SWRs. This replaying of experiences during sleep, the researchers hypothesized, was somehow part of how the brain transferred memories from the hippocampus into long-term storage in the cortex.
The Decision Tree
Over the next two decades, researchers established that SWRs are a crucial component of memory consolidation, and not only during sleep. In 2006 Wilson and his postdoctoral researcher David Foster reported in Nature that the sequence of brain activity that fired when a rat was following a straight track also replayed in a precise order during rest periods immediately afterwards. Intriguingly, the researchers found that the pattern fired in reverse — the rat reviewed its most recent experiences first, perhaps because these memories were the most useful to the animal in its current state.
Over the past few years a number of research groups have investigated how animals use these instant replays to guide behavior. Loren Frank’s team has dug into this question by training rats to run on metal tracks shaped like an E rotated 90 degrees. The animals are rewarded when they follow a certain pattern: from the middle arm to the left arm, then back to the middle, then to the right arm and back to the middle, and so on. To do this successfully, they must learn two rules. The first one is easy: If I’m in the outer arm, go to the middle. The second rule takes more thought: If I’m in the middle arm, go to the outer arm I didn’t just come from.
When rats pause in the middle arm, their hippocampi sputter SWRs, and these codes represent the paths the animal has just taken in the maze. It’s as if the animal is stopping to consider: Where did I just come from? Where should I go next?
In a study published in Science in 2012, Frank and his colleagues showed that these SWRs turned out to be essential to learning the task. When the researchers wiped out SWRs with electrical stimulation, the rats could no longer learn the alternating maze pattern. They learned the first step — go out and come back — but not the second. Frank theorizes that the SWRs integrate a rat’s immediate past information — what it just did — with what it needs to do next.
Some neuroscientists, however, aren’t ready to say that SWRs are intimately involved in planning, decision making, and other complex behaviors that rely on the coordinated activity of many brain regions. Buzsáki, surprisingly, is one of the skeptics, believing that SWRs are limited to memory consolidation. “I love sharp waves, and I try to promote these [studies] as much as possible,” he said. “But I’m a little cautious.”
He points out that SWRs last for only a short period of time, around 100 milliseconds. “That’s way too short to arouse the entire brain,” he said, citing studies showing that the act of making a conscious decision requires at least 500 milliseconds. What’s more, SWRs often occur when decisions are not being made. “If they were related to decision making, then you’d expect them to occur when you’re fully alert, not when half asleep,” he said.
Long-Distance Connection
If SWRs really are involved in planning and decision making, then they must somehow communicate with brain regions outside of the hippocampus. “The first question is, does the rest of the brain care?” Frank asked. According to his latest study, it does. “The rest of the brain does care, and it cares quite a lot.”
In this study, Frank’s team used the three-arm track again, but this time the researchers recorded the response from neurons in a rat’s prefrontal cortex, the region associated with planning for the future, at the precise time that the animal’s hippocampus was sending out SWRs. Frank found that SWR codes are strongly synchronized with firing patterns in the prefrontal cortex.
During an SWR, about one-third of the neurons in the prefrontal cortex change their firing activity, he found. This study, which Frank presented in June at the Areadne conference in Santorini, Greece, is the first to find such a tight, coordinated connection between SWRs and the prefrontal cortex while an animal is awake, Frank said. “It looks like there is a very strong mode of communication between the hippocampus and this prefrontal brain area, which is quite a long ways away.”
Buzsáki is excited about the evidence of interactions between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain. He cites a 2012 Nature study in which researchers scanned the brains of monkeys under anesthesia and showed that SWRs seem to activate most of the cortex while at the same time silencing non-cortical areas.
“What they observed is quite remarkable,” Buzsáki said. “The hippocampus can reach out to wide areas of the cortex.”
When he first put forth his theory that SWRs are involved in memory consolidation, Buzsáki thought that these interactions were somewhat one-directional, with the cortex sending messages to the hippocampus during learning and the hippocampus sending messages to the cortex during memory consolidation. But now he suspects that communication between the cortex and the hippocampus is multilayered. “Things are trickier now, and more beautiful,” he said.
This article was reprinted on ScientificAmerican.com.With millions of downloads, great reviews, best mouse performance on Marketplace, easy and secure setup, this is the perfect remote connectivity app. You can control PC from your phone while relaxing on couch or bed. You can use your phone as keyboard, mouse, interactive remote desktop, transfer files to and fro, integrated remotes for your favorite media players, and lot more. Requirements: • Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 • PC and Phone must be connected to the same WiFi network • Install PC Remote Server on PC from www.PCRemoteServer.com Features: • Mouse: Left, right clicks, scrolling, zooming, drag n drop multi finger gestures, Windows 8 gestures like swipe from edges • Keyboard: type from phone - full keyboard support including control, shift, alt, tab, function and other special keys • Remote Desktop without locking PC: view PC screen at phone, use keyboard to type and tap to move mouse cursor • Volume Control • YouTube: search YouTube in the app and with one tap play them on PC • Windows Media Center: fully control Windows Media Center from phone • Zune: view and play playlist and song • iTunes, Spotify, Media Player Classic, XMBC, VLC, Netflix, Hulu • PowerPoint Remote • Power Controls: shutdown, logoff, sleep, hibernate, turn on/off monitors, etc. • Password protection and Encrypted data transfer • Domain network support Features in PC Remote Pro: • No advertisements • Windows 8 gestures like swipe from edges • Custom Remote to create your own hot keys • View Files/Folder of PC and open them with one click • Transfer files to and from PC with one click • Wake-up PC • Hotspot – create virtual wireless network at PC and connect phone to it at places where a wireless router is not present, e.g. coffee shop • Auto-connect shortcut by creating tile at Start • Pin each remote to Start • Copy and paste text from phone to PC • View and play Zune playlist and songs • Manage fav apps • Multiple monitor support(Photo courtesy of Bar Angeles)
In case you haven't heard, the snake has fully eaten its tail, and there is now an Elliott Smith-themed bar in Silver Lake. Sorry to ruin your day, we really thought you knew.
Quick refresher: the cover of Elliott Smith's 2000 album Figure 8 features a photograph of the late musician standing in front of the Sound Solutions mural on Sunset Boulevard. After Smith's death in 2003, the now-iconic mural transformed into a makeshift memorial of sorts, with fans making pilgrimages to leave flowers and heartfelt Sharpie-d tributes. The Elliott Smith wall, as its now known by locals and far-flung fans alike, has been tagged over and cleaned up a few times through the years, but it's inextricably tied to Smith.
Bar Angeles, which opened in February and strives to be "an elevated dive bar," is behind the Elliott Smith wall, or at least what was once the Elliott Smith wall—the restaurant cut out a large section of the wall and replaced it with glass block windows. But don't worry, in a creative, Epcot Center-ish twist, the restaurant is actually Elliott Smith themed. According to a press release, "this neighborhood gastropub is inspired by the vibrancy of the musicians, artists, and misfits who enrich the neighborhood of Silverlake [sic]."
Wade McElroy and Russell Malixi (Horse Thief BBQ, Cafe Birdie, and Good Housekeeping), the restaurateurs behind Bar Angeles, even saved said chunk of wall and put it up as decor inside the restaurant, so as to keep with the restaurant's Elliott Smith theme. The late singer-songwriter, who publicly struggled with alcoholism and addiction, died of a self-inflicted stab wound to the chest.
"Essentially it's in the same spot, just moved back 40 or so feet, and we left the area that Elliott used for his album art untouched," Jake Rodehuth-Harrison of ETC.etera, who designed the space, said.
The restaurant is named after Smith's 1997 song "Angeles," which is cool, because Either/Or, the album that song was on, takes its name from a book by Søren Kierkegaard, so it all comes full circle.
In fact, it was in that very book that Kierkegaard asked, "What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?" Brunch at the restaurant named after the song named after the book will be served on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. - 2:30 p.m., beginning this weekend.
The "familiar yet innovative menu" will include a bone marrow soft scramble, french toast topped with whipped walnut butter, Eggs Benedict Pizza with a baked egg, bacon, spring garlic, hollandaise, and chives, and the unshakable realization that brunch at an Elliott Smith-themed bar is probably the closest humankind will ever get to definitively disproving the existence of any meaning in the universe. Mimosas for the table?
Note: A Bar Angeles' spokesperson would like to note that although they do pay homage to the late singer-songwriter, they do not self-identify as an Elliott Smith-themed establishment....I'm taking part in a competition! This is for's Frozen Guardian contest where you had to design Anna's wedding dress.The hair isn't very inspiring, and nor are the patterns on the dress, but I tried to base everything off the designs from the film (to keep with the same kind of feeling) but also change things, just to add a little bit of originality.The colour scheme is green (and a bit of gold) since green is the colour I associate with Anna. I figured she needed to have a bit of a train as, being the princess, she'd have to keep a little bit of tradition going, but being Anna, her train wouldn't be too long as she'd keep somehow tripping over it!Anna, Frozen (c) DisneyArt (c) meCompetition etc. (c)Wynne makes historical jab against Harper during Liberal campaign event
TORONTO — Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne continued to weigh in on the federal election campaign Saturday, this time reaching into the history books to attack Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Wynne compared the Conservative leader to Canada’s first prime minister, implying that the transcontinental railway never would have been built if Harper had been in charge back then.
She made the remarks during the opening of Toronto federal Liberal candidate Bill Blair’s campaign office in east Toronto.
“I’ve said that if Stephen Harper had been the Prime Minister instead of Sir John A. Macdonald and B.C. had said ‘well we need a railway,’ he would have said ‘well, you know, we’re not going to help you with that, build it yourself,'” Wynne said.
“That’s not the kind of leadership that we need.”
Wynne said Blair has chosen to run with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau because he knows that he would be the kind of prime minister who will work with premiers on issues including climate change, infrastructure, the economy, jobs and growth.
“Ontario needs a federal partner,” she said.
“We need provincial and federal leaders working together to make sure that decisions that are made benefit their shared constituents, because Ontarians are Canadians, they’re not a different group of people.”
She also continued her criticism of Harper for the federal government’s lack of support for the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan and of not giving the province “even the minimal support” given to Quebec and Saskatchewan.
The Conservatives responded by repeating previous comments that it would not help Wynne bring in a tax hike, and said in a statement that Trudeau’s government would also raise taxes for middle class Canadians.
Wynne has been blasting Harper on various issues since the very beginning of the federal campaign and has vowed to keep fighting against him, though has said she will try again to work with him if he is re-elected on Oct. 19.
Cara McKenna, The Canadian PressWASHINGTON — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a new report detailing how congressional candidates are benefitting from companies operating hydraulically fractured wells and trade associations supporting the fracking industry.
Read the report, Natural Cash.
In the report, Natural Cash: How the Fracking Industry Fuels Congress, CREW — utilizing federal campaign contribution data tracked by MapLight — found contributions from the industry to House and Senate candidates from districts and states home to fracking activity rose by 231 percent between the 2004 and 2012 election cycles, from approximately $2.1 million to $6.9 million. In contrast, industry contributions to candidates from nonfracking districts rose by 131 percent, from approximately $2.2 million to $5.1 million, over the same time period.
Contributions
The steady increases in federal campaign contributions from the fracking industry correlate with the intensifying debate over whether the federal government should have more oversight of the industry. For example, the biggest increase in industry contributions — nearly 41 percent between the 2010 and 2012 election cycles — came at a time when Congress was actively debating fracking.
Top recipients
The top 10 recipients of fracking industry contributions are a mix of strong industry supporters and Republican leadership. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman emeritus of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, received the most contributions, raking in $509,447 between the 2004 and 2012 election cycles — over $100,000 more than the next closest recipient, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who received $384,700.
While serving as chairman of the committee, Rep. Barton sponsored the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Overall, nearly 80 percent of fracking industry contributions went to Republican congressional candidates.
Click here to read the report, Natural Cash: How the Fracking Industry Fuels Congress.In this April 20, 2016, file photo, Shane Kinoshita from San Francisco smokes marijuana in Golden Gate Park in the area unofficially known as "Hippy Hill" in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) this week released its 2016 congressional scorecard on marijuana policy. Twenty U.S. representatives and two senators received an 'A' grade, indicating that "this member has publicly declared his/her support for the legalization and regulation of marijuana for adults," according to NORML (see the full list at the bottom of this article).
But as the organization notes, Congress lags far behind the public when it comes to support for marijuana reform. Four states plus D.C. have already legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and this fall voters in five more will decide whether to follow suit. Polls taken this year have pegged support for marijuana legalization nationally at between 54 and 61 percent.
"It is apparent that voters' views regarding marijuana policy have evolved significantly over the past decades," said Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML, in an email. "Yet, the positions of their federally elected officials have not progressed in a similar manner."
Looking beyond legalization, the scorecard does find significant congressional support for a number of other marijuana-related policy changes. In addition to the members supporting legalization, 254 congressmen and senators support policies related to the decriminalization of marijuana, or to allowing marijuana for medical use. An additional 32 representatives and 22 senators have publicly declared support for states to set their own marijuana policies without federal interference.
At the other end of the spectrum, 16 representatives and 16 senators received an 'F' grade from NORML, indicating "significant and vocal opposition to marijuana law reform."
But overall, the scorecard shows strong majorities in Congress who have voiced support for at least some form of change to the nation's marijuana laws. 270 representatives and 60 senators received a "passing" grade of 'C' or higher, indicating they at least support the right of states set their own marijuana policies.
While many marijuana reform measures have attracted bipartisan support in Congress, the scorecard does show a significant partisan split on marijuana policy: 92 percent of Democrats received a grade of 'C' or higher, compared to only 37 percent of Republicans.
Among the 22 congressmen supporting full marijuana legalization only one, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Calif.) is a Republican. Conversely, among the 32 most vocal opponents of marijuana reform only one, Sen. Tom Carper (D.-Del.) is a Democrat.
One reason Congress has been slow to move on marijuana reform is that for most voters, drug policy isn't as big a priority as traditional hot-button issues, like jobs, terrorism or healthcare. Still, the past few years have shown that voters do care enough about the issue to change marijuana laws via ballot initiatives.
That can create problems when federal law doesn't keep pace with changes at the state level. The legal marijuana industry is already dealing with these problems: marijuana businesses still can't use the federal banking system. They're not able to apply for the same tax breaks available to other businesses, meaning many are paying effective tax rates of 70 percent or more. Since marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, some businesses are still dealing with the threat of DEA raids.
If current trends continue, at some point enough states will have legalized marijuana that Congress would likely be forced to act to reconcile differences between state and federal policy. Many observers point to California -- the world's 6th-largest economy and home to 12 percent of the U.S. population -- as the potential tipping point.
Voters there will decide whether to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in November. Recent polling suggests they're likely to do so.
Representatives and senators supporting marijuana legalization
Mike Honda (D.-Calif.)
Jared Huffman (D.-Calif.)
Barbara Lee (D.-Calif.)
Ted Lieu (D.-Calif.)
Zoe Lofgren (D.-Calif.)
Alan Lowenthal (D.-Calif.)
Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Calif.)
Eric Swalwell (D.-Calif.)
Ed Perlmutter (D.-Co.)
Jared Polis (D.-Co.)
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.-D.C.)
Ruben Gallego (D.-Ill.)
Jan Schakowsky (D.-Ill.)
Chellie Pingree (D.-Maine)
Mike Capuano (D.-Mass.)
Jerrold Nadler (D.-N.Y.)
Earl Blumenauer (D.-Ore.)
Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.)
Steve Cohen (D.-Tenn.)
Don Beyer (D.-Va.)
Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.)
Mark Pocan (D.-Wis.)A vessel said to be the world's largest aircraft has left its hangar for the first time, in preparation for a test flight (+ slideshow).
British company Hybrid Air Vehicles towed the Airlander 10 – nicknamed the Flying Bum – out of its hangar at the UK's Cardington Airfield in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The company believes the vessel, which is quieter and emits less pollution than traditional aircraft, could be the future of air travel.
Nicknamed for its bisected, bulbous shape, the Airlander 10 was pulled for 30 minutes from the UK's biggest hangar in Bedforshire to its mast site. There it will undergo ground tests before it makes its maiden voyage.
"Last week we successfully completed our final in-hangar all-engines, all-generators, all-systems testing," said technical director Mike Durham.
"The entire team is looking forward to the final series of tests outside before taking to the skies for the first time."
Related story Supersonic Boom aircraft will be the "fastest passenger plane ever"
The 91-metre-long and 26-metre-high Airlander 10 craft is a hybrid of an airship and an aeroplane. The combination of these systems means it can stay airborne for up to five days.
There is no internal structure in the Airlander. Its shell – made from a strong liquid crystal polymer called Vectran – maintains its shape due to the pressure of helium inside its hull.
The Airlander can stay airborne for long periods because 60 per cent of its lift is produced aerostatically, by virtue of it being lighter than air. This allows it to float like a helium balloon.
The other 40 per cent of its lift is generated aerodynamically, as in aeroplanes, using the Airlander's wing-shaped hull. The aircraft's engines can be rotated to provide additional thrust upwards or downwards, allowing it to land, take off and hover.
Airlander 10 was originally developed as part of a US Army project but was abandoned after funding cuts. Hybrid Air Vehicles brought the craft back to the UK and converted it for civilian use.
According to the BBC, the company is hoping to build 12 crafts per year by 2018 – some as passenger aircraft that will carry up to 48 people at a time.
It also sees a role for the Airlander 10 in coastguard duties, military and civil surveillance, filming and academic research.
Hybrid Air Vehicles' vision for an airship-led future is in contrast to transportation designer Paul Priestman's. The co-founder of London transport design studio PriestmanGoode recently told Dezeen that advances in electric motors could see jet aeroplanes replaced by battery-powered, personal flying machines.
Other recent developments in flight include a new luxury line of personal aircraft from Cobalt and the return of Virgin Galactic space flight testing."Do you hear the Ponies singSinging the song of Changeling loveIt is the music of the Equines who will raise their neighbor aboveWhen the beating of your heartEchoes the beating of the drumThere is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!"One Changeling refused to believe that they had to feed off of love in order to survive.Through trial and tribulation he escaped and gained footing in Equestria. Now he hopes that ponies can offer refuge for those like him, who realize that love is stronger than any other power, who seek to be free from the Changeling Queen. In his repentance, he knows that if he and his kin are granted amnesty, it would not be the first time Princess Celestia has forgiven a villain... for Couples Base for Chancellor Puddinghead for Commander Hurricane and Princess Platinum inspired the Moose character's design.The Government building was inspired by The Federal Parliament of Canada, designed by John Pearson and Jean Omer Marchand. This was submitted to the "Cooperation" Everfree Northwest Contest, November 30 2014. The winners for this contest were supposed to be announced on December 7 at which time this would'be been released to the public simultaneously. Instead, I just released it the next day.The idea for this picture has been simmering in my mind since June, and I only began working on it in August. It has over 700 layers.ESTACADA, Ore. -- A 7-year-old Oregon boy carried out his dream of being a crime-fighting superhero -- and he did it by sneaking out of his home in the middle of the night.
Lliam Baird armed himself with a Nerf gun and few extra bullets when he snuck out of his house sometime between midnight and 4 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 23. He was dressed in all black, and ventured out into the dark all alone on his search for bad guys.
Fortunately, Lliam ran into a good guy first: a police officer who brought him back home.
We had no idea he was gone until my husband opened the door, and there was him and a police officer. –- Tyra Baird, Liliam's mother.
"We had no idea he was gone until my husband opened the door, and there was him and a police officer," said Tyra Baird, Lliam's mother, told NBC News.
Lliam has read from his police officer storybook that "the under age to become a police officer is to be 21." When asked how many years he had to wait to fight crime as an officer, Lliam said, "Four years, probably."
Although he is very enthusiastic, Lliam may realistically need to tack on another 15 years before he can really fight crime. But watch out, bad guys -- this future officer is coming for you.
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Related StoriesLess than a week after the Republican health care bill suffered an embarrassing failure in the House, President Trump told Republican and Democratic senators who joined him for dinner at the White House that they were going to make a deal on health care.
“That’s such an easy one, so I have no doubt that’s that’s going to happen very quickly,” Trump said during brief remarks to welcome Senators and their spouses to a bipartisan reception featuring the U.S. Army Chorus.
“Because we’ve all been promising — Democrat, Republican, we’ve all been promising that to the American people. So I think a lot of good things are going to happen there,” he added.
Vice President Mike Pence, who introduced Trump, thanked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for their leadership and service and called for a round of applause for the spouses who were in attendance.
President Trump took the stage to loud applause.
“Nobody ever told me that politics was going to be so much fun,” he quipped.
He showered the Army Chorus with praise and said he planned the evening for the “unit” to enjoy the “incredible musicians” and hoped they’d have gatherings like this in the future.
“We’ll talk about infrastructure, we’re going to talk about fixing up our military which we really need — there has been a depletion — and we’re going to make it so good and so strong,” Trump said. “Hopefully it’ll start being bipartisan because everybody really wants the same thing.”A study released Thursday by the Rand Corporation claims that marijuana prices in a post-legalization California could drop by up to 80 percent, placing some of the most delicately cultivated buds in the world at less than $40 an ounce.
An initiative that would legalize California’s most valuable cash crop will be on the state’s Nov. 2010 ballot. Should it pass, individual counties and municipalities would be able to opt in or out of the legalized system; those which opt in would be given additional tax and enforcement options, and residents would be allowed to transport up to one ounce and grow plants in a five-foot-by-five-foot area.
Similarly, State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has been pushing forward with a bill that would legalize marijuana state-wide and place a $50-per-ounce tax on all sales. He estimated tax revenues on sales alone would come to $1.5 billion in the first year. Rand researchers estimated a tax boon ranging from $650 million to $1.49 billion.
“Past research provides solid evidence that marijuana consumption goes up when prices go down, but the magnitude of the consumption increase cannot be predicted because prices will fall to levels below those ever studied,” a summary noted, citing Rand researchers.
“We cannot rule out increases of 50% to 100% or perhaps higher, but we just don’t know,” the study added.
The study also found that as potential per-ounce taxes increase, the likelihood of customers switching to higher-potency alternatives becomes greater. It also said that a green-rush in California would spark price drops nation-wide and disrupt Mexican marijuana smuggling, which by most estimates accounts for the largest portion of the violent drug cartels’ profits.
“In only two countries have there been changes in the criminal status of supplying marijuana,” Rand researchers added. “The Netherlands allows for sale of small amounts of marijuana (5 grams) in licensed coffee shops and in Australia four jurisdictions have reduced the penalties for cultivation of a small number of marijuana plants to confiscation and a fine. Neither has legalized larger-scale commercial cultivation of the sort California is considering.”
The Los Angeles Times added:
The report called “Altered State?” is the most scholarly examination of the issue so far. It is likely to be scrutinized and cited by both sides in the debate. “The uncertainty and the potential chaotic nature of what could happen here just totally derails this initiative,” said Roger Salazar, the spokesman for Public Safety First, one of four opposition committees that plan to fight the initiative. “Outside of the prices going down there is nothing else that is certain here and certainly not worth having the state of California become the first entity in the world to completely legalize production and sales of marijuana.” Stephen Gutwillig, the California director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said: “The current system is loaded with the certainty of mass arrest, racist enforcement and boondoggle law enforcement expenses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
A marijuana advocate contacted by the Times said that even if use of the drug skyrocketed 100 percent, it would simply be returning to rates of usage seen during the 1970s.
Rand researchers also said that it is impossible to determine whether legalization will lead to more drugged driving arrests. However, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs reported in May that after a double-blind study of 85 drivers tested before and after smoking marijuana, “no differences [in motor control and response time] were found”.
The Rand Corporation, born out the U.S. Air Force following the Manhattan Project, is often cited by its critics as a thinktank that is cornerstone to America’s post-World War II economic hegemony and core to the marriage of intellectual, scientific communities and the military-industrial complex. The group bills itself as a non-partisan, non-profit policy analysis center.English cricketer Douglas Jardine (Hugo Weaving) is at a garden party, discussing Australian batsman Don Bradman with English cricket selectors and Percy Fender, captain of the English team.
Pelham Warner Percy’s just been telling me about young Bradman.
Douglas Jardine Oh, yes, he’s quite remarkable.
Pelham Really? That’s not what Percy was saying.
Percy Fender I think I’m about to be misquoted. Excuse me.
Jardine I’ve spent weeks trying to persuade him, but he still can’t see the truth.
Lord Harris And what truth is that, Douglas?
Jardine Well, like most batsman, I can play one or perhaps two shots to any given ball, whereas Bradman can choose between four or five.
Fender He doesn’t choose. He just plays the first shot that comes into his head. But he has no technique. Now, he can get away with this on those true hard Australian pitches. But put him on one of our green strips, with Morris seaming the ball late – oh no, he’s too unorthodox. Take the third Test in Melbourne.
Jardine Oh no, not that again.
Percy It’s a very good example, Douglas. Now on at least three occasions, the ball was short pitched, screaming out to be hooked, he played a cover drive.
Pelham Oh, it’s absurd.
Jardine No, it’s not absurd. At least two of those balls went for four. That’s the power of Bradman. He’s learned that a batsman’s sole objective is to score runs. And he’ll play whatever shot, unorthodox or not, which best fulfils that purpose. It makes it almost impossible to set a field to him.
Pelham Well, sorry old chap, but I think you’re on your own. Well, the skipper agrees with Percy and says Bradman is just a flash in the pan. And Tait says that he’ll have to play a straighter bat if he comes here and plays on one of our wet wickets.
Jardine They’re older men, steeped in the conventional methods of play.
Fender Oh, thank you very much!
Jardine Bradman is something totally new. He’s not interested in playing classic shots. He’s never had any formal training, so he’s developed his own style. A unique approach. I believe if he continues to develop, we could see scores none of us have ever dreamed of. He could rewrite the record books. He could change the very nature of the game.
Lord Harris Oh, come come, Douglas. That’s being unnecessarily alarmist. No batsman in the world has ever done that.
Fender I must say, in fairness, there are hundreds and thousands of Australians who’d agree with Douglas. Out there, he’s become quite a celebrity.
Jardine It’s not a very pleasant sight, Bradman standing in the middle of the pitch, bat raised, the crowd chanting his name. As a society, they seem to crave heroes.
Pelham Well, I like Australians. It’s just that they prize individualism.
Jardine Indeed. They continually want to elevate one man at the expense of the team. I find it quite abhorrent.
Lord Harris Well, that’s certainly not the nature of the game. The heart is the team.
Jardine I’m afraid the Australians wouldn’t agree with you there, my Lord. Their whole approach to cricket is different. At times, I wondered if we were playing the same game I’d grown up with. To listen to the crowd, you’d think it was a hunt with the English as the fox.
Pelham Oh, get used to that. It’s just good-natured barracking.
Jardine Questioning a man’s parentage is hardly good-natured.
Pelham My dear fellow, in Australia, ‘bastard’ is almost a term of endearment.
Jardine Well, I come from a different world, thank God. The Australians are not a people I’ll ever warm to.
Lord Harris Nothing wrong with that. Always easier to give a hiding to a man you dislike.As rate of airstrike casualties rises, Donald Trump’s expansion of conflict could strain relations between Kabul and Washington
When thousands of additional US soldiers are deployed to Afghanistan as part of Donald Trump’s expansion of America’s longest war, many of them will experience the conflict at a distance from fighters jets and helicopters.
The US has stepped up its use of airstrikes in Afghanistan and is pouring vast resources into strengthening Afghan airpower. But while airstrikes may be effective in killing insurgents, increasing their use also leads to more civilian deaths.
Last week at least 26 civilians were killed in two separate airstrikes. Near Herat, Afghan warplanes killed at least 13 civilians. A day later, what appears to have been a US airstrike killed at least 11 civilians in Logar, east of the capital, Kabul.
Even before then, 2017 had been shaping up to be the deadliest year on record for Afghan civilians since the 2001 US-led invasion. The rate of casualties from airstrikes is on par with 2011, during the Obama troop surge. In the first six months of 2017, airstrikes killed 95 civilians and injured 137.
Such deaths risk undermining public faith in the national air force, which is seen as representing a vital step towards self-reliance for the Afghan security forces, experts say.
For now, though, airpower is the Kabul government’s lifeline. Half a dozen provincial capitals are verging on collapse, and some would probably have fallen were it not for American air support.
One of them, Farah, in the western part of the country, was under siege for three weeks last year by Taliban fighters, probably supported by Iranian commandos, until American planes were called in. Many of the insurgents fled north to Shindand, in Herat province, a Taliban stronghold.
This is where Afghan government forces struck last week. But by the time their bombs dropped, the Taliban had already fled, local residents told the Guardian. Instead, the planes killed 18 civilians, said a witness who asked for anonymity. The district governor put the number at 13.
“There were no men among the victims. All were women |
markets and slaughtering facilities were investigated, along with options for reducing such risks. The effect of vaccines on reducing virus transmission was also discussed.
Next Steps The conference was very well received by delegates, many of whom expressed enthusiasm for the theme and the active interdisciplinary discussions that were a feature of the meeting. There was near unanimous support for this to be the start of a series of meetings with multidisciplinary participation, perhaps at 2–3-year intervals. The International Society for Influenza and Other Respiratory Virus Diseases (ISIRV) provided some logistical support for this conference; a potential development is the creation of a special interest group within ISIRV for conference participants and other researchers to discuss these shared interests.
Dr. Cowling is an infectious disease epidemiologist and leads a research team at the School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong, with a focus on the epidemiology of influenza.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Julie Au, Jiaju He, Lala Kei, Chi Kin Lam, and Tom Lui for technical support. The conference was supported financially by the 130th Anniversary Fund of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong, and by the Croucher Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project No. T11-705/14N). Logistical support was provided by the International Society for Influenza and Other Respiratory Virus Diseases (ISIRV).
References
Guan Y, Peiris JS, Zheng B, Poon LL, Chan KH, Zeng FY, et al. Molecular epidemiology of the novel coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome. Lancet. 2004 ; 363 : 99 – 104. DOI PubMed Fineberg HV. Pandemic preparedness and response—lessons from the H1N1 influenza of 2009. N Engl J Med. 2014 ; 370 : 1335 – 42. DOI PubMed Malik M, Elkholy AA, Khan W, Hassounah S, Abubakar A, Minh NT, et al. Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus: current knowledge and future considerations. East Mediterr Health J. 2016 ; 22 : 537 – 46. DOI PubMed Jain S, Self WH, Wunderink RG, Fakhran S, Balk R, Bramley AM, et al. ; CDC EPIC Study Team. Community-acquired pneumonia requiring hospitalization among U.S. adults. N Engl J Med. 2015 ; 373 : 415 – 27. DOI PubMed Nair H, Nokes DJ, Gessner BD, Dherani M, Madhi SA, Singleton RJ, et al. Global burden of acute lower respiratory infections due to respiratory syncytial virus in young children: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet. 2010 ; 375 : 1545 – 55. DOI PubMed Gutiérrez S, Michalakis Y, Blanc S. Virus population bottlenecks during within-host progression and host-to-host transmission. Curr Opin Virol. 2012 ; 2 : 546 – 55. DOI PubMed Parrish CR, Holmes EC, Morens DM, Park EC, Burke DS, Calisher CH, et al. Cross-species virus transmission and the emergence of new epidemic diseases. Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2008 ; 72 : 457 – 70. DOI PubMed Schrauwen EJ, Fouchier RA. Host adaptation and transmission of influenza A viruses in mammals. Emerg Microbes Infect. 2014 ; 3 : e9. DOI PubMed Belser JA, Eckert AM, Tumpey TM, Maines TR. Complexities in ferret influenza virus pathogenesis and transmission models. Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2016 ; 80 : 733 – 44. DOI PubMed
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Suggested citation for this article: Cowling BJ, Lam TT-Y, Yen H-L, Poon LLM, Peiris M. Evidence-based options for controlling respiratory virus transmission. Emerg Infect Dis. 2017 Nov [date cited]. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2311.171231
Table of Contents – Volume 23, Number 11—November 2017Jack Lew's union-busting past In a little reported episode, our possible next treasury secretary played a critical role trouncing an NYU union
With President Obama poised to tap current chief of staff Jack Lew as his next treasury secretary, Republicans are already attacking Lew for supposed slights during budget talks. Some progressives may bring renewed scrutiny to his time at CitiGroup. But if history is any guide, there will be little talk about another line on Lew’s résumé: The key role he played in New York University’s campaign to rid itself of a graduate student workers’ union.
Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, joined NYU as chief operating officer and executive vice president in 2004. At the time, NYU was the only private university in the United States whose graduate students had a union contract. By the time Lew left two years later, NYU graduate students had lost their collective bargaining rights. In between, picketers hoisted “Wanted” posters with his face on them.
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Reached over email, Andrew Ross, NYU professor of social and cultural analysis, charged that “the administration followed every page of the union-busting playbook, as instructed by the anti-union lawyers retained for that purpose.” Ross, a co-editor of the anthology "The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace," wrote that despite broad faculty and community support for the union, “students on the picket line were threatened with expulsion. There was no indication that Lew, as a senior member of the team who executed this policy, disagreed with any of these practices. To all appearances, he was a willing, and loyal, executor of decisions that trampled all over the students’ democratic right to organize.”
When contacted for a response, White House spokesperson Eric Schultz emailed: “Jack Lew has been a strong supporter of the right of workers to organize – as has the President. And that support will not change in his new role as Treasury Secretary.”
While graduate student teachers and researchers are unionized at many public universities, their private sector counterparts didn’t win collective bargaining rights until 2000, when a Clinton-appointed majority on the National Labor Relations Board sided with NYU graduate students and rejected the university’s contention that they weren’t really workers. Graduate student workers do an increasing share of the teaching and research work of major universities, and they receive stipends for it. Following the precedent-setting NYU decision, NYU graduate students won a union election and negotiated their first-ever union contract with the university.
Meanwhile, administrators at several other universities resisted the ruling, campaigning against unionization while insisting that the decision would soon be reversed by the new NLRB members recess-appointed by President Bush. (This includes Yale University, where as an undergraduate activist I supported a graduate student union campaign by an affiliate of UNITE HERE, the union I later worked for.) They got their wish: In 2004, the new NLRB majority sided with Brown University, one of several Ivy League universities that had filed appeals to prevent their graduate students’ union ballots from being counted on the grounds that they had no legal right to unionize.
After the NLRB’s flip-flop, NYU could have kept recognizing and negotiating with its union, the Graduate Students Organizing Committee, an affiliate of United Auto Workers Local 2110. But the Bush NLRB had given NYU an out, and – like other universities led by avowed liberals – NYU took it.
As I reported last January for In These Times, what came next began as a complex dance, and ended with a bitter strike. NYU first announced that it would spend months listening to community input and weighing whether to negotiate a new union contract with GSOC when the current one expired. During that period, Rev. Jesse Jackson and City Council speaker Christine Quinn presented Lew with a petition from workers urging negotiations. But on June 16, 2005, Lew and NYU provost David McLaughlin co-authored a “Memo to the Community” announcing a “proposed decision” to “no longer use the union as an intermediary with our students.” An Aug. 5 memo from the same duo made it final: “the university will not negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement with the UAW.” Lew and McLaughlin accused the union of having improperly interfered with “academic decision-making” in a way that could have “a profound impact” on “the academic quality of the institution.” (The American Association of University Professors rejected NYU’s argument.)
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In response to NYU’s decision to strip their collective bargaining rights, union members staged a civil disobedience action with then-AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. Then, in November 2005, they went on strike. Former GSOC activist Susan Valentine charged in "The University Against Itself" that NYU’s efforts to break the union included a battery of tactics that would have been illegal if not for the Bush NLRB’s 2004 decision curtailing graduate students’ labor rights. International students charged that management threats to deny future work to strikers put them at risk of deportation. Union members alleged that they were interrogated about their union activism by their supervisors. 20 strikers were fired.
By the time Jack Lew left his post as NYU COO to become COO of Citigroup Wealth Management, the six-month strike was over, and the union had lost.
When we talked last year – soon after Obama had promoted Lew from his OMB director to his chief of staff -- Local 2110 president Maida Rosenstein told me that Lew had acted as “the point person” in “representing management’s position” against GSOC. She said that NYU’s choice to stop recognizing the union meant the membership “has had to organize from scratch.” But when I asked if she thought Lew’s role should have disqualified him for the promotion, she answered, “I would love it if he had a chief of staff who had a direct history of being very pro-union. But he was in charge of the budget at NYU. Within that context, he did what he did. Maybe he’s learned something from it.”
NYU, the UAW and Local 2110 did not respond to Salon’s early afternoon requests for comment; an AFL-CIO spokesperson said that an official was not immediately available to comment. Obama’s past appointments of Lew have not drawn outcry from the AFL-CIO, the UAW, or other major unions.
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Meanwhile, graduate student teachers and researchers at NYU have petitioned the NLRB to allow a new union election, so they can win their union recognition back. That would require the current NLRB members – most of whom Obama recess-appointed in January 2012, prompting outcry from Republicans and relief from unions – to overturn the Bush NLRB’s Brown decision. Asked in October about complaints from some activists about the long wait for a ruling, Obama-appointed NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce quoted an old wine commercial: “No wine before its time.” Pearce told Salon, “I was never in agreement with the Brown case, primarily because I did not think all factors were taken into consideration. Now whether or not it is appropriate for it to be overturned is another question. I have to see all of the circumstances – now that takes a little bit of time.”- According to a new survey, some college students plan to use money from student loans to pay for their Spring Break getaways.
The survey, taken by student loan news site LendEdu, found that 30.6 percent of students with debt "claim that they are using money they received from student loans to help pay for their spring break trip this year."
Using other available data, the study noted that more than 11.2 million students are expected to travel for Spring Break this year. So LendEdu estimated that 2.38 million students will be using loan money for some or all of those travel costs.
The study found that many students are using their loans for other non-education expenses. More than one-third of those surveyed said they've used loan funds to buy clothing and food at restaurants.
Continue reading this story at FOXNews.com
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.comA response by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) to the attack on the antiwar movement from Terry Burke published in "In These Times"
In the past 15 years, the US military machine has attacked 17 countries. The many peace and justice organizations and individuals attacked in Terry Burke’s article(1) have a long history of opposition to ALL US wars, interventions, invasions, drone attacks, military coups, blockades, and sanctions on numerous countries around the world. The military aggression of the United States, the expansion of NATO, the efforts at encirclement of Russia and China with weapons shields, CIA destabilizations in Latin America and the massively destructive US wars in Central Asia, West Asia, Middle East and North Africa, along with the massive arms deals with US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, have created terrible destruction and millions of deaths and refugees. UNAC, a peace and justice coalition with organizations and individuals from different perspectives, seeks to counter the corporate media propaganda and politicians’ justifications for each of these wars and for expanding US militarism. These wars collectively, and each of them individually, are for US economic and geopolitical domination. None of these wars have resulted in increased security or stability for the countries targeted or for the people of the US.
It is from this perspective that we oppose the US war in Syria. We oppose the US bombing that has ruined so much of the vital infrastructure, and we oppose the US-coordinated arming and financing of numerous armed groups and the devastating sanctions that the US has imposed on the people of Syria. Terry Burke cites her past work in the Nicaragua Solidarity Committee as the basis of her position on Syria. However, this distorted reasoning would have led Terry and the antiwar movement to support the US backed Contra forces in Nicaragua as “democratic and progressive forces.” The US role in Central America was to covertly arm contra forces to impose regime change in Nicaragua while funding and arming Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads. This destructive policy created millions of refugees from Central America in the 1980s, just as US policies of regime change in the past 12 years of war in Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere has created even more refugees. The US is coordinating Saudi, Israeli, Qatar, Turkish and EU efforts of bombing and of arming opposition groups. The stated goal from the beginning has been regime change in Syria. Regime change, as in Iraq and Libya, means the complete destruction of every secular state institution, including the very structures that provided full access to free education, free health care, electrification, potable water, modern infrastructure, irrigation and communication. Years of US sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya did not succeed in carrying out regime change, although they created great hardships and dislocations in each economy. Up to 1.5 million people died due to US sanctions in Iraq alone. Today, as we watch two candidates running for president who threaten increased and terrible interventions in Syria, we are seeing a big increase in US propaganda. Take, for example, the August 11th article by Fair and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) on the breakdown of the recent ceasefire: http://fair.org/home/how-media-distorted-syrian-ceasefires-breakdown/. FAIR, a media watchdog group, exposed the fact that it was groups supported by the US fighting alongside the al Nusra Front, the al Qaida group in Syria, that actually broke the ceasefire, yet the media blamed the Syrian government and the Russians for the breakdown. Much of what we see in the US media related to the situation in Syria is the same kind of propaganda with the goal of building greater support for war. Terry Burke claims we are “US-centric” for opposing our government’s attacks on Syria and attempts at regime change in that country. She claims that we have “ignored anti-Assad progressive Syrian voices.” But who has ignored what? Where in the US corporate media are the voices of Syrians (both pro and anti-Assad) who want an end to the ISIS/Al-Qaida/US/NATO intervention in their country and have rallied to the side of their government to end it? The US corporate media and some so-called progressives in the US have focused on vilifying Assad rather than the US-led war on Syria, which only leads to strengthening the forces who seek regime change and war. Should we add our voices to that chorus? Is that the best way to end US intervention in Syria, which the overwhelming majority of Syrians oppose? We think not.
Syrians in Lebanon line up to vote in Syrian election 2014
The March 13 UNAC protest, “A Day of Peace and Solidarity,” is the basis of Burke’s claims that “a dictator accused of monstrous war crimes is being given tacit support by major organizations in the peace movement.” Why? Because the “anti-war protest in New York City included people carrying the flag of the brutal Assad regime…” It is true that Syrians came to that demonstration and carried the flag of their country. Do Syrians not have the right to carry their flag? Is it the place of the US anti-war movement to tell people from any country that is under attack by the US that they do not have the right to carry their country’s flag? That is not the role of our movement; we oppose our government’s illegal and immoral aggression against all countries and do not lecture the people of that country on whom they should support or not support.
Syrians protest in DC to end US intervention in their country
If antiwar activists and organizations in the US condemn US bombings and aggression in Syria as our primary concern, rather than denouncing “Assad’s crimes,” we are branded “pro-Assad.” Burke attacks us for having signs like “US Hands Off Syria” and “No US War on Syria.” These she says are “US-centric.” Were similar slogans used during the Vietnam War, Afghan War, and Iraq War also US-centric? The US is the most militarily aggressive country in the world. It has around 20 times the number of foreign military bases as all other countries in the world combined. We in the US have an obligation to humanity to demand that our government stop the aggression and bring the troops home from Syria and all of the more than 130 countries where there are US troops. Burke accuses the antiwar movement of ignoring progressive Syrian voices but she is highly selective in identifying the “Syrian perspective” as those who are anti-Assad. We must ask her why she ignores the Syrian voices that seek to end the US/NATO/ISIS/Al-Qaida attacks on their country. Burke believes that the primary feature of the Syrian conflict is fighting between two camps of Syrians. However, this is not the case. Syria has been invaded by extremists such as ISIS and al Nusra. Tens of thousands of mercenaries have poured into this small country to overthrow the government, a goal which the US and NATO share. They have been supported by bombings, logistics and harsh sanctions against Syria from the US and NATO. Though the US has claimed it is there to attack the extremists, there had not been much damage to them until Russia entered the fighting-- and then, in a matter of weeks, the tide turned. The oil that ISIS takes from Syria and uses to help fund their operations has been left untouched by the U.S and its allies until Russia started bombing their oil operations. The antiwar movement can agree on non-intervention and self-determination. Aligning with those anti-Assad Syrians who support US intervention in Syria can only divide and weaken our movement, which needs to be united today, perhaps more than ever. We urge the antiwar movement to reject the ideas that Terry Burke presents in her article and demand that the US and NATO stop the bombing, stop the sanctions, stop the flow of weapons and stop the funding. This will stop the extremist groups. Then the people of Syria can alone decide their fate. (1) Organizations and people attacked by Terry Burke in her article in “In These Times” include United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), US Peace Council, Syrian American Forum, Veterans for Peace, Manhattan Green Party, WarIsACrime.org, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Syrian American Will Association, ANSWER Coalition, Anti-War Committee Chicago, Minnesota Anti-War Committee, Women Against Military Madness, Workers World Party, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Mint Press News, AntiWar.com, Consortium News, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity including members William Binney, Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern; dedicated activists like David Swanson and Kathy Kelly, as well as journalists Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Kennedy Jr., Gareth Porter and Robert Parry. The Administrative Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Marilyn Levin - UNAC co-coordinator Joe Lombardo - UNAC co-coordinator Margaret Kimberley - Senior columnist, Black Agenda Report Joe Iosbaker - Chicago Anti-war Committee Sara Flounders - Co-director, International Action Center Bernadette Ellorin - Chairperson, BAYAN, USA Judy Bello - Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars Abayomi Azikiwe - Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice Phil Wilayto - Editor, The Virginia Defender Jeff Mackler - Northern California UNAC (additional endorsers: http://nepajac.org/syriaendorsers.htm)
(If you want to add your name to this statement, please email UNACpeace@gmail.com with your name and the name of your organization. If it is an organizational endorsement of the statement, please note that in your email or simply click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/support-syria-statement.html)
(to see the original article in "In these Times", go here: http://inthesetimes.com/ article/19388/u.s.-peace- activists-arent-listening-to- progressive-syrian-voicesYou must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
Message: * A friend wanted you to see this item from WRAL.com: http://wr.al/vNGH
— An eaglet that survived a 60-foot fall from its nest near Jordan Lake died Sunday at the Carolina Raptor Center in Huntersville. Veterinarians tried to save the bird after another eaglet died in the fall.
The eaglet arrived at the center with a fractured leg, and, over the last few days, doctors discovered additional injuries that made the bird's condition more dire.
"We discovered an open fracture of the left humerus today. It was very close to the elbow joint (wing). We took him to surgery to attempt to repair it, but we were not successful," Dr. Dave Scott wrote on the raptor center's Facebook page.
"In this case, we decided to euthanize the bird as he had multiple other serious issues including a fracture."President Barack Obama on Tuesday decried Republican obstruction over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling this month as nothing more than hostage taking, arguing that Democrats were right in resisting negotiations over Obamacare because it would set a dangerous precedent for the nation going forward.
“If reasonable Republicans want to talk about these things again, I am ready to head to the Hill,” Obama said at a White House press conference. “I’ll even spring for dinner again. But I’m not going to do it until the more extreme parts of the Republican party stop forcing John Boehner to issue threats about our economy.
“We can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy,” he added. “And this is not just for me. They shouldn’t have to pay ransom for me. We have to put a stop to it.”DDDD DDDD KKK DDDDD KKKKK DDDDDDDKKKKK DDDDDDKKK KKKK KKKKKKKKKKKK KKKKKK DDDDDD DDDDDDDDDDDD KKKKKK KKKKKKKKKKKK KKKK KKK KKK DDDDDDDDD DDDDDDDDDDDD DD KK KKKKKK KK KKKKKKK K KKKK DDDDDDD DDDDDDDDDDDD DD DD D KKKKKKKK KKKK KKKKKKK KKK DDDD DD DDD DD DD DD DDDDDD K KKKKKKKK KKKK KK KK K KKK DD DDDDD DD DDDD D DDD DD KK KKKKKKK KKK KKK KKK KKK DDD DDDDD DDDD DDDDD DDDDDDDDDDD KKKK KKKK KKKKKKKKKKKK KKKKKK KK DDD DDDD DDDD DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD KKKKKKK KKKKKKKKKKK KK KK KKK KK DDDD DDD DDDD DDDDDDDDDD DD KKKKKKKK KKKK KK KK KKK KK DD DD DDDDDDDDDDDDD DD K KKKKKKKKK KK KK KKKKK DD DDDDDD DD K KKKKK KK KK DD DDDDD DD DK KKKK KK KK DDDDDDD DDDD KKK KKKKK DDDD DD KKKK ADDITION EDITION PLUS A guide to Divekick: Addition Edition Plus for the PS3, PSVita, and PC Written by Adam King (aka Terotrous) Version 2.6 =============================================================================== =============================================================================== Table of Contents: You can search using the code listed before the titles to jump right to that section. Just press Ctrl-F and type in the code. F-0 Faq information F-1 Version History F-2 Preface D-0 Game Mechanics D-1 Introduction to The One True Game D-2 How to Divekick D-3 Slightly Advanced Game Mechanics D-4 Getting Godlike K-00 Characters K-01 Dive K-02 Kick K-03 Kung Pao K-04 Mr. N K-05 Redacted K-06 Dr. Shoals K-07 Uncle Sensei K-08 Jefailey K-09 The Baz K-10 Markman K-11 Stream K-12 S-Kill K-13 Kenny K-14 Johnny Gat K-15 The Fencer Z-0 Contact and Credits Z-1 Contacting Me Z-2 Credits Z-3 Closing Information =============================================================================== =============================================================================== F-0 FAQ Information: ############################################################################### F-1 Version History: 1.0 - Aug 21, 2013 First draft. Covers all 13 characters. Some of the strategy advice is likely pretty fraudulent as this is literally day 1 tech. Meter costs are accurate, though. 1.1 - Aug 23, 2013 Fixed a bunch of things that were wrong. See the getting godlike section for information about Kara Cancels in Divekick, which seem like they'll be important for some characters. 1.2 - Aug 25, 2013 A couple other minor changes, Mr N's hidden double jump, and Stream's hidden double kick. Also, all the special move names are right this time, I swear. 1.3 - Sep 4, 2013 Divekick version 1.1 is out. Baz is slightly adjusted. See his section for details. 1.4 - Sep 8, 2013 Added some more hidden info about Shoals' hidden dropkick and S-Kill's Trick Followup. 2.0 - Apr 9, 2014 A major balance patch for Divekick, called "Divekick: Addition Edition", has been released. All of the characters have been changed in various ways, and the guide now covers their up-to-date movesets. Also, Johnny Gat was revealed as a playable character, but he's not out quite yet. I've also updated the way I denote meter to fit with the game's internal representation of it. This update was somewhat hurried to get the new information out there ASAP, so there might be a few things that still need to be updated from the old version. 2.5 - Oct 30, 2014 The next patch for Divekick has been released, called "Addition Edition Plus". This adds the new character, Johnny Gat, fixes some bugs with The Baz, and makes some minor adjustments to a few of the characters. 2.6 - Dec 8, 2015 Out of nowhere, Divekick got a new character, The Fencer from Nidhogg. He's a very strange character, so you'll probably want to read up on him whether you're playing as or against him. ############################################################################### F-2 Preface: This game is so simple that it may not really need a guide, but there are some little details that may not be obvious at first glance. Also, since this is a very community-oriented game, there will be some in-jokes here and there, because you really can't do Divekick any other way. =============================================================================== =============================================================================== D-0 Game Basics: This sections goes over the basics (and they are quite basic) of Divekick. ############################################################################### D-1 Introduction to The One True Game: In case you haven't heard by now, Divekick is a deliberately simple fighting game that aims to boil fighting games down to their barest essentials. It's also a celebration and good-natured parody of Fighting games and the people who play them. If you're not familiar with Fighting games, they revolve around combat between a small number of roughly evenly-matched competitors in a small arena. A large part of playing any fighting game well is to always be aware of the options available to each player and to try to manipulate the situation so that you have the advantage. However, the opponent will be trying to do this as well, and therein lies the depth that has entranced fans for decades. Fighting games were enormously popular in the early 90s, with titles like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat bringing the genre to the forefront of gaming. As time went on, players became very proficient at these titles and discovered many techniques that the developers never intended, creating a rich competitive scene full of dedicated fans. Unfortunately, over time, these fans came to desire more and more complex games so high-level competition would be more balanced and they could elevate the competition to the next level, but the increased complexity was too much for new players, and the fighting game audience began to shrink. By the late 90s, apart from Smash Bros (another Fighting game that drastically reinvented and simplified Fighting mechanics), Fighting games had become a niche product, still adored by loyal fans but lacking the popularity they once had. Flash forward to 2012, where Fighting games have seen something of resurgence thanks to the back-to-basics approach of Street Fighter 4, but they still remain inaccessible to many. Every year, Adam "Keits" Heart hosts an event called UFGT, a more lighthearted Fighting Game Tournament featuring such events as Ski-ball, Golf, and a tournament of completely random games that no one is told about ahead of time. While planning for the tournament, he jokingly proposes the concept of a fighting game that only has two buttons, Dive and Kick, two characters, Dive and Kick, and where the only thing you can do is Divekick, a popular tactic in many modern fighting games. With the help of a few friends, he throws together a basic prototype lampooning various fighting game concepts and characters, intending for it to be a hilarious joke for his upcoming event, but somehow, everyone loves it, and the one question on everyone's mind after UFGT8 is "when can we buy Divekick?" The fan support for the game remains so strong that Keits runs a very successful Kickstarter campaign, then cancels it as the game has found a publisher, Iron Galaxy Studios. Over the next 9 months, they drastically expand and polish the original game, taking it to many events and receiving even more rave reviews from players who aren't generally interested in fighting games but find this one to be very compelling and easy to play. And now, the game has finally dropped, and top level competition is available for everyone. Are you ready to play the One True Game? ############################################################################### D-2 How to Divekick: Divekick has perhaps the simplest controls of any game ever, to the extent that a control chart is completely unnecessary. There are only two buttons, Dive (Yellow) and Kick (Blue). It doesn't even have any directional input. Pressing Dive causes you to Dive (jump) into the air. Pressing Kick in the air causes you to Kick back down to the ground at an angle, which is also the only way to move forward. Pressing Kick on the ground causes you to Kickback, which is a backwards jump, and is also the only way to move backward. Pressing both buttons at once lets you use a special move, more on that later. And that's how you play Divekick. Hit the opponent with your foot while kicking to win, a single hit determines each round. Win 5 rounds to win the game. ############################################################################### D-3 Slightly Advanced Game Mechanics: Even though the above basically summarizes the gameplay, there's a little bit more involved in Divekick. For one thing, the game includes multiple playable characters, all of whom Dive and Kick at slightly different heights, speeds, and angles. You can also select one of four different gems to slightly customize your character. The Dive Gem causes you to jump 6% higher and faster. The Kick Gem causes you to Kick 12% faster, getting you to the ground faster. The Style Gem causes you to gain 15% more meter. And the YOLO gem is like a better version of all 3, except that you only get one round while the opponent gets 5. Beyond this, there are four further mechanics that affect how matches play out. The first and most important mechanic is the Kick Meter, which is the giant foot that appears in the bottom corner of the screen. Every time you Kick, you build up a certain amount of meter (it varies per character), and when your meter is full you enter Kickfactor, which causes your character to enter a powered up state, usually making them dive higher and kick faster, though some characters have different bonuses. Kickfactor only lasts a short time, though, the meter progressively drains as soon as it becomes full and when it's empty, you go back to normal. You also lose all your meter should you happen to be hit while in Kickfactor. However, you don't have to use your meter for Kickfactor. Each character has two special techniques that they can use, one for when they're on the ground, and one for when they're in the air. These techniques are activated by pressing Dive and Kick at the same time, and sometimes holding them. Each consumes a certain amount of meter, indicated by the blue and yellow markers in the Kick meter. You can even use Techniques during Kickfactor, which still costs just as much meter as it normally does. Regardless of how you plan to spend meter, though, you have to watch your head. If an opponent's kick hits you right in the head, this is called a Headshot, and it has two very negative consequences. First, in the next round, you will be concussed, and you will move much slower for the first 4 seconds of the match. Secondly, all of your meter will be gone. You can even be Headshot again while you are still concussed. And finally, there is a timer displayed in the top middle of the screen. As a single hit in Divekick is always fatal, the winner cannot be determined by health remaining when time runs out. When time is almost up, a red line will appear in the middle of the stage, and whomever is closer to it when time runs out will be considered the winner. Should there be a tie, Judgement will occur, and not only does no one win, but both players lose their meter. ############################################################################### D-4 Getting Godlike: Divekick is largely a game of reactions and spacing, where victory is determined by your ability to either punish your opponent's mistakes or put them into a bad situation where they either can't avoid your attacks or can't do anything without getting punished. You also want to be aware of what your opponent's game plan is and try to prevent them from achieving it. However, there are various other subtle tricks that can give you an edge. Most characters can build meter easily without giving up much space by hitting the kick button repeatedly. If your opponent is not actively coming after you, this is often a great way to spend your time. Every character is more threatening when they have meter. By the same token, try not to be too passive and let your opponents build meter on you. Speaking of Kickback, it's also the best way to punish opponents who are too aggressive. If someone comes right at you, just kickback, let them land where you previously were, then press Kick again to hit them. Every character has a couple frames of landing recovery during which they cannot act, so they are vulnerable to being hit after coming down with a kick. Be cautious not to attack too obviously or over-commit to an attack or you will be easily countered. Kickfactor has a couple hidden nuances. First of all, when it activates, the screen and players are frozen for a second, but various actions continue, such as the timer counting down and opponent's kickfactor draining. You can use a precisely timed Kickfactor activation to give yourself a timeout win. During Kickfactor, you can also use your specials, but they still consume meter. However, you're allowed to use a special you can't afford as long as it only has an upfront meter cost and doesn't drain it over time, so you can end your Kickfactor with an expensive Special to really milk your meter for all it's worth. On the subject of Timeouts, 0 is a full second. Don't make your play for the middle too early. If you're going to time someone out with Kickfactor, do it exactly as the clock ticks down to 0. Headshots are extremely dangerous. Not only do you lose your meter, you're also greatly weakened at the start of the next round. Going on the offensive is almost never an option, you're going to have to try to escape backwards. But you don't want to just immediately kickback a few times and put yourself in the corner or you'll be quickly killed, likely with another Headshot. Even slowed down, your kick can still be threatening, force your opponent to approach cautiously by not giving up too much space at a time. You may be able to stall long enough to survive, or at least make sure you don't get Headshot again. If you are the one who scored the headshot, don't forget that you don't have to go for the kill, you can always take the opportunity to build meter while your opponent is helpless to stop you, which can pay off in the long run. One fairly advanced hidden technique in Divekick is Kara Cancelling. When doing a special, Divekick does not actually require you to press both buttons on the exact same frame, they can be slightly apart and it will still give you the move. However, because most actions in Divekick |
ness that English nationalists can use as a comfort blanket to tell themselves that their nationalism isn’t nationalist at all. And if you’re a Scottish Unionist, you’re helping them in their delusion, and you’re deluding yourself that you’re opposing nationalism when all you’re doing is to foster someone else’s.
This is not the Union that Scotland was promised in 2014 in return for a No vote. This is not the safety and security of EU membership they told us a No vote would achieve. This is not the Scotland which is a much loved and respected equal partner in the great project of Britishness. This is not the Scotland whose parliament and legal rights are enshrined permanently in legislation beyond the reach of capricious British governments which Scotland didn’t vote for. We are living in a bunting bedecked lie. They lied until they were red white and blue in the face. The only surprising thing is that the liars and cheats who drafted the infamous vow didn’t expect that they’d be found out so quickly. They sold us a lie. They sold us a cheat. They deceived, they dissembled. Democracy is dead if the people can be sold a lie and not have any redress. If the powerful cannot be held to account then the people are chattel. There must be another referendum.
The UK won’t respect Scotland. Their judges have ruled that there is no reason to grant Scotland respect, no reason to give Scotland a hearing. Today’s the day that Scotland’s No voters discovered that the UK is not a Union of equals after all, and they’ve only got their cognitive dissonance as a comfort. Scotland won’t get a voice in the UK, we know that now. The only way in which Scotland’s voice can be heard is to stop the pretence that Britain speaks for Scotland and to start to speak for ourselves. It’s time for a second independence referendum.
Audio version of this blog post, courtesy of Sarah Mackie @lumi_1984 https://soundcloud.com/occamshaver/wee-ginger-dug-24th-jan-2017
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http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=2709The system of Synchronotron is a tool for learning the mathematical language of telepathy, which is coded into the Law of Time. It is a teaching from Sirius that contains the language of post-conceptual mind.
Sirius is a binary star – Sirius A and Sirius B. It takes Sirius B approximately 52 years to go in an orbit around Sirius A. This is the basis of the 52- year solar galactic cycle (and why the galactic compass is also called the Sirian Wheel).
Synchronotron refers to the compendium of the practices of the 441 (21 x 21) cube matrix system. This mathematical system represents the minimum fractal of totality cubed: 21 x 21 being the prime statement of totality (20) + 1 (unity). 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21 (unity of totality).
This system was revealed to José Argüelles/Valum Votan 18 years after the discovery of the Law of Time (1989). It began with a dream initiation at the beginning of the Resonant Moon, Red Magnetic Moon Year (January 10, 2007), Kin 117. The number 441 was heard in a dream instigating an on-going process of decoding. He discovered that this 441 cube matrix is a living system of information transmission that is always occurring; the cube is being transmitted to the larger mental field of the solar system and then into the planet.
The second stage of this transmission occurred eight moons later when a cube crop circle appeared at Sugar Hill in Wiltshire, reported on August 1, 2007 (Magnetic Moon 7, Cube 1, Kin 54 year, Kin 60, Long Count 11 Chuen, Kin 11). On the night that this appeared Valum Votan dreamed that he was taken to the center of the cube matrix.
The crop circle contained 18 cubes, 54 faces, and 144 triangles. It was the year Kin 54 (2007) and he perceived this as the clear sign that the Kin 54 year marks the entrance into the 6 cubes of the interdimensional shift. The measure of the first six cubes define the interdimensional shift:
6³ = 216 = 2 Wizard Year
5³ = 125 = 3 Storm Year
4³ = 64 = 4 Seed Year
3³ = 27 = 5 Moon Year
2³ = 8 = 6 Wizard Year
1³ = 1 = 7 Storm Year
This crop circle occurred on the cubing of the first heptad of the fourth ring of the Mystery of the Stone: 54 x 4 = 216. This occurred at the beginning of the Monkey Genesis—20 Tablets, Cube 11: 2007- 2008. “Monkey Genesis Anchors Magic of Lunar Earth Wizards.”
After three years of daily work with this system, the Synchronotron was finally presented publicly at the 7-day Advanced Training Seminar, Babaji Ashram, Cisternino Italy, Lunar Moon 15-21, 4 Seed Year. This seminar is referred to in some of the Intergalactic Bulletins that elucidate different facets of the Synchronotron system.
The ultimate purpose of learning the 441 cube matrix system is to learn how to operate the Holomind Perceiver, a new sense organ located in the corpus callosum (see Book of the Cube). The Holomind Perceiver facilitates the integration of time, space and mind as the principle of radialized synchronization informing the totality of our being. Then we can begin to learn the language of telepathy or the language of Number.
This is a new cosmology based on the eleventh-dimensional system of the cube. It is a telepathic language referencing system that has nothing to do with historical modes. Within this system are various levels of hierarchical command and coding. Anything can be reduced to number and placed into this system.
When studying this system, it is helpful to keep in mind the following:
Number is frequency. Number is the basis of all creation. Everything in creation is based on Number. Number is the primary, exalted language; it precedes and evolves language. After language, there is Number. Number is the telepathic frequency language based on complete whole number mathematics. Number is a dimension, just as space is a dimension and time is a dimension. (where there is Number, there is mind). Number creates order out of time and space. All is number. God is a number. God is in all.
Continue to "Introducing the 441 Matrices"Alternative assumptions for the extrapolation of the cancer risk vs. radiation dose to low-dose levels, given a known risk at a high dose: supra-linearity (A), linear (B), linear-quadratic (C) and hormesis (D).
Radiation hormesis is the hypothesis that low doses of ionizing radiation (within the region of and just above natural background levels) are beneficial, stimulating the activation of repair mechanisms that protect against disease, that are not activated in absence of ionizing radiation (similar to vaccinations). The reserve repair mechanisms are hypothesized to be sufficiently effective when stimulated as to not only cancel the detrimental effects of ionizing radiation but also inhibit disease not related to radiation exposure (see hormesis).[1][2][3][4] This hypothesis has captured the attention of scientists and public alike in recent years.[5]
While the effects of high and acute doses of ionising radiation are easily observed and understood in humans (e.g. Japanese Atomic Bomb survivors), the effects of low-level radiation are very difficult to observe and highly controversial. This is because the baseline cancer rate is already very high and the risk of developing cancer fluctuates 40% because of individual life style and environmental effects,[6][7] obscuring the subtle effects of low-level radiation. An acute effective dose of 100 millisieverts may increase cancer risk by ~0.8%. However, children are particularly sensitive to radioactivity, with childhood leukemias and other cancers increasing even within natural and man-made background radiation levels (under 4 mSv cumulative with 1 mSv being an average annual dose from terrestrial and cosmic radiation excluding radon which primarily doses the lung).[8][9] There is also indication that exposures around this dose level will cause negative subclinical health impacts to neural development. Students born in regions of Sweden with higher Chernobyl fallout performed worse in secondary school, particularly in mathematics. “Damage is accentuated within families (i.e., siblings comparison) and among children born to parents with low education..." who often don't have the resources to overcome this additional health challenge.[10]
Hormesis remains largely unknown to the public. Government and regulatory bodies disagree on the existence of radiation hormesis and research points to the "severe problems and limitations" with the use of hormesis in general as the "principal dose-response default assumption in a risk assessment process charged with ensuring public health protection."[11]
Quoting results from a literature database research, the Académie des Sciences – Académie nationale de Médecine (French Academy of Sciences – National Academy of Medicine) stated in their 2005 report concerning the effects of low-level radiation that many laboratory studies have observed radiation hormesis.[12][13] However, they cautioned that it is not yet known if radiation hormesis occurs outside the laboratory, or in humans.[14]
Reports by the United States National Research Council and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) argue[15] that there is no evidence for hormesis in humans and in the case of the National Research Council hormesis is outright rejected as a possibility.[16] Therefore, estimating Linear no-threshold model (LNT) continues to be the model generally used by regulatory agencies for human radiation exposure.
Proposed mechanism and ongoing debate [ edit ]
A very low dose of a chemical agent may trigger from an organism the opposite response to a very high dose.
Radiation hormesis proposes that radiation exposure comparable to and just above the natural background level of radiation is not harmful but beneficial, while accepting that much higher levels of radiation are hazardous. Proponents of radiation hormesis typically claim that radio-protective responses in cells and the immune system not only counter the harmful effects of radiation but additionally act to inhibit spontaneous cancer not related to radiation exposure. Radiation hormesis stands in stark contrast to the more generally accepted linear no-threshold model (LNT), which states that the radiation dose-risk relationship is linear across all doses, so that small doses are still damaging, albeit less so than higher ones. Opinion pieces on chemical and radiobiological hormesis appeared in the journals Nature[1] and Science[3] in 2003.
Assessing the risk of radiation at low doses (<100 mSv) and low dose rates (<0.1 mSv.min−1) is highly problematic and controversial.[17][18] While epidemiological studies on populations of people exposed to an acute dose of high level radiation such as Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivors (hibakusha (被爆者)) have robustly upheld the LNT (mean dose ~210 mSv),[19] studies involving low doses and low dose rates have failed to detect any increased cancer rate.[18] This is because the baseline cancer rate is already very high (~42 of 100 people will be diagnosed in their lifetime) and it fluctuates ~40% because of lifestyle and environmental effects,[7][20] obscuring the subtle effects of low level radiation. Epidemiological studies may be capable of detecting elevated cancer rates as low as 1.2 to 1.3 i.e. 20% to 30% increase. But for low doses (1–100 mSv) the predicted elevated risks are only 1.001 to 1.04 and excess cancer cases, if present, cannot be detected due to confounding factors, errors and biases.[20][21][22]
In particular, variations in smoking prevalence or even accuracy in reporting smoking cause wide variation in excess cancer and measurement error bias. Thus, even a large study of many thousands of subjects with imperfect smoking prevalence information will fail to detect the effects of low level radiation than a smaller study that properly compensates for smoking prevalence.[23] Given the absence of direct epidemiological evidence, there is considerable debate as to whether the dose-response relationship <100 mSv is supralinear, linear (LNT), has a threshold, is sub-linear, or whether the coefficient is negative with a sign change, i.e. a hormetic response.
The radiation adaptive response seems to be a main origin of the potential hormetic effect. The theoretical studies indicate that the adaptive response is responsible for the shape of dose-response curve and can transform the linear relationship (LNT) into the hormetic one.[24]
While most major consensus reports and government bodies currently adhere to LNT,[25] the 2005 French Academy of Sciences-National Academy of Medicine's report concerning the effects of low-level radiation rejected LNT as a scientific model of carcinogenic risk at low doses.[14]
Using LNT to estimate the carcinogenic effect at doses of less than 20 mSv is not justified in the light of current radiobiologic knowledge.
They consider there to be several dose-effect relationships rather than only one, and that these relationships have many variables such as target tissue, radiation dose, dose rate and individual sensitivity factors. They request that further study is required on low doses (less than 100 mSv) and very low doses (less than 10 mSv) as well as the impact of tissue type and age. The Academy considers the LNT model is only useful for regulatory purposes as it simplifies the administrative task. Quoting results from literature research,[12][13] they furthermore claim that approximately 40% of laboratory studies on cell cultures and animals indicate some degree of chemical or radiobiological hormesis, and state:
...its existence in the laboratory is beyond question and its mechanism of action appears well understood.
They go on to outline a growing body of research that illustrates that the human body is not a passive accumulator of radiation damage but it actively repairs the damage caused via a number of different processes, including:[14][18]
Mechanisms that mitigate reactive oxygen species generated by ionizing radiation and oxidative stress.
Apoptosis of radiation damaged cells that may undergo tumorigenesis is initiated at only few mSv.
Cell death during meiosis of radiation damaged cells that were unsuccessfully repaired.
The existence of a cellular signaling system that alerts neighboring cells of cellular damage.
The activation of enzymatic DNA repair mechanisms around 10 mSv.
Modern DNA microarray studies which show that numerous genes are activated at radiation doses well below the level that mutagenesis is detected.
Radiation-induced tumorigenesis may have a threshold related to damage density, as revealed by experiments that employ blocking grids to thinly distribute radiation.
A large increase in tumours in immunosuppressed individuals illustrates that the immune system efficiently destroys aberrant cells and nascent tumors.
Furthermore, increased sensitivity to radiation induced cancer in the inherited condition Ataxia-telangiectasia like disorder, illustrates the damaging effects of loss of the repair gene Mre11h resulting in the inability to fix DNA double-strand breaks.[26]
The BEIR-VII report argued that, "the presence of a true dose threshold demands totally error-free DNA damage response and repair." The specific damage they worry about is double strand breaks (DSBs) and they continue, "error-prone nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) repair in postirradiation cellular response, argues strongly against a DNA repair-mediated low-dose threshold for cancer initiation".[27] Recent research observed that DSBs caused by CAT scans are repaired within 24-hours and DSBs maybe more efficiently repaired at low doses, suggesting the risk ionizing radiation at low doses may not by directly proportional to the dose.[28][29] However, it is not known if low dose ionizing radiation stimulates the repair of DSBs not caused by ionizing radiation i.e. a hormetic response.
Radon gas in homes is the largest source of radiation dose for most individuals and it is generally advised that the concentration be kept below 150 Bq/m³ (4 pCi/L).[30] A recent retrospective case-control study of lung cancer risk showed substantial cancer rate reduction between 50 and 123 Bq per cubic meter relative to a group at zero to 25 Bq per cubic meter.[31] This study is cited as evidence for hormesis, but a single study all by itself cannot be regarded as definitive. Other studies into the effects of domestic radon exposure have not reported a hormetic effect; including for example the respected "Iowa Radon Lung Cancer Study" of Field et al. (2000), which also used sophisticated radon exposure dosimetry.[32] In addition, Darby et al. (2005) argue that radon exposure is negatively correlated with the tendency to smoke and environmental studies need to accurately control for this; people living in urban areas where smoking rates are higher usually have lower levels of radon exposure due the increased prevalence of multi-story dwellings.[33] When doing so, they found a significant increase in lung cancer amongst smokers exposed to radon at doses as low as 100 to 199 Bq m−3 and warned that smoking greatly increases the risk posed by radon exposure i.e. reducing the prevalence of smoking would decrease deaths caused by radon.[33][34] However, the discussion about the opposite experimental results is still going on,[35] especially the popular US and German studies have found some hormetic effects.[36][37]
Furthermore, particle microbeam studies show that passage of even a single alpha particle (e.g. from radon and its progeny) through cell nuclei is highly mutagenic,[38] and that alpha radiation may have a higher mutagenic effect at low doses (even if a small fraction of cells are hit by alpha particles) than predicted by linear no-threshold model, a phenomenon attributed to bystander effect.[39] However, there is currently insufficient evidence at hand to suggest that the bystander effect promotes carcinogenesis in humans at low doses.[40]
Statements by leading nuclear bodies [ edit ]
Radiation hormesis has not been accepted by either the United States National Research Council,[16] or the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP).[41] In May 2018, the NCRP published the report of an interdisciplinary group of radiation experts who critically reviewed 29 high-quality epidemiologic studies of populations exposed to radiation in the low dose and low dose-rate range, mostly published within the last 10 years.[42] The group of experts concluded:
The recent epidemiologic studies support the continued use of the LNT model for radiation protection. This is in accord with judgments by other national and international scientific committees, based on somewhat older data, that no alternative dose-response relationship appears more pragmatic or prudent for radiation protection purposes than the LNT model.
In addition, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) wrote in its most recent report:[43]
Until the [...] uncertainties on low-dose response are resolved, the Committee believes that an increase in the risk of tumour induction proportionate to the radiation dose is consistent with developing knowledge and that it remains, accordingly, the most scientifically defensible approximation of low-dose response. However, a strictly linear dose response should not be expected in all circumstances.
This is a reference to the fact that very low doses of radiation have only marginal impacts on individual health outcomes. It is therefore difficult to detect the'signal' of decreased or increased morbidity and mortality due to low-level radiation exposure in the 'noise' of other effects. The notion of radiation hormesis has been rejected by the National Research Council's (part of the National Academy of Sciences) 16-year-long study on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. "The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial. The health risks – particularly the development of solid cancers in organs – rise proportionally with exposure" says Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.[44][16]
The possibility that low doses of radiation may have beneficial effects (a phenomenon often referred to as “hormesis”) has been the subject of considerable debate. Evidence for hormetic effects was reviewed, with emphasis on material published since the 1990 BEIR V study on the health effects of exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation. Although examples of apparent stimulatory or protective effects can be found in cellular and animal biology, the preponderance of available experimental information does not support the contention that low levels of ionizing radiation have a beneficial effect. The mechanism of any such possible effect remains obscure. At this time, the assumption that any stimulatory hormetic effects from low doses of ionizing radiation will have a significant health benefit to humans that exceeds potential detrimental effects from radiation exposure at the same dose is unwarranted. [16]
Studies of low level radiation [ edit ]
Very high natural background gamma radiation cancer rates at Kerala, India [ edit ]
Kerala's monazite sand (containing a third of the world's economically recoverable reserves of radioactive thorium) emits about 8 micro Sieverts per hour of gamma radiation, 80 times the dose rate equivalent in London, but a decade long study of 69,985 residents published in Health Physics in 2009: "showed no excess cancer risk from exposure to terrestrial gamma radiation. The excess relative risk of cancer excluding leukemia was estimated to be -0.13 Gy_1 (95% CI: -0.58, 0.46)", indicating no statistically significant positive or negative relationship between background radiation levels and cancer risk in this sample.[45]
Cultures [ edit ]
Studies in cell cultures can be useful for finding mechanisms for biological processes, but they also can be criticized for not effectively capturing the whole of the living organism.
A study by E.I. Azzam suggested that pre-exposure to radiation causes cells to turn on protection mechanisms.[46] A different study by de Toledo and collaborators, has shown that irradiation with gamma rays increases the concentration of glutathione, an antioxidant found in cells.[47]
In 2011, an in vitro study led by S.V. Costes showed in time-lapse images a strongly non-linear response of certain cellular repair mechanisms called radiation-induced foci (RIF). The study found that low doses of radiation prompted higher rates of RIF formation than high doses, and that after low-dose exposure RIF continued to form after the radiation had ended. Measured rates of RIF formation were 15 RIF/Gy at 2 Gy, and 64 RIF/Gy at.1 Gy.[29] These results suggest that low dose levels of ionizing radiation may not increase cancer risk directly proportional to dose and thus contradict the linear-no-threshold standard model.[48] Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher and collaborator in this study stated “Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses. This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”[48]
Animals [ edit ]
An early study on mice exposed to low dose of radiation daily (0.11 R per day) suggest that they may outlive control animals.[49] A study by Otsuka and collaborators found hormesis in animals.[50] Miyachi conducted a study on mice and found that a 200 mGy X-ray dose protects mice against both further X-ray exposure and ozone gas.[51] In another rodent study, Sakai and collaborators found that (1 mGy/hr) gamma irradiation prevents the development of cancer (induced by chemical means, injection of methylcholanthrene).[52]
In a 2006 paper,[53] a dose of 1 Gy was delivered to the cells (at constant rate from a radioactive source) over a series of lengths of time. These were between 8.77 and 87.7 hours, the abstract states for a dose delivered over 35 hours or more (low dose rate) no transformation of the cells occurred. Also for the 1 Gy dose delivered over 8.77 to 18.3 hours that the biological effect (neoplastic transformation) was about "1.5 times less than that measured at high dose rate in previous studies with a similar quality of [X-ray] radiation." Likewise it has been reported that fractionation of gamma irradiation reduces the likelihood of a neoplastic transformation.[54] Pre-exposure to fast neutrons and gamma rays from Cs-137 is reported to increase the ability of a second dose to induce a neoplastic transformation.[55]
Caution must be used in interpreting these results, as it noted in the BEIR VII report, these pre-doses can also increase cancer risk:
In chronic low-dose experiments with dogs (75 mGy/d for the duration of life), vital hematopoietic progenitors showed increased radioresistance along with renewed proliferative capacity (Seed and Kaspar 1992). Under the same conditions, a subset of animals showed an increased repair capacity as judged by the unscheduled DNA synthesis assay (Seed and Meyers 1993). Although one might interpret these observations as an adaptive effect at the cellular level, the exposed animal population experienced a high incidence of myeloid leukemia and related myeloproliferative disorders. The authors concluded that “the acquisition of radioresistance and associated repair functions under the strong selective and mutagenic pressure of chronic radiation is tied temporally and causally to leukemogenic transformation by the radiation exposure” (Seed and Kaspar 1992). BEIR VII report, [16]
However, 75 mGy/d cannot be accurately described as a low dose rate – it is equivalent to over 27 sieverts per year. The same study on dogs showed no increase in cancer nor reduction in life expectancy for dogs irradiated at 3 mGy/d.[56]
Humans [ edit ]
Effects of sunlight exposure [ edit ]
In an Australian study which analyzed the association between solar UV exposure and DNA damage, the results indicated that although the frequency of cells with chromosome breakage increased with increasing sun exposure, the misrepair of DNA strand breaks decreased as sun exposure was heightened.[57]
Effects of cobalt-60 exposure [ edit ]
The health of the inhabitants of radioactive apartment buildings in Taiwan has received prominent attention in popular treatments of radiation hormesis. In 1982, more than 20,000 tons of steel was accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60, and much of this radioactive steel was used to build apartments and exposed thousands of Taiwanese to gamma radiation levels of up to >1000 times background (average 47.7 mSv, maximum 2360 mSv excess cumulative dose) – it was not until 1992 that the radioactive contamination was discovered. A medical study published in 2004 claimed the cancer mortality rates in the exposed population were much lower than expected.[58] However, this initial study failed to control for age, comparing a much younger exposed population (mean age 17.2 years at initial exposure) with the much older general population of Taiwan (mean age approx. 34 years in 2004), a serious flaw.[59][60] Older people have much higher cancer rates even in the absence of excess radiation exposure.
A subsequent study by Hwang et al. (2006) found the incidence of "all cancers" in the irradiated population was 40% lower than expected (95 vs. 160.3 cases expected), except for leukaemia in men (6 vs. 1.8 cases expected) and thyroid cancer in women (6 vs. 2.8 cases expected), an increase only detected amongst those exposed before the age of 30. Hwang et al. proposed that the lower rate of "all cancers" might be due to the exposed populations higher socioeconomic status and thus overall healthier lifestyle, but this was difficult to prove. Additionally, they cautioned that leukaemia was the first cancer type found to be elevated amongst the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, so it may be decades before any increase in more common cancer types is seen.[59]
Besides the excess risks of leukaemia and thyroid cancer, a later publication notes various DNA anomalies and other health effects among the exposed population:[61]
There have been several reports concerning the radiation effects on the exposed population, including cytogenetic analysis that showed increased micronucleus frequencies in peripheral lymphocytes in the exposed population, increases in acentromeric and single or multiple centromeric cytogenetic damages, and higher frequencies of chromosomal translocations, rings and dicentrics. Other analyses have shown persistent depression of peripheral leucocytes and neutrophils, increased eosinophils, altered distributions of lymphocyte subpopulations, increased frequencies of lens opacities, delays in physical development among exposed children, increased risk of thyroid abnormalities, and late consequences in hematopoietic adaptation in children.
Effects of no radiation [ edit ]
Given the uncertain effects of low-level and very-low-level radiation, there is a pressing need for quality research in this area. An expert panel convened at the 2006 Ultra-Low-Level Radiation Effects Summit at Carlsbad, New Mexico, proposed the construction of an Ultra-Low-Level Radiation laboratory.[62] The laboratory, if built, will investigate the effects of almost no radiation on laboratory animals and cell cultures, and it will compare these groups to control groups exposed to natural radiation levels. Precautions would be made, for example, to remove potassium-40 from the food of laboratory animals. The expert panel believes that the Ultra-Low-Level Radiation laboratory is the only experiment that can explore with authority and confidence the effects of low-level radiation; that it can confirm or discard the various radiobiological effects proposed at low radiation levels e.g. LNT, threshold and radiation hormesis.[63]
The first preliminary results of the effects of almost no-radiation on cell cultures was reported by two research groups in 2011 and 2012; researchers in the US studied cell cultures protected from radiation in a steel chamber 650 meters underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico[64] and researchers in Europe reported the effects of almost no-radiation on mouse cells (pKZ1 transgenic chromosomal inversion assay).[65]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]An Iranian nuclear scientist spy who returned home last week from the United States provided valuable information about the CIA, a semi-official news agency reported Wednesday.
Shahram Amiri's tale will be made into a TV movie, the agency reported.
American authorities have claimed Amiri willingly defected to the U.S. but changed his mind and decided to return home without the $5 million US he had been paid for what a U.S. official described as "significant" information about his country's disputed nuclear program.
The Fars news agency quoted an unidentified source as saying that Iran's intelligence agents were in touch with Amiri while he was in the U.S. and that they won an intelligence battle against the CIA.
Iran has portrayed the return of Amiri as a blow to American intelligence services that it says were desperate for inside information about Iran's nuclear program.
Iran has sought to make maximum propaganda gains from the affair, allowing journalists to cover Amiri's return, sending a senior Foreign Ministry official to greet him and preparing to make a movie about his story.If lawmakers want evidence of such abuse, they need look no further than the federal courts in the Eastern District of Texas. Patent trolls have shown a growing preference for bringing their lawsuits in this jurisdiction as they harass and threaten some of our economy’s most innovative job creators and financial service providers.
Like the explosion early last decade of asbestos lawsuits in Illinois’ rural Madison County or the brazen efforts by some judges in Philadelphia to attract multidistrict litigation plaintiffs from across the country, plaintiff-friendly court rules and the ultimate success rate of plaintiffs in East Texas have drawn an increasing and wildly disproportionate number of patent litigation tourists in recent years. At least one California-based troll has gone so far as to set up a nonprofit foundation within the district to which it transfers its patents for the sole purpose of filing lawsuits there.
According to a recent article by intellectual property lawyer James Pistorino, excluding so-called “false marking” cases, the troublesome Texas district’s new patent lawsuit filings in 2010 grew by 20 percent over the previous year. Its new cases outnumbered new cases in every other federal district and, in all, included 3,879 defendants -- a 70 percent increase from 2009 and more than four times the next highest number for new defendants, 884, in the District of Delaware. Troubling, and perhaps most telling, is the fact that more than 25 percent of all defendants sued in new patent cases nationwide in 2010 were sued in this Texas district.
Privately, many defense attorneys who are critical of the jurisdiction point to local rule changes initiated by Judge T. John Ward and embraced by Judges Leonard Davis and David Folsom. These problematic rules in Texas have served to speed up trials, largely to the advantage of patent plaintiffs who enjoy both a rate of success and average award for damages there that are among the highest of all federal court districts.
But the problem with patent lawsuits is not confined to Texas. Caseloads have risen nationally, driven largely by litigation of so-called “business method” patents involving financial services, in particular. Harvard’s Josh Lerner has found that these patents are litigated at a rate 39 times greater than other patents. Section 18 of the pending patent legislation represents significant tort reform by specifically focusing on litigation against businesses that engage in or manage a routine financial activity, including invoicing, over-the-counter sales transactions and electronic payments.
Not surprisingly, the ever-aggressive plaintiff's bar is bankrolling a major lobbying effort to strip Section 18 from the Senate-passed reform bill when it comes up for a vote on the House floor. Although more could be done to rein in patent lawsuit abuse, Section 18 is a solid step forward and will benefit both economic growth and every consumer of financial services.
Fair-minded Americans agree that intellectual property rights must be enforced if the nation’s unique brand of entrepreneurial capitalism is to thrive in an increasingly competitive 21st century. But Congress cannot allow parasitic patent trolls to abuse the civil justice system. Senators should investigate the Eastern District of Texas when they consider nominees for two pending judicial vacancies there. In the meantime, the House should promptly pass patent reform legislation, with Section 18 intact. Both actions would serve to reduce the drag that patent trolls now impose on our economy.
Tiger Joyce is president of the American Tort Reform Association, based in Washington, D.C.Share. Coming to PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Coming to PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
A star is about to explode in front of me. Survivors are stranded after their ship was destroyed. Klingons are attacking. And all I can do is hope the rest of the bridge crew next to me on the U.S.S. Aegis work alongside me to make sure we warp away safely.
That cuts to the core of the experience playing Ubisoft's new VR title, Star Trek: Bridge Crew: teamwork is everything. Each of the four players in the game's titular bridge crew have a specific job to do, and all you can hope is that everyone is going to hold up their end of the game. It also makes you want to be an expert in all four of the options: the captain's chair, engineering, tactical and helm.
Exit Theatre Mode
"The bridge crew is the heart of Star Trek," Red Storm Senior Creative Director David Votypka explained during an E3 demo. "It's about the dynamics between these people, their relationships and how they survive together, and that is what the game is about."
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is set in J.J. Abrams' movie universe, but Votypka said there was a pointed decision to not have the game take place on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Bridge Crew is able to maintain a suspension of disbelief about your role in Starfleet since you aren't pretending to be Captain Kirk. It's easy to imagine you're a part of your own crew on your own ship being sent on your own missions that can happen concurrent with whatever is taking place in the films.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew Photos 7 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 07 01 OF 07 Star Trek: Bridge Crew Photos Ubisoft Download Image Captions ESC
Even if you aren't a diehard fan of Star Trek, Bridge Crew has an easy point of entry. There's a simple tutorial of your role at the beginning of the game, but no need to "go to Starfleet for three years to learn how to operate your station."
"We want it to be a lighthearted social experience. We want players to have fun," said Votypka. "We don't want to create a complex tactical simulation."
Exit Theatre Mode
Those are the four player options for Bridge Crew, which is slated for a fall 2016 launch date. Sitting down alongside two peers in the press during my demo, we relied on a Ubisoft demoer to lead us through our Aegis mission from the captain's chair.
I volunteered to take the tactical seat; my |
. Ensign later found a job for the chief of staff and his parents paid the couple $96,000. Vitter, who is up for reelection, was connected to a prostitution ring in 2007.
Anti-Washington sentiment
When he accepted the Democratic nomination in August 2008, Obama pledged to fix the “broken politics of Washington.”
Nearly two years later, Washington has become, by most accounts, more partisan. Routine legislative measures, such as an extension of unemployment benefits and a freeze in cuts to doctors’ Medicare reimbursements, have become heavy lifts.
An estimated 200,000 Americans are expected to lose unemployment insurance this week because of failure to reach compromise on a one-week extension.
Democratic strategists note that Republicans aren’t faring any better than Democrats in generic public opinion surveys. But they admit the national mood is more of a problem for Democrats because they control more seats in Congress.
“It’s an anti-incumbent year and we have more incumbents than [Republicans] do,” said Erik Smith, who served as a senior aide to former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt (Mo.).
Smith contrasted this year to 2006, which he called an anti-Republican year, and 1994, which he called an anti-Democratic year — two election years when control of Congress flipped.
Smith said a lot of “marginal” Democrats survived in 2006 and 2008 because those were good years for the election cycle. He said the environment is significantly different and vulnerable lawmakers’ toughest job will be convincing voters that the economy is improving.
“It will be a hard sell to folks who don’t have jobs that the economy is getting better,” he said.The thin ice crunches as the cutter breaks through, chugging along at a leisurely pace to the middle of the fjord. In the wheelhouse, Anders Stigebrandt has his steel blue eyes locked on the screen in front of him. He's in a great mood. It's been another good day of outsmarting nature.
The boat passes a few red wooden houses on the shore beyond the Swedish port city of Uddevalla, where too much industrial sewage has been allowed too drain into the fjord.
The nutrients contained in the runoff of fertilizers, sewage sludge and liquid manure all encourage the growth of algae. When the algae later dies, it sinks to the sea floor, where it decomposes with the help of micro-organisms, which consume the oxygen of the deep in the process. In turn, fish, mussels and crustaceans disappear from these oxygen-poor areas.
The Byfjord on Sweden's west coast serves as Stigebrandt's model for the largest marine death zone ever created by humans -- a 60,000 square kilometer patch of the Baltic Sea floor. Over the years, some 20 million tons of nitrogen and 2 million tons of phosphorus have flowed into the semi-enclosed sea, and it is slowly running out of life-giving oxygen.
Stigebrandt wants to artificially aerate it, and his experiment in the fjord is intended as the start of a much larger project in the Baltic.
Big Plans for the Baltic
His two colleagues jump onto a raft anchored in the water, where two pumps with propellers as large as cement mixers are rotating above the surface. They are pushing water masses into the depths below.
At this location the fjord is around 40 meters (131 feet) deep. From the shore, the sea floor drops rapidly to form a basin, and the conditions are comparable to those in the Baltic Sea, where the water near the surface has more oxygen and less salt than the water below. Due to the difference in salt content, the two layers hardly mix naturally at all.
The propellers whir, and the apparatus sounds like an oversized aquarium. Slowly, the pumps begin to mix the water layers, bringing more oxygen to the deep and more salt to shallower depths. This helps the water to mix better. But Stigebrandt is also hoping to take advantage of another effect: When oxygen is present on the sea floor, it also helps to bind the phosphates that are so damaging to sea life populations to the sediments -- thus reducing the amount of phosphorus found in the water column.
Next, Stigebrandt wants to test the pumps in the Baltic Sea, preferably powered by wind. Swedish authorities have funded his initial experiment with some 230,000 ($302,000). It is estimated that oxygenating the Baltic Sea would require around 100 pump stations, and would come at a cost of around 200 million.
Doubts About Environmental Benefits
Stigebrandt's biggest critic, Daniel Conley, says he finds the experiment fascinating, but hopes the idea never comes to fruition. "Of course it could work," says the biochemistry professor at Sweden's Lund University. "We sent people to the moon and dried up one of China's largest lakes. If we wanted to, we could oxygenate the entire Baltic Sea." But, he adds, it would likely never be the same.
The oceanographer warns that a lower salt content on the sea floor could drive marine life away. "It's possible the codfish would cease to spawn," Conley says. Furthermore, toxins from the sediment that has thus far been resting on the sea floor could be introduced into the food chain -- poisons such as DDT, an insecticide that was banned in Germany in 1972.
"That's ridiculous," Stigebrandt says, adding that his group has examined the project's risks closely. Far more remarkable, he says, are the results of the testing in the fjord, where sea worms have settled in because there is now enough oxygen for them to inhabit the area. Certainly his critics could have wished for nothing more, the scientist adds.
Unpredictable Sea
At the same time, it is also true that immense water circulation can still occur naturally in the Baltic, which is connected to the North Sea via small straits. When wind conditions are favorable, oxygen-rich water flows in, although this has been happening less frequently in recent decades.
In the 1980s, countries that border the Baltic Sea coast began modernizing sewage systems and restricting excessive fertilization by farmers. The result was that fewer nutrients have been drained into the water, but it is likely the state of the inland sea will only change slowly over the next 50 to 100 years. The intent was to make the waters ecologically sound again by 2021.
Advocates of the artificial oxygenation like Stigebrandt argue that waiting alone won't suffice and urge that action be taken. Similar experiments involving pumps are being conducted in the Gulf of Finland. And in the Stockholm archipelago, another group is testing a chemical in the water that has been used to purify sewage. Nevertheless, none of these projects eliminates the root cause of the glut of nutrients in the water.
As to the question of what the effects the project would have on the ecosystem, both supporters and critics are cautious. The sea is unpredictable, they say.The Dallas Makerspace, along with sister organization, Dallas Personal Robotics Group (DPRG) will be out for our annual Tanner Electronics event on October 20th. Event will start at 10 am and run till about 2pm. Both groups will have tables set up that showcase some of the neat projects we’ve been working on. This is a great chance for people to come out with kids to see what we’re all about, even meet some robots! It’s also a great precursor to our annual Open House which is coming up in November. There will be robots, electric bikes, 3D printers, and so much more! So come with family and friends to Tanner’s and meet the men and women behind the Maker Movement in Dallas!
Location: Tanner Electronics
1100 Valwood Parkway, Suite #100
Carrollton, TX 75006
Check out their website (link is above) for more photographs of past events!COLUMBUS, Ohio – For Greg Vanney, Toronto FC’s comeback win Wednesday night was less of a chess match and more of a gut check.
Vanney’s men came back from a 0-1 deficit to beat Columbus Crew SC via two Tosaint Ricketts goals in the match’s final 10 minutes, stunning the home team.
Along the way, Vanney was constantly tinkering with his squad. He made a tactical first-half substitution in the 40th minute, sending on Ricketts to replace Chris Mavinga and shifting his team from a 3-6-1 diamond shape to something more akin to their usual 3-5-2.
By the end of the match, Toronto seemed to have played several different formations, pushing striker Jozy Altidore wide right at times and adding wingback Raheem Edwards, who had assists on both Ricketts goals.
And while it was Vanney’s substitutions and changes that ultimately made the difference in the match, the Reds boss said he was simply proud of his team’s ability to grind out a fifth win in a row in a span of 20 days.
“It wasn’t necessarily what I would call our comfort zone, which is why it took some grit and determination to get there in the end,” he said. “It was a game with a few different nuances for us, shape-wise, and we just kept working through it.”
The changes allowed playmaker Victor Vazquez to find a more comfortable position, and that shift was crucial for Toronto. Vazquez picked up assists on both goals, and now has eight assists in eight starts to lead the league.
Ricketts said the Spanish midfielder “controls the attack and momentum” of the team, and Vanney credited Vazquez for fighting through “the amount of defending we had to do” and go a full 90 minutes.
But for Vanney, the biggest takeaway from this stretch has been his team’s depth. He called his squad the “deepest team in the history of the league” last weekend, and after using plenty of his bench against Columbus, Vanney again praised his large selection pool.
“They’re good players,” he said. “It’s a challenge for me to pick who should be on the field each week and each game and to try to make sure that everybody feels like they have a part in it [because] they know they’re fully capable of playing.
“So it puts a lot of pressure on the guys who are starting to do well, because they know those guys are behind. The competition is great for our group. It’s what got us to where we got to at the end of last year and hopefully it’s what’s going to make us great this year.”
That depth may be a bit less necessary when TFC host Minnesota United Saturday (3 pm ET | CTV in Canada, MLS LIVE in US). Superstar Sebastian Giovinco didn’t travel with a slight heel injury, and the striker is expected back this weekend.
“I think it’s very likely,” Vanney said. “He was close for this game, but it became a risk-reward for a longer-term [injury]. But I think he’ll be good by Saturday.”Feedly is a replacement for Google Reader, a tool for bringing headlines and articles from your favorite websites into a single place. (Photo: Anick Jesdanun AP) Story Highlights Google shutting Reader on July 1
RSS feeds (for'really simple syndication') push content to you
Feedly is a handy replacement for Google Reader
NEW YORK (AP) — On July 1, we say goodbye to Google Reader, a handy tool for bringing headlines and articles from your favorite websites into a single place.
With Reader, I've been able to see at a glance all the updates from various news services, blogs and company websites I follow. Although many of these items relate to work, I have added a few fun topics, too, including news on Antarctica and a daily dose of passive aggressive notes that people send each other.
I have spent a lot of time curating Reader, so I'm not keen on seeing it die.
Fortunately, there's an afterlife. Google has made it easy to move your list of sites you follow, known as feeds, to another service. And many of those rival services have made it easy to accept those feeds, especially after Google said in March that it would retire Reader.
Reader's demise comes as little surprise. Google says usage has declined since Reader made its debut in 2005.
RSS feeds — for really simple syndication — used to be a popular way to keep track of multiple websites without having to visit each and every one. Content comes to you, through readers such as Google Reader. More recently, though, Twitter and Facebook have performed a similar role in discovering content. I myself have logged on to Reader less frequently because keeping up with more than 150 feeds from dozens of sites became overwhelming.
Yet I still check it now and then for a glimpse of what's out there.
As July 1 approached, I looked at a half-dozen alternative services. All of them are free, like Reader. It didn't take long to find one that exceeds what Reader offers in many ways, though a few omissions will leave me missing Google's offering.
The service that stands out is Feedly. An update available now allows Feedly to run on just about any major Web browser. The service also is available through apps on the iPhone, the iPad and Android devices.
Transferring your feeds from Reader is easy.
Most other services require you to create a data file of those feeds using a Google tool called Takeout. It's fairly straightforward, but you then have to save the file to your computer and import that to the service. In one case, only one of the more than 150 feeds survived the transfer because of some glitch.
With Feedly, you can skip that step. Simply log in with your Google account, and all that gets done automatically. There's also no need to create and remember a separate Feedly account. You use your Google credentials each time you're back.
On Reader, I have my feeds organized by category into folders. Those categories remain intact on Feedly, though they appear alphabetical rather than topical, as I had arranged them on Reader. It isn't too difficult to reorder them.
Feedly excels in highlighting the most popular items from all your feeds, based on sharing and other interactions on Feedly and elsewhere. Simply visit a page called "Today." Under the default layout, you see headlines and the first sentence or two of each item. You can click on any item for more.
You can also share the item on a number of social networking sites. That freedom isn't available on Reader, which confines sharing to Google's own Plus service.
My four main complaints with Feedly:
— You can save a link to read later, but it would have been better had Feedly fetched those items as well so you can read them offline.
— Although the service lets you email items to others, you have to go through stand-alone software such as Outlook, which is often tied to your work account. By contrast, Reader lets you email over the Web using Google's own Gmail service.
— With Reader, items are automatically marked as read as I scroll down, so that they won't reappear the next time. Feedly does that, too, in a non-default layout that most resembles Reader's. That part is good. But while Feedly offers additional layout options, it doesn't take full advantage of its greater breadth. It would have been nice to have auto-marking when scrolling in those layouts as well.
— Many websites let you easily add their feeds by clicking on a button. Reader is usually among the options, but Feedly isn't yet. Instead, you must copy and paste the Web address for the feed into Feedly. But Feedly is better than Reader at suggesting feeds to add, if you don't have specific ones in mind for a given topic.
I did try one other service that makes it as easy as Feedly to transfer feeds from Reader and discover new ones. But that service, called Pulse, does require you to set up a separate Pulse account or use Facebook's — not Google's. If you can get past that added hassle, Pulse does the rest of the work for you once you log in to your Google account. There's no Google data file to create, save and import.
Unfortunately, articles are presented as tiles, similar to what you see in Microsoft's oft-criticized Windows 8 operating system. That works fine when you're choosing apps on a tablet computer. On desktop and laptop computers, I find a list much easier to read and scroll through. I had a backlog of more than 20,000 articles, and I wasn't about to click on 20,000 squares.
There are dozens of other services I didn't get a chance to try. Some of them are more geared toward mobile devices. Others are still in development. For example, a popular site called Digg promises one on June 26, just five days before Reader's cutoff.
I'm sure there's one out there that matches or exceeds what Feedly offers, but I saw no need to look further.
Feedly has tripled its user base to 12 million since Google announced Reader's retirement. The growth has given Feedly incentive to work on new features. Feedly has also designed the system so that outside developers can build apps for it. You can use one to run Feedly on BlackBerry phones, for instance.
Feedly isn't perfect, but switching to it will make Reader's demise easier to accept.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/16muWMWPro-Corbyn blogger @Rachael_Swindon is one of the most tireless campaigners for Labour, Corbyn and a fairer society that you’ll ever find.
As well as blogging and creating some of the strongest memes to support Labour’s message, she is a full-time mother of two kids who also cares full-time for her disabled husband, who recently took a turn for the worse. As a result, she and her family are in the support group of ESA and PIP, which allowed them – just about – to scrape by, except when the DWP screwed up.
Until now.
Because of her effectiveness, Rachael has angered right-wingers both inside and outside the Labour party. Because she has a ‘donate’ button on her blog, in case the occasional donation comes in to help eke out meagre benefits, someone made a malicious report to the DWP, triggering an investigation.
Let’s be clear, Rachael has done nothing wrong – being on benefits doesn’t mean someone can’t give you a gift. It’s not earned income. But the DWP has suspended all benefits to Rachael and her family while they investigate – pushing her into desperate straits that have now become very desperate indeed..
This is part of a clearly coordinated series of attacks on some of the most effective pro-Corbyn bloggers and campaigners. The SKWAWKBOX has been targeted, as have others.
The ‘person’ responsible for this is slime. But there are far more good -hearted people out there.
If you are able to help Rachael, however small the amount, please go as soon as you can to her blog and use the donate button. Thank you for your help for great campaigner in an emergency, who’s paying a high price for doing the right thing – and for your support for the cause of making this a better country to live in.
Like this: Like Loading...Why The Dark Phoenix Saga Is The Perfect Way to End the X-Men Movies By Adam Holmes Random Article Blend The X-Men movie series has had its ups and downs since beginning in 2000, and it looks like we're heading back into the latter territory. While X-Men: Apocalypse wasn't the worst superhero movie released in 2016, it definitely didn't measure up to its immediate two predecessors critically. It's becoming abundantly clear this superhero franchise is starting to show its age, and Fox apparently agrees. It was reported last week that the studio is considering "pressing the reset button," though it sounds like their approach would be more of a semi-reboot. We talked last week about why it's a good idea for Fox to fully reboot the X-Men, i.e. start from scratch, but before that happens, the main series should conclude with one last hurrah. Fortunately for the studio, they have just the story for the job. It's been reported several times over the last year that the next main X-Men series will tackle the Dark Phoenix Saga, which was previously adapted for 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand. Here are the main reasons why this comic book storyline should end the current batch of main X-Men movies before a reboot is launched. It Brings The Series Around Nearly Full Circle Starting with X-Men: First Class and its 1960s setting, every main X-Men installment has jumped forward approximately a decade. More than half of X-Men: Days of Future Past balanced being set in 1973 with the apocalyptic future 50 years later, and X-Men: Apocalypse hopped to 1983. According to Bryan Singer, the next X-Men movie will continue this trend by taking place in the 1990s, which means the series will be the closest yet to coming nearly full circle with when the first X-Men movie happened, i.e. circa 2000. Even though X-Men: Apocalypse marked the end of the "First Class" trilogy, this X-Men movie can serve as an epilogue of sorts and end this series close to the same time period it began. There would be something poetic leaving these characters close to how they were when we first met them. Granted, any story could technically work with this approach, but by using the Dark Phoenix saga, the studio receives the added bonus of ending the series with one of the biggest bangs possible...if executed properly, of course. It Redeems The Storyline After The Last Stand 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand is notorious for being one of the worst-received X-Men movies among fans. One of the reasons for this is because of how the Dark Phoenix adaptation was handled. It was bad enough that Jean Grey's villainous self was forced to share screen time with the mutant cure plot, but on top of that, Jean's Dark Phoenix powers were attributed to being a subconscious separate personality rather than anything extraterrestrial. Now that the "First Class" trilogy is working with a relatively fresh timeline, as well as X-Men: Apocalypse having reintroduced the Phoenix Force, this is the perfect time to re-tackle the storyline and give it its proper due. Granted, the new movie can't be 100% faithful to the original tale. For instance, the Phoenix Force will have to still be attributed to something inside of Jean rather than an entirely different entity. But hey, at least this version of the story can't be any worse than what The Last Stand gave us, right? At least this time the door is open to connect the Dark Phoenix to her cosmic roots, which brings us to the next section... It Can Take The Heroes To Outer Space The X-Men movies have leaned on many sci-fi tropes over the years, but they still have yet to take the action off Earth and into outer space. Fortunately, such a trip may finally be on the table, as Bryan Singer expressed interest earlier this year in having a "big alien, interstellar tenant" within this cinematic universe. Although Apocalypse's solar-powered technology seemed like it could have been alien technology, that was never confirmed in X-Men: Apocalypse. So before this X-Men movie series concludes, a Dark Phoenix re-telling can take the team of mutant protagonists into outer space. Better yet, put them on another planet! If Jean destroys a nearby star as the Dark Phoenix like she did in the original storyline, that means she'll be put on trial by a nearby alien society (probably the Shi'ar empire) for killing the inhabitants of the planet near that star. Before the current X-Men franchise comes to an end, these characters need to interact with life from elsewhere in the galaxy, and the Dark Phoenix presents a natural way to do so. It Gives The Post-Apocalypse Team A Better Chance To Shine Even though X-Men: Apocalypse had a group of mutant superheroes to fight back against Apocalypse's Four Horsemen, the younger heroes weren't fully trained using their powers. Fourtunately, by the end of the movie, Professor X realized that Earth needed a team to protect both mutants and humans. So with Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Nightcrawler and Quicksilver, he formed the first official X-Men team in this new timeline...well, second if you count the team from First Class. Before this series is over, it would be great to see the mutants as full-fledged superheroes. Assuming we reunite with these characters in the 1990s, they'll have had a decade (give or take) to master their abilities. They held up well in X-Men: Apocalypse, but wouldn't it be great to see Tye Sheridan's Cylcops have full control over his optic blasts? To see Quicksilver use his speed in more creative ways? And since the story would revolve around Dark Phoenix, we would see Jean Grey at her most powerful, which would unfortunately let her darker side loose and force her teammates to battle her. It Leaves More Room For Spinoffs If it were up to us, the new Dark Phoenix adaptation would be the final X-Men-related movie before an new reboot series began. However, that's unlikely to happen given the plans in motion for spinoff movies like Deadpool 2 and New Mutants. So as a consolation prize, we'll take Dark Phoenix ending the main X-Men series with a bang so Fox can dedicate attention to making the spinoffs exceptional. Deadpool was a massive hit earlier this year, and along with Deadpool 2 currently being worked on, there are already plans for Deadpool 3 to reportedly include X-Force. New Mutants seems to be poising itself as the new series starring a group of teenage superheroes. Gambit's had a run of bad luck for many years, but without a main X-Men series to work on, Fox can tackle it with renewed vigor so the Ragin' Cajun can finally lead his own adventure. The primary X-Men movies have had over a decade and a half to entertain audiences, and now the spinoffs can continue its legacy with fresher material. Dark Phoenix Trailer: Key X-Men Moments Explained Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topWriter Walter Kirn tweeted something mid-summer that rang so poignant and true, I immediately "favorited" and re-tweeted: "The brilliant dark governing insight of social media is that most people prefer socializing alone."
Sure, all of this newfound sharing and real-time communication is awesome indeed. But the very same digital tools that heighten our reach and accessibility are somehow alienating us from each other more so than ever before. Human-to-human connection and communication, it seems, tends to get too intermediated by gadgets and gizmos.
Today, there's a new social network rolling out nationwide to help bridge the distance between folks who couldn't be physically closer: neighbors. Fittingly, it's called Nextdoor. It's designed to help neighbors connect and communicate online about important information, services, and goings-on in their specific communities. Being neighborly has somehow gotten lost in the digital era. Nextdoor is working to reverse that.
Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor's co-founder and CEO, told CNET, "People are using the technology to bring back a sense of community." And that's a good thing considering the majority of Americans only know some of their neighbors names and 28 percent don't know any of their neighbor's names, according to a Pew Research report.
After a year in private beta, Nextdoor quickly spread by word of mouth from Menlo Park, Calif., to 175 neighborhoods in 26 states. Apparently, no marketing, advertising, focus groups or any paid incentives were involved. Once local residents get onto Nextdoor, Tolia says, the adoption has been fast and neighbors are active and engaged. "They rely on this thing like a public utility," he said.
Nextdoor
Local communities anywhere in the United States can create private social networks on Nextdoor for their neighborhood. Each site is owned and maintained by locals actually living in the neighborhood. Once residents verify their addresses and sign up for the site using their real names, they have access to a neighborhood directory, map, events, marketplace ("buy," "sell," and "free") and local service recommendations like "great babysitter" or nearby resources such as veterinarians, dentists, schools, country clubs, and churches. Nextdoor can also serve as an area "blotter" to report and share news about break-ins or suspicious activity. Disaster preparedness is yet another service that Nextdoor plans to offer local neighborhoods.
Neighbors choose how much information they want to disclose on their personal profiles (e-mail address, work and/or home phone, or street name instead of exact address.) Members may also be contacted through private messages directly via their profile pages. Personal e-mail addresses do not have to be revealed.
Nextdoor has several ways to verify new members actually live in the neighborhood. A postcard may be sent to a new member's address with a special code to be plugged into Nextdoor.com. Once they've logged in, neighbors are asked to confirm their account. Signing up with a home phone number or credit card linked to a home address also works as verification. Alternatively, verified neighbors can invite other neighbors to join by sending an official postcard or flyer from Nextdoor.
The social startup is definitely filling a void. Most neighborhoods across the United States don't have a geo-specific Web resource or a hyper-local e-mail listserv, said Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, Nextdoor's lead investor. (Shasta Ventures is another investor, but funding specifics have not been disclosed.) And those neighborhoods that do have their own listservs are looking for more, Gurley said. "There are a number of communities that have turned off their listserv and moved everybody onto this [Nextdoor]," he said. Unlike e-mail listservs, Nextdoor keeps an archived database of service recommendations and classifieds, he added. Gurley is a Nextdoor board member along with Rich Barton, Zillow's chairman and co-founder.
Tolia who is armed with considerable startup experience after key roles at Epinions and Shopping.com, says he anticipates considerable growth for Nextdoor. Over the next two to three years, he says, "All neighborhoods will be connected through a private social network."
Redwood City, Calif. is one city embracing Nextdoor's approach. All 22 neighborhoods in this Bay Area city will soon establish a private Web site on the new social network. But it's not just tech-savvy communities using Nextdoor. Neighborhoods from Memphis to Santa Fe have also welcomed the new tool.
Turns out, homeowner's associations, supermoms, and empty nesters are the earliest adopters of Nextdoor. HOA's are often run by volunteers with limited time and technology. Busy moms running from activity to errands to school appreciate being connected to neighbors and community resources and Nextdoor makes it easy for them, Tolia said.
As for the business model, Tolia said, "It's really important to get the user experience right. Nextdoor is well capitalized, we're not seeking more funding." Over time, though, Nextdoor plans to work with local businesses and offer specialized deals for neighborhoods, said Benchmark's Bill Gurley. "Benchmark is a pretty patient investor. I'm in no hurry. I'm much more interested in making a huge impact."With thousands of illegal immigrant children – some of whom may belong to dangerous gangs – flooding across the border and possibly bringing contagious diseases with them, President Barack Obama on Monday vowed to change as many of the country’s immigrations laws as possible on his own.
Speaking at the Rose Garden with Vice President Joe Biden behind him, Obama acknowledged the recent “surge of unaccompanied children” and said the immigration rules are so “unclear” that “folks don’t know what the rules are.” He then promptly vowed to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress.”
The president, who has repeatedly boasted about his “phone and a pen” strategy, said he does not like issuing executive actions but would do so anyway if Congress does not give him the bills he wants.
Obama said he would begin to move “resources from our interior to our border” and ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Eric Holder to send him recommendations for additional unilateral actions that he can take before the end of summer. Obama said he would adopt their ideas “without further delay.”
As the Associated Press noted, moving resources to the border will “effectively further reduce the number of deportations in the country’s interior by stressing enforcement action on individuals who are either recent unlawful border crossers or who present a national security, public safety, or border security threat.”
The White House is reportedly working on giving temporary amnesty to the parents of so-called DREAMers, easing deportations, and potentially allowing some recipients of temporary amnesty to enlist in the U.S. military with executive actions. On Friday, amnesty advocates stormed Congress, demanding deportation relief for the parents of illegal immigrant children, and Obama said in his weekly address that he will “keep taking actions on my own” if Congress does not act on amnesty legislation.
After House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was ousted because of his support for amnesty legislation, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told Obama that there will not be an immigration vote this year.
Breitbart Texas’s photos of illegal immigrant children being warehoused in detention facilities forced the mainstream media to cover the issue, and a recent Gallup poll found that two in three Americans disapprove of the way Obama is handling immigration right now.
This will not be the first time Obama has acted unilaterally on immigration.
In 2012, Obama, by executive fiat, enacted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gave temporary amnesty and work permits for two years to illegal immigrant children who met a variety of requirements.
As Breitbart News has reported, “at least 560,000 people to date have been granted temporary amnesty under the DACA program,” and that number, according to federal officials, will only increase in September, when those who were not 16 years of age in 2012 will be able to apply for initial DACA status along with current DACA recipients who will be applying for a two-year renewal.
The Obama administration recently honored ten activist DACA recipients at a “Champions of Change” White House ceremony. As Breitbart News reported, “that prompted Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI), who is the Vice Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, to say the ‘tone-deaf’ event is an example of the type of messaging that is ‘fueling the unprecedented surge of immigrant children being smuggled across our southern border’ by ‘flaunting the success stories of ten immigrant children who entered the U.S. illegally.'”
“How can we expect to dispel rumors throughout Central America that children who enter America illegally will be allowed to stay while simultaneously touting the success stories of a few illegal immigrant children granted de facto amnesty by the administration?” Miller said. “The sad truth is that most of the children being smuggled across the border today, in unprecedented numbers, will not have similar success stories.”
Promises of more executive actions may lure more illegal immigrant children to try to make the treacherous journey to America.
There have been at least “52,000 unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors have crossed the border since October of last year, and nearly 150,000 more may attempt to next year because they believe the Obama administration, which ignored the warning signs, will not deport them.”
As Breitbart News has reported, the Obama administration has gone on a public relations campaign in Central America to tell parents that their migrant kids will not receive amnesty. Central Americans are not buying the White House’s words, as “nearly all of the illegal immigrants – many of whom have been flagging down Border Patrol agents believing they will get ‘permisos’ that will allow them to indefinitely remain in the United States – who are arriving made the journey from Central America with the belief that the Obama administration will not deport them and their families if they made it across the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Biden has met with Central American leaders, and Secretary of State John Kerry will do so Tuesday. Obama wrote a letter to Members of Congress Monday asking them to help with the administration’s so-called “deterrence strategy.”
At the Rose Garden, Obama claimed that his administration has sent a “clear message” to Central American migrants that they will not be able to live freely in the United States if they make it across the border. Yet Obama’s vow to enact as many executive actions as he can this summer may have, at best, muddled his message even more to those in Central America thinking about making the journey to America.Ramadan has always been a time for me to make new resolutions and reflect on the past so that I can grow as a person and transition into the New Year… Hopefully this article will serve as a helpful treatise of advice for those of you who are looking for some traction in your early twenties. When I told Omar Usman that the title of this article is “What I Learned at 21,” he smirked and said, “You learned absolutely nothing.” I nodded my head and agreed, and hence below you will see how I simply compiled what I learned that I don’t know. Enjoy!
1. You Don’t Know Anything and You Are Inexperienced – Accept it.
Our egos do a pretty good job of making us front like we are on top of our game. We rave about our creative ideas and ability to think outside-the-box, but the reality is that most of our ideas and outside-the-box thinking is useless if we haven’t worked a day in our lives. Bachelor’s degrees will simply help you think along a certain wavelength and give you the chance to show others (including your employers) that you are serious about yourself and getting ahead. Learn to work a bunch of random jobs during college to learn skills needed for your profession. Simple things such as learning to talk to people at a help desk, helping someone feel accomplished through tutoring, or working as a waiter will possibly take you a long way. Sometimes we are our own deceivers.
2. Understand Your Priorities as a Muslim.
There are some things in life which are more important than others; it’s a simple rule of thumb. When you can figure out what your priorities are and give them their due rights, life will begin to flow very naturally. If waking up in the morning has always proven difficult for you, understand that going to sleep early and praying Fajr on time in the morning takes priority over watching the season finale of Breaking Bad or Burn Notice. If you are at school the whole week and work at night time and get barely anytime with your family, be sure to set aside a generous amount of time on the weekend to spend time with your parents and siblings instead of spending the weekend at an Islamic weekend seminar. Your religion and family take priority over EVERYTHING else in your life.
3. Work Hard, Study Hard, Play Hard.
You better be REALLY good at whatever you want to do in life. Stop beating around the bush and give everything its due measure. When it is time to work, work. Work thoroughly through your |
it moving. CASE, the Centre for Social and Economic Research, is one of the best think tanks in Poland, ranking high among the global think tanks and the best one in Central and Eastern Europe.
However, Hartwell admits that Poland has its limits in its efforts to influence the rest of the EU.
“Poland needs to continue to advocate for the EU’s engagement in the east, but unless the EU is responsive, there is not much more that Poland can do. Let us never forget the fact that it was Poland’s Foreign Minister who brokered the deal that Yanukovych eventually ran away from, though, so Poland’s interest and activity is unquestionable,” he said, confirming the views that a historic chance nay have been lost to sign the AA under Yanukovich.
Vis-à-vis Ukraine, Hartwell advises Poland to focus less on its experience as a EU member, but rather on its expertise in overcoming communism.
“I think the most important thing that Poland has to offer is its experience in overcoming the yoke of Soviet oppression. And by this, I mean by sharing its experience from the early years of transition, 1989 until maybe 1999, rather than focusing on the pre-European Union accession years of 2000-2004. Poland’s greatest strides forward came when it was outside of the EU and it was not guaranteed that it would become part of the EU. This is the same situation the neighbourhood countries face today, although they are even more of a stretch to ever enter into the EU than Poland was in 1989,” Hartwell said.
‘If Poland waits for France, nothing will happen’
Asked what one should expect from the future, Hartwell said that “if the invasion of a sovereign nation on the EU’s borders cannot mobilize the EU to take the eastern countries more seriously, nothing will”.
“And this is why I think that Poland needs to continue a two-track approach, acting as an ambassador of the east to the EU, but also working to further its own interests in a prosperous and stable Eastern Europe. If Poland waits for France, nothing will happen”, Hartwell said.Rose from the Ashes through Obstacle Racing.
Eduardo Gonzalez Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 6, 2016
Once upon a time there was a recent graduate of Florida Tech. Overweight and hating life, he had been recently laid off from his first job and at the same time was dealing with the expensive and tedious rehab from a torn ACL. With little will to move forward, a friend invited him to an obstacle race.
That defeated human being was me. Tipping the scale at 230 lbs, I was far away from my football glory days in college where I could do everything and anything I set my mind to. It took that one obstacle race to make me realize that I could achieve greatness. The effort by a few co-workers to bring me down were soon forgotten and I began my journey toward becoming the healthy and athletic individual I always wanted to be.
The results from that race, called Beachpalooza, where not pretty. I limped the whole way, through sand, walls, crawls, pits, water hazards, you name it. I walked sometimes but everytime someone passed me, I picked up the pace. In the end I got 19th in my age group which was ok I guess, since I had nothign to compare it to. What I did realize was that even though 18 people beat me, there were a far larger group behind me. That was the moment, where everything clicked!
That happened on a early November of 2011. 2012 would be a great year as I began to ramp up my participation on mud runs, obstacle races and even triathlons. Slowly but surely, I was getting better. I rehab my knee and my lower back got better as I started losing weight. Obstacle Racing was becoming a sport and I was in the middle of it. It was great to meet a bunch of people like myself, and get surrounded by the obstacle racing super-positive community.
A few races into my adventures, I got involved with a regional Florida Team called MudRunFun. this team is much more than just an OCR or Obstacle Racing team. It has evolved into the online hub for obstacle racers to get information on events, not only in Florida, but all over the world. MudRunFun also maintains a blog with a large variety of information from “How to climb a rope” to “What shoes to wear”. Very informational blog if you are into obstacle racing and mud running. Ok, enough bragging about MudRunFun.
As I kept losing weight and gaining speed and endurance, i ventured into triathlons. My first sprint was an odyssey and I felt like I was going to die, especially on the swim. a few sprint later, I took on an olympic triathlon and later on a Half Iron Man. I did it in Miami and although I told myself that was the last time I would do one, I kept going. Last year, in November, I finally took on the Full Iron Man at Panama City, Fl. It was an definitely a goal of mine for the past few years but I was in no rush to complete it, mainly because I was terrified. I entered that race as a 175 lbs athlete. Huge difference from my sad and depressive 230 lbs days. The last four years have been great and I look forward to keep moving while encouraging others to do the same. I will write from time to time. If you would like me to discuss any particulars about my journey, comment below and I will write something about it.
“Stay Healthy, Stay Active”
Eduardo GonzalezThe eSports world is already preparing for the upcoming IEM World Championship Hanover. We from GosuGamers begin our pre-event coverage by talking to the man behind it all - IEM Production Manager Michal "Carmac" Blicharz.
"The best fans were definitely in Brazil and I blame Violet for it. You rarely ever see an audience which gets seduced by a player in the course of an event."
Photo by: ESL.tv
"For StarCraft II, I am still afraid of the bubble - some tournaments will disappear sooner or later"
Photo by: SK-Gaming.com
"We need to build a world where we see a totally new, unknown player breaking into the world’s top 10 every 12 months. We need to build a world where the world’s top 10 is not an old gentlemen’s club like it happened in Warcraft III"
Photo by: Esports-award.org
Carmac has been a major driving force of the Intel Extreme Masters and is undoubtedly one of the most renowned figures on the eSports scene. We caught up with him to hear what he has to say about the World Championship in March, his thoughts on other eSports disciplines and why does he think that all leagues in this sphere should grow some balls.Michal Blicharz: The goal is to always be better than previously and it’s a tall order this time. Last year’s Intel Extreme Masters World Championship was absolutely epic and there are just some aspects that we can’t beat. For example, our hall was filled over capacity last year and security stopped letting people in (a hall was closed like that for the first time in the history of CeBIT). To top it in that aspect, we’d have to have a larger hall. But we will have a stage and two big viewing areas – so not one but three places where you could watch the gamers compete. In that respect, the event will easily top the one from last year.MB: I personally feel that the player pool at our events has always been better than we get credit for, but it’s a problem when you run open qualifiers. Many big names get beaten before they get to our events. The best playing field was, overall, in Kiev. I felt that all three tournaments were really great and interesting to follow.As regards the fans, the best ones were definitely in Brazil and I blame Violet for it. You rarely ever see an audience which gets seduced by a player in the course of an event. Their passion for violet rose as he was progressing farther and farther. It was amazing to see.MB: We aren’t ready to talk about the next season, but I have to say that I’m working very hard on what’s to come next. The first details of the next season will come from us directly and I can’t spill the beans to the press about it yet. I am quite sure we will go to a country which we haven’t gone to, though.MB: The ESL is hosting the Go4SC2 Cup series every single week and we’ve been doing that for a mighty long time. The goal isn’t to get the most attention out of it but to service a community of European players. I feel like there’s enough content “in between” in StarCraft II already. We don’t have to go there.MB: That would be an ESL TV question… I do know ESL TV is planning a lot of new stuff, some of it you should see around next week!As for me, I cannot commit to a show like RotterdaM University anymore. I am busy as is, unfortunately. Also, a tutorial on interviewing people would maybe have two episodes and that’s it :)MB: For sure the most open question when it comes to winners is the League of Legends tournaments. You just don’t know who’s going to win it! You could name eight teams that win the event and it wouldn’t surprise me.Our four Global Challenges were won by teams from four different geographical regions, from four different playing cultures. In Cologne it was CLG from North America, in China it was World Elite from China, in New York it was Fnatic from Europe and in Kiev it was the Russians from M5. On top of this there are a lot of teams that cannot be written off, like SK Gaming, Dignitas, TSM and others… I have no favourites in LoL. The game is too new for that.When it comes to StarCraft II, there are over ten Koreans competing for the crown and the winner will likely be a Korean. The interesting part for me is that we will be seeing many of the “traveling Koreans” – those that go to live events a lot in Europe and America. The audiences know them very well and it’s important because it’s much more fun to cheer for someone you know very well as opposed to a winning machine you know nothing about.As for CS, it will just be… epic. Impossible to say who’ll win.MB: I am not sure if it’s a negative thing that there’s so much good content in StarCraft II out there. I think for the most part it drives the industry forward because the standards are raised every time. The question is whether that forward motion is based on sustainable business models because if the production quality and the content is created with more money that comes in, then it might be gone overnight. And that would set us back a lot as an industry.MB: Have you missed the announcements that Riot’s Season 2 has 5,000,000 USD in prize money? :) For StarCraft II I am still afraid of the bubble – some tournaments will disappear sooner or later.MB: We are not X-Factor. We are a sports league.I know how to make sure that at every event we have the most famous players and we had enough money in the budget to make it happen, but I am simply not interested in this. If it hurts our attention, that’s fine. Our sponsors Intel have been with this league for six years (and for over 10 with ESL in general). They are in it for the long run and they trust us to do the right thing for esports. They like good numbers like any other sponsor but that’s not the primary target.Our primary goal is to grow eSports and we won’t do that by stuffing piles of cash into the pockets of the players that are already rich and famous. We need to build a world where we see a totally new, unknown player breaking into the world’s top 10 every 12 months. We need to build a world where the world’s top 10 is not an old gentlemen’s club like it happened in Warcraft III.All the leagues in this industry should grow some balls and run open qualifiers to look for the next 18 year old world champion from Europe or America. Otherwise sooner or later we’re in trouble.MB: I obviously have an opinion but I am not in a position to publicly discuss what MLG is doing. Intel Extreme Masters will remain free to access. At the start of the year we were actually talking of finding ways to give the community HD streaming for free at our events (and we are still looking), so we’re much closer to doing that than to going Pay-Per-View.MB: I haven’t thought about that, but it’s a great idea! I am quite sure we’ll do it next season.MB: Right now yes, because once I like something I grind it out until I’m sick of it. You cannot run League of Legends events without being a decent player yourself. I am level 23 right now and rising in LoL and Platinum in StarCraft II. I wish I had the time to play both games…MB: I won’t tease or make promises. All I can do is say that we at ESL will continue to work our asses off to provide the best possible experience for the community. Also, I’ve made a promise to the LoL fans that if we break 333,333 concurrent viewers on all streams combined at any point during the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship, I will do LoL cosplay at the opening event of the next season.Judaism and Cults
I saw a few people talking about chassidic judaism and how it’s not a cult - and it got me wondering: Why not? Certainly it seems that way to many people, and certainly there are practices which seem… well… cultish.This is true of religion in general, unsurprisingly, but particularlyamongst “ultra-orthodox” jews.
Back when I was a religious undergrad, I actually wrote a research paper for my senior psych undergrad that was about brainwashing and cults. (Turns out, brainwashing doesn’t really exist… but heavy indoctrination and other psychological phenomenon do.) Anyways, it did give me an opportunity to study a lot about cults and I remember, even then, being uncomfortably surprised by the similarities to my then very religious circles. And while there are many ways to define a cult, certain behaviors are generally deemed to be harmful. Those are, for lack of better terminology, the differences between a friendly cult and a dangerous cult.
Googling about cult characteristics, I found two “checklists”. Now, this is too simplistic on three levels: 1) Determining a dangerous cult just isn’t that simple, but it’s a good way to start analyzing a group. 2) There are so many sects and philosophies in judaism, that I’d really need to do this for at least 6 different orthodox judaisms! (More on that soon.) 3) I also think a checklist is somewhat simplistic bc the answer isn’t always so black-and-white. As such, let’s imagine it as a scale of 1-5, where 1 = not at all; 2 = just a bit; 3 = somewhat, yes; 4 = much; and 5 = absolutely. I’ll provide my own scoring but I encourage you to score it yourself for your own assessment. Also, as one might expect, the scores will depend on which branch of orthodoxy one is talking about, so I’ll provide a range, where the lower score will typically represent the more liberal “modern” orthodox rating and the higher will typically represent the more ultra-orthodox fundamentalist rating:
Characteristics Associated with Cultic Groups - Revised
Janja Lalich, Ph.D. & Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.
…Bear in mind that this list is not meant to be a “cult scale” or a definitive checklist to determine if a specific group is a cult. This is not so much a diagnostic instrument as it is an analytical tool.
1) The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
I’ll give this a 2 for orthodox Judaism in general. It does revere god, moses, the sages, and leading rabbis etc. but it is distributed amongst many people; however, let’s not forget, the range of power and awe narrows and those earlier people are essentially unquestioned (e.g. no orthodox rabbi can really overrule the opinion of a talmudic sage; instead, he must derive his opinion from theirs.)
That said, I would give this a 4 or 5 for chassidic judaism. They display a lot of ‘leader-worship’, with the best example being chabad and the late lubavitcher rebbi. However, that power too is still distributed to an extent, which is why I’m not giving it a strong 5.
2) Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
There are certainly sects of Orthodox Judaism for which I’d rate this as low as a 1 (maybe a 1.5 since these are often people who embrace questions - but give really misinformed answers), but certainly there are sects where I’d rate this a 5. Again, chassidic sects come to mind. And I’ve already written about many cases, such as the hasidic “morannos” who have to hide their true disbelief for fear of the repercussions. {x}
3)Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
I could give this a 1 for much of orthodox judaism, particularly those not particularly religious. But consider, for instance, prayer. It is essentially a chant and a meditation. Of course, many may not take “advantage” of that element, brushing through it (as I said, I could give their judaism a 1), but many take full “advantage” of it; again, chassidim come to mind.
Or how about singing and dancing? Again, could rate pretty low for some groups (maybe a 2) but pretty damn high for others. What are lots of chassidic people doing on their day off from work? They’re at a tish! Have a few drinks, sing some songs or chants, do some dancing, talk about god. Um yeah, I’d rate that around a 4 (not higher since it’s not really imposed on people in abusive ways). I’d also consider whether talmudic study - what many eat, breathe, and live while in yeshiva - fits into this category. But I’ll leave that. Btw, let’s not forget to mention the na-nach-nachman guys.
4)The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
I’d say that modern orthodox judaism scores pretty low here, maybe a 1 or 2. Aside from some basic laws about modesty, and some basic sense of jewish ethics, it’s pretty hands-off and not much more intense than how secular society promotes its values. But that’s modern orthodoxy; ultraorthodoxy could probably rate around a 4 or 5. There’s a lot of community pressure on who one can marry, what jobs are appropriate, very strict dress codes, where one can live (in the community, of course), how one should act, whether the internet or smartphones are “kosher” (which leads to the important point of controlling what information adherents have “permission” to learn!), etc.
5) The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
Orthodox Judaism in general would have to score at least a 3 on this since we are “the chosen people”. And ultraorthodox groups could rate at least a 4 considering the esteem and status of their leaders. (e.g. talking to god, to angels, making golems, plummeting the depths of the kabalah, etc.) Again, need I mention chabad?
6)The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
I’d give orthodoxy a minimum of 2 bc so much of the orthodox mentality is just that: strength through resistance. Many of our holidays are stories of survival, of us vs the world. (e.g. purim, battling the world physically; and channuka, battling them philosophically.) And perhaps those sentiments are somewhat sensible - afterall, we’ve had a rather horrible history - but it does seem to characterize so much of the religious mentality. Furthermore, I’d give this a 4 or 5 for chassidism which sees all of the non-orthodox world is a heathen nightmare (and is probably wary of even modern orthodoxy). These are people who don’t teach their kids English bc they don’t have anything to do with the “others” - and these people can live in the middle of Brooklyn, NY! These are also the people who keep getting caught making outrageously racist comments. So, yeah, upward of 4.
7) The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).
I’d like to say that ability to abuse the position of power is very low in Judaism in general, but I know it isn’t quite so. Again, in the modern orthodox world, I’d give a 2 - but, again, in the ultraorthodox world it can go pretty high, depending on who you ask. I’d say at least a 4. There are quite many stories about rabbis doing horrific things but getting away with it simply bc they’re the big kahunas. What they say, goes. (At least until someone finally breaks and goes to the cops.)
8)The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
It’s somewhat difficult to imagine how people would’ve reacted before joining bc many, most, of these people were raised in it. But my guess is that if they didn’t have exposure to it beforehand, they’d probably find certain behaviors inexcusable. This includes using welfare money to study in yeshiva, using yeshiva as a way to skirt army service in Israel, relegating women to second-class citizens, depriving kids of a proper education, bigotry, etc. However, I don’t think these quite compare to the despicable practices some cults ask of their members. I’d give it between a 2 and 4.
9)The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
Guilt? Shame? In Judaism? 2-4.
10)Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.
Between 1 and 4.
11)The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Actually pretty low, but this is somewhat different since orthodoxy in the past few hundred years hasn’t really tried to convert people. Of course, this isn’t true of non-orthodox sects, and is somewhat true of a sect like chabad which evangelizes jews to become chabadnics and non-jews, to an extent, to become “sons of noah”. But all in all, I’m not sure this is good metric for Judaism. That said, I’d give it a 1-3, just bc there is an emphasis on getting non-orthodox jews to start practicing orthodoxy.
12)The group is preoccupied with making money.
Maybe individuals, lol, but as a group, I’d give this a 1 or 2. (I probably would’ve just said 1 had I not seen the chabad telethon recently… damn, chabad is not looking good here!)
13)Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
Anywhere from a 2 to 4.
14) Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members. 14)
2-5. Though many chassidic sects will include other orthodox sects as being “kosher.”
15)The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.
3-5. Simple as this: How many orthodox jews feel that it’d be fine to just become a conservative (more liberal) jew?How many of them feel there’s a purpose to life without Judaism? The group is their everything.
(So, not that it means much, but out of a possible score range of 15 -75, my total ranges from 27.5- 61.)
Here’s the second checklist I found(ironically, written by a Rabbi) {x}:
Cults are typically defined by five characteristics. First, cults tend to centralize power in the hands of a single individual or small group that is considered beyond questions.
2-4.5
Second, they treat all questions about the group and its beliefs as intolerable challenges to the group’s authority and authenticity.
1-4.
Third, they demean all those who do not share their beliefs and sow fear and mistrust amongst their believers about all such people.
2-5.
Fourth, they typically cut off all or most opportunities for members to interact freely with those outside the group.
1-5.
And finally, they take revenge upon those who choose to leave the group, in ways which include, cutting them off from all relationships with those who remain inside, confiscation of material goods and even physical harm.
1-5.
But again, that’s just my rating. In fact, the score doesn’t even matter. It’s just a springboard for discussion and analyzing it. For instance, I’m realizing that chabad is clearly more cultish than other chassidic groups - but also that ultra-orthodox groups are way more cultish than “modern orthodox” groups.
All in all, seems to me that ultra-orthodox judaism definitely has cultish characteristics, but could possibly be on the borderline to becoming a “dangerous cult” - but that might depend on the individual evaluating and the particular sect he has in mind.
But what do you think?Selling drugs on the Internet can be a very lucrative business, but it is also an excellent way to get oneself locked up in jail sooner or later. Two Pakistani men found that out the hard way, as they succeeded in selling nearly US$1m of narcotics on the deep web. As a result of their business practices, they were sentenced by a US federal Judge after being extradited in 2012.
Pakistani Drug Sellers Locked Behind Bars
The allure of selling drugs online can sway anyone’s mind to venture into the world of criminality. Money can be made with relative ease, assuming one takes the necessary precautions to stay anonymous. That said, receiving and shipping packages, either domestically or internationally, will always attract unwanted attention at some point.
For two Pakistani narcotics sellers, their business started out as an online pharmacy. Not the legal kind, mind you, but a pure illegal business that operated from 2005 to 2012. They distributed US$2m worth of pharmaceuticals to customers worldwide, with most of the goods ending up in the United States.
Running such an online business means it is only a matter of time until an arrest is made. For both men, this arrest came in 2012, when they were apprehended by the London Metropolitan Police Service Fugitive Squad. Given their crimes against the US Constitution, they were extradited shortly after their arrest, where they awaited trial until a few days ago.
Several charges were filed, ranging from money laundering to running drug crimes and conspiracy to import controlled substances in the US. Both men pleaded guilty to their individual charges, as there was no reason not to do so. All of the evidence piled up against them made a damning case, and there was very little point in disputing the obvious.
Contrary to what some people may expect, US customers were not asked to make Bitcoin payments by any means. In the early days of the business, Western Union was the primary form of payment, with transfers sent to Karachi, Pakistan. It appears Western Union remained the primary payment option until the day both individuals were arrested in 2012.
Now that both men have been convicted to undisclosed jail sentences, the US government wants to continue the fight against online drug sales. Regardless of whether they occur on the deep web or through regular “legitimate” storefronts, pharmaceuticals should not be messed around with. The road ahead is long and hard, but the goal remains to protect to the USA against dangerous drugs.
Header image courtesy of ShutterstockNot to be confused with Art of Noise
L'arte dei rumori, published in book form in 1916. Cover of Luigi Russolo's, published in book form in 1916.
The Art of Noises (Italian: L'arte dei Rumori) is a Futurist manifesto written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. In it, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. He proposes a number of conclusions about how electronics and other technology will allow futurist musicians to "substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms".[1]
The Art of Noises is considered by some authors to be one of the most important and influential texts in 20th-century musical aesthetics.[2]
The evolution of sound [ edit ]
Instruments for futuristic music, called "Bruitism", partly electrically operated, built by Russolo, 1913
Russolo's essay explores the origins of man made sounds.
"Ancient life was all silence" [ edit ]
Russolo states that "noise" first came into existence as the result of 19th century machines. Before this time the world was a quiet, if not silent, place. With the exception of storms, waterfalls, and tectonic activity, the noise that did punctuate this silence were not loud, prolonged, or varied.
Early sounds [ edit ]
He notes that the earliest "music" was very simplistic and was created with very simple instruments, and that many early civilizations considered the secrets of music sacred and reserved it for rites and rituals. The Greek musical theory was based on the tetrachord mathematics of Pythagoras, which did not allow for any harmonies. Developments and modifications to the Greek musical system were made during the Middle Ages, which led to music like Gregorian chant. Russolo notes that during this time sounds were still narrowly seen as "unfolding in time."[3] The chord did not yet exist.
"The complete sound" [ edit ]
The Art of Noises Instruments built by Russolo, photo published in his 1913 book
Russolo refers to the chord as the "complete sound,"[3] the conception of various parts that make and are subordinate to the whole. He notes that chords developed gradually, first moving from the "consonant triad to the consistent and complicated dissonances that characterize contemporary music."[3] He notes that while early music tried to create sweet and pure sounds, it progressively grew more and more complex, with musicians seeking to create new and more dissonant chords. This, he says, comes ever closer to the "noise-sound."[3]
Musical noise [ edit ]
Russolo compares the evolution of music to the multiplication of machinery, pointing out that our once desolate sound environment has become increasingly filled with the noise of machines, encouraging musicians to create a more "complicated polyphony"[3] in order to provoke emotion and stir our sensibilities. He notes that music has been developing towards a more complicated polyphony by seeking greater variety in timbres and tone colors.
Russolo explains how "musical sound is too limited in its variety of timbres."[3] He breaks the timbres of an orchestra down into four basic categories: bowed instruments, metal winds, wood winds, and percussion. He says that we must "break out of this limited circle of sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds,"[3] and that technology would allow us to manipulate noises in ways that could not have been done with earlier instruments.
Future sounds [ edit ]
Russolo claims that music has reached a point that no longer has the power to excite or inspire. Even when it is new, he argues, it still sounds old and familiar, leaving the audience "waiting for the extraordinary sensation that never comes."[4] He urges musicians to explore the city with "ears more sensitive than eyes,"[4] listening to the wide array of noises that are often taken for granted, yet (potentially) musical in nature. He feels these noises can be given pitch and "regulated harmonically," while still preserving their irregularity and character, even if it requires assigning multiple pitches to certain noises.
The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination. [5]
Six Families of Noises for the Futurist Orchestra [ edit ]
Russolo sees the futurist orchestra drawing its sounds from "six families of noise":[6]
Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms Whistling, Hissing, Puffing Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing,[7] Crackling, Scraping [7] Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs
Russolo asserts that these are the most basic and fundamental noises, and that all other noises are only associations and combinations of these. He built a family of instruments, the Intonarumori, to imitate these six kinds of noises. [8]
Conclusions [ edit ]
Russolo includes a list of conclusions:
Futurist composers should use their creativity and innovation to "enlarge and enrich the field of sound"[6] by approaching the "noise-sound." Futurist musicians should strive to replicate the infinite timbres in noises. Futurist musicians should free themselves from the traditional and seek to explore the diverse rhythms of noise. The complex tonalities of noise can be achieved by creating instruments that replicate that complexity. The creation of instruments that replicate noise should not be a difficult task, since the manipulation of pitch will be simple once the mechanical principles that create the noise have been recreated. Pitch can be manipulated through simple changes in speed or tension. The new orchestra will not evoke new and novel emotions by imitating the noises of life, but by finding new and unique combinations of timbres and rhythms in noise, to find a way to fully express the rhythm and sound that stretches beyond normal un-inebriated comprehension. The variety of noise is infinite, and as man creates new machines the number of noises he can differentiate between continues to grow. Therefore, he invites all talented musicians to pay attention to noises and their complexity, and once they discover the broadness of noise's palette of timbres, they will develop a passion for noise. He predicts that our "multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears, and... every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noise."[4]
Gallery of Works [ edit ]
photo of a Intonarumori concert with noise-machines
photo of an indoor Intonarumori machine (must be rotated!)
instruction-schema for building an Intonarumori noise-machine
Russolo, 1913: score of en-harmonic notation; partitura for Intonarumori
Russolo, 1913 and his assistant Ugo Piatti in their Milan studio with the Intonarumori (noise machines)
Musicians/Artists influenced by The Art of Noises [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Russolo, Luigi: L’Art des bruits. Textes réunis et préfacés par Giovanni Lista, bibliographie établie par Giovanni Lista. L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1975.
. Textes réunis et préfacés par Giovanni Lista, bibliographie établie par Giovanni Lista. L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1975. Chessa, Luciano: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. University of California Press, 2012.
University of California Press, 2012. Lista, Giovanni: Luigi Russolo e la musica futurista. Mudima, Milan, 2009. ISBN 978-88-96817-00-1
. Mudima, Milan, 2009. ISBN 978-88-96817-00-1 Lista, Giovanni: Journal des Futurismes. Éditions Hazan, Paris, 2008.
. Éditions Hazan, Paris, 2008. Lista, Giovanni: Le Futurisme: Création et avant-garde. Éditions L’Amateur, Paris, 2001.Does Hillary Clinton have “pneumonia” — as her campaign claims — or not?
During a speech in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Bill Clinton said Hillary is planning to return to the campaign trail tomorrow after her bout with “the flu,” and then even made a sarcastic |
as Logi will overlap) as well as always-useful ships such as Intys, Dictors & Recons. Everyone in your group of playters should strive to achieve this golden standard, and do their best to replace any ships that are lost as soon as possible as well as help out fellow corp mates by selling/lending/giving out spares.
The next hurdle to overcome is getting the ships from (typically) Jita to wherever you live and in the hands of your brothers in arms. These systems can range for the very simple to the very complex, run by specific sub-groups or by everyone pitching in and usually take the form of some combination of corp contracts, in-house JF services, seeding local markets and ship replacement programmes.
The other main preparation to do is bookmarks. One of my good friends and the best ‘Ceptor pilot I know, whenever he moves to a new home spends the first 2-3 days making bookmark after bookmark after bookmark, and for good reason. Especially in modern day EVE with its faster ships that project damage better than ever before, out-maneuvering your opponents and controlling engagements is the key difference between coming out on top and welping horrifically. There is no reason not to give yourself a home field advantage by placing bookmarks around structures that will see fights, your home station and well traveled or popularly camped gates, not to mention having a plethora of “safes”, at least one mid-safe per system that you can warp to when the brown stuff hits the fan.
Part III: Actually shooting at people
It’s taken us a long time to get to the bit we all came here for, but we’ve reached it at last, shooting at people for fun and/or profit. I’m not going to spend overly long on this section despite the fact that it’s (almost) everyone’s favourite part, I more want to cover how this should be approached in the context of this guide of mid/long-term living in low/null sec. There are many other (and far superior) places (including other posts in this blog) which provide resources on how to fly from your very first fleet to crazy Rooks and Kings stuff.
Especially in the smallest of groups, you need people willing to step up and FC, who will switch to ships to even out a composition, who will fly Interceptors and Interdictors. These tend to be the main personalities of corps, those who keep up the morale, drive for improvement and provide content for everyone to enjoy. It is a lot of fun to be this person and these are the kind of people every Coalition/Alliance/Corp are desperate to have. Without these people compositions are lop-sided, it takes ages to react to available PvP (which is never good) and the whole group suffers for it, becoming lethargic and ineffective as an entity.
One of the most important lessons I have learnt and want to impress on anyone reading this is that you should be aware of what reputation you’re building for yourself. This is something that new player corps especially can struggle with, for example E-UNI’s old reputation for ECM blobbing or Brave Newbie’s reputation for Talwars, Talwars, Talwars. If you’re fond of Falcons, unending Talwar fleets and/or dropping hideous numbers of dreads on people, you aren’t going to be liked very much. Now, by all means it’s your choice whether or not this is something you care about, but general people are more happy to take fights that are less in their favour if they like you and know you’ll be equally brave at a later date. By maintaining good relationships with some of your neighbours, you can have pre-arranged fights or even work together against an outside force which on your own you might not be able to deal with.
This also raises the point of how you deal with standings and your opinion/need for blues. More more people you blue, the less people you can shoot at, but equally the less people who are going to shoot at you. My own corp, SniggWaffe, operate on the basis that we like shooting things quite a lot and thus avoid blues like the plague, with exceptions for our own alts and PL (as we are the recruitment & training corp of Sniggerdly). If you have a bunch of structures that more powerful groups than yourself might want to replace with their own, you might want to try to attain a non-structure shooting agreement with them, or become best buddies with another group who might help fend off any aggressors.
Apoth ♥
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The Department of Justice has charged at least 137 people in the US with child pornography related crimes, after the FBI used a hacking tool to identify visitors of a large site on the so-called dark web. Many of those people are facing years in prison.
One person caught has avoided any serious jail time altogether though: Brian Haller, a former cybersecurity employee at Booz Allen Hamilton who himself has ties to the government. Haller was sentenced on Friday to time served—two days and one night, according to court documents and local media reports.
Haller pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography, court documents state. Haller was also sentenced to 10 years of supervised release, in which his computer will undergo constant monitoring (except devices that are used as part of his employment), and he was ordered to pay a fine of $1,000.
"We see a lot of […] good people who've done bad things," Judge Robert Byran said from the bench, according to a local report.
Up until his arrest in July 2015, Haller was the President of the Washington chapter of InfraGard, "the FBI's public-private partnership dedicated to critical infrastructure protection," reads Haller's LinkedIn profile. As part of this, Haller had access to a "secure FBI online platform and email system," reports Seattle Pi.
Haller had also worked at Booz Allen Hamilton as a senior consultant and an associate, as well as cybersecurity company NCC Group.
Haller isn't the only one caught by the FBI's mass hack with links to government. David Tippens reportedly served as a combat engineer in the US Army, and Richard Armendariz, a former Homeland Security analyst was also allegedly identified by the FBI's hacking tool.
These cases all stem from the takeover of child pornography site Playpen. For 13 days, the FBI ran Playpen from a government facility in Virginia, and deployed a network investigative technique (NIT). This NIT, after circumventing the protections offered by the Tor Browser, grabbed Playpen visitors' IP and MAC address, as well as other technical information.Photo: Kate Bouey Green Party faithful campaigning in Vernon prior to the spring election.
BC Green Party members are already gearing up for another election.
Regional campaign teams and party members from the Thompson-Okanagan and Kootenays will gather Sunday at the Best Western Hotel in Kelowna.
In a news release announcing the meeting, spokesman Robert Mellelieu said discussions will include a review of campaign performance, Green policy principles and organizational issues in advance of another provincial election that is expected, "sooner rather than later."
Thirteen electoral districts will be represented.
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs will speak to the group.
"May 9 results saw significant gains for the Greens in all 13 districts, apparently drawing new voters as well as some traditional Liberal and NDP voters," said Mellalieu.
“We intend to find ways to advance a progressive green agenda in co-operation with the members of other political parties. Regional organizers will take their cue from the three Green Party MLAs headed by our party leader, Andrew Weaver.”
The three elected Green MLAs forged an agreement with the NDP to allow the NDP to form a minority government after a Liberal minority fell.An analysis of three-billion-year-old soils from South Africa shows that oxygen appeared in the atmosphere more than 600 million years earlier than previously thought.
Previous studies have indicated that oxygen began accumulating in the atmosphere only about 2.3 billion years ago during a dynamic period in Earth’s history referred to as the Great Oxygenation Event.
The new study, published in the journal Nature, provides evidence for low concentrations of atmospheric oxygen in 3-billion-year-old Nsuze paleosol, the oldest soil on Earth.
“We’ve always known that oxygen production by photosynthesis led to the eventual oxygenation of the atmosphere and the evolution of aerobic life,” said study lead author Dr Sean Crowe from the University of British Columbia.
“This study now suggests that the process began very early in Earth’s history, supporting a much greater antiquity for oxygen producing photosynthesis and aerobic life.”
There was no oxygen in the atmosphere for at least hundreds of millions of years after the Earth formed.
Today, the Earth’s atmosphere is 20 per cent oxygen thanks to photosynthetic bacteria that, like trees and other plants, consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen. The bacteria laid the foundation for oxygen breathing organisms to evolve and inhabit the planet.
“These findings imply that it took a very long time for geological and biological processes to conspire and produce the oxygen rich atmosphere we now enjoy,” said second author Dr Lasse Døssing from the University of Copenhagen.
______
Bibliographic information: Sean A. Crowe et al. 2013. Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago. Nature 501, 535–538; doi: 10.1038/nature12426DHAKA: Bangladesh on Tuesday executed the leader of the country's largest Islamist party for war crimes, officials said, a move set to exacerbate tensions in the volatile Muslim-majority nation.
Motiur Rahman Nizami, leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged at a prison in the capital Dhaka, just days after the nation's highest court dismissed his final appeal to overturn the death sentence for atrocities committed during the country's 1971 war.
Law and Justice minister Anisul Huq told AFP the 73-year-old leader was hanged just before midnight (1800 GMT) after he refused to seek mercy from the country's president.
“He was executed between 11:50 pm and 12:00 am midnight,” Huq said.
In 2013 the convictions of Jamaat officials for war crimes triggered the country's deadliest violence in decades. Around 500 people were killed, mainly in clashes between Islamists and police, and thousands were arrested.
Nizami is the fifth and highest-ranked opposition leader -- and the fourth from Jamaat -- to have been executed since December 2013 for war crimes despite global criticism of their trials.
“We've been waiting for this day,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters, adding that people “will remember this day forever”.
Security stepped up
Hours before the hanging, family members of Nizami met him for the last time at the Dhaka Central Jail, as hundreds of police and elite security forces cordoned off the British colonial-era prison.
Security has been stepped up in the capital and in Nizami's home district of Pabna in the country's west, with magistrates being deployed to hand down instant prison terms to any law-breakers.
“If anyone tries to commit sabotage, our security forces are ready to identify them and take proper measures,” Khan told reporters.
Jamaat has said the charges against Nizami, a former government minister, are false and aimed at eliminating the leadership of the party.
Nizami took over as party leader in 2000 and played a key role in the victory of an Islamist-allied government in the 2001 general election. He was made a key minister in the cabinet of 2001-6.
The 1971 conflict, one of the bloodiest in world history, led to the creation of an independent Bangladesh from what was then East Pakistan.Rob Segedin hit his first MLB home run on the same day his wife went into labor
At this time last year, 27-year-old Rob Segedin was playing Double-A ball for the Yankees. In January,he was traded to L.A. Smash cut to this month: He set a new franchise RBI record in his MLB debut, and on Monday, he hit his first MLB home run, en route to the Dodgers' 18-9 victory over the Reds.
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Oh, and it was on the same day his wife, Robin, went into labor with their first child. Segedin went straight from Cincy to the hospital:
What a day! Straight off to plane from cincy to meet my wife at the hospital as we wait for my son's debut! @dodgers A photo posted by Rob Segedin (@robsegedin) on Aug 22, 2016 at 10:21pm PDT
If there's a better definition of "red-letter day," we don't know what it is. Actually, maybe we should just change it to "blue-letter day" in Segedin's honor.As soon as word spread that former Pro Bowl linebacker Navorro Bowman was being released by the 49ers, Oakland fans began to chant in unison for the Raiders to bring him in. The Raiders’ linebacking corps is young and has yet to reach their potential, meaning Bowman would provide veteran leadership and a solid presence in the middle.
The Vic Tafur tweeted this out:
Ball is in Bowman’s court. Raiders interested https://t.co/034enKfoT3 — Vic Tafur (@VicTafur) October 13, 2017
Albert Breer, earlier in the day, Tweeted this:
An offensive coach who faced him this year texted that NaVorro Bowman doesn't run well anymore, but still a good tackler, can fill a role. — Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) October 13, 2017
Who cares? Come on down, Mr. Bowman. Anyone who can tackle is a good fit for this Raiders team.
Expect Bowman to make his decision in the coming days. If anything breaks on the Raiders front, your friendly neighborhood Raiders blog will be the first to break the news to you, the home viewer.WATCH ABOVE: A happy ending to a story that touched the hearts of many Edmontonians: a stolen van, containing medical equipment used by a six-year-old with cerebral palsy, is found. Eric Szeto has the update.
EDMONTON – Six-year-old Shaleigh will be able to go back to school after police found her dad’s stolen van with her wheelchair and carseat inside.
Edmonton police found the van early Tuesday morning in the parking lot of a grocery store near 82 Street and 112 Avenue in Cromdale.
“Two o’clock this morning, I got a phone call,” said Shaleigh’s 29-year-old father, Phillip Hulmes.
“They actually sent a unit down here to pick me up. They brought me up there, and sure enough it was my van.
“This the best feeling ever,” he said. “She’s got her wheelchair and car seat so she can go to school. She’s back at school today; she’s back to living kind of normal.”
Shaileigh, who has cerebral palsy, had to stay home Monday since her father didn’t have a safe way to get her to school.
His van vanished from the family’s central Edmonton home sometime Friday night or early Saturday morning.
Hulmes said the specialized medical equipment that was inside would have cost more than $15,000 to replace. The walker, which he says is valued at upwards of $10,000, is still missing. So are his construction tools.
“I flip houses and do a lot of renovations. Everything from a screwdriver, table saw, chop saw, skill saws, routers, nailers … everything you would use to build a house is gone.”
Hulmes says those things can eventually be replaced. He has already been inundated with offers, some all the way from the U.K.
“Just an enormous outpouring of support. People from far and wide, people offering wheelchairs and walkers, willing to help out financially, everything they can do to help. It’s been absolutely phenomenal.”
After airing the story of the missing van Monday evening, Global News also received several calls and messages from people wanting to help.
A couple who was going to sell their van said they would rather give it, complete with new winter tires, to Hulmes and his daughters. One woman offered up a wheelchair and a car seat. Another viewer also had a carseat available.
Online fundraisers were also set up on YouCaring and GoFundMe, the latter put together by a man from Saskatoon. As of Tuesday afternoon, about $2,100 had been raised.
Police continue to investigate the theft.
Hulmes says whoever left the van in the parking lot did the right thing.
“I don’t know if it was them or whoever it was, but thank you so much. It was a godsend for sure.
“Lots of prayers went out. My prayers were answered and Shaileigh’s prayers were answered, and that’s all that matters.”The US is poised to sell state of the art thermal weapon sights and spares to Pakistan, in the wake of Obama administration’s decision to provide eight F-16 fighter jets and nine AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters worth USD 170 million to the country.
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The Pentagon yesterday awarded a USD17 million contract to Raytheon for supply of state of the art thermal weapon sights and spares which improve targeting and surveillance capabilities by enabling soldiers to spot targets at long distances through haze, dust, fog and other obscurants.
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Raytheon is known as a pioneer in thermal weapons sights. The Pentagon on Tuesday said Raytheon has been awarded a USD17,877,938 firm-fixed-price, foreign military sales contract (Pakistan) for thermal weapon sights and spares, training, and contract data requirements lists.
One bid was solicited with one received. Work will be performed in McKinney, Texas; and Pakistan, with an estimated completion date of October 30, 2017. Fiscal 2010 other procurement funds in the amount of USD17,877,938 were obligated at the time of the award, the statement said.A working group of the Planning Commission had only negative things to report at the commission’s Oct. 25 meeting after analyzing the final prescription paper for CodeNEXT, the city’s overhaul of the Land Development Code. The paper, which addresses fiscal health, had been presented at the commission’s Oct. 11 meeting.
Commissioner Angela Piñeyro De Hoyos told the commission that the working group did not have as much time as it would have liked to study the paper in depth; however, from what they did see, members felt discouraged. “Like the other prescription papers, there was an astonishing lack of details,” she said. “It was like a very unsatisfying teaser trailer for a new movie.”
She cited the paper’s recommendation to use public-private partnerships to build and maintain the city’s infrastructure, saying it did not provide details as to what those partnerships would actually look like.
The prescription papers compare the CodeNEXT plan to city code from the 1980s, almost as a way of making the proposals seem more innovative than they actually are, according to Commissioner Jeffrey Thompson. “It’s an inaccurate comparison to what we have now,” he said.
“There were a lot of feel-good proposals,” Commissioner Michael Wilson said. “But when reality hits, it will be nasty. I, myself, see a train wreck.”
One of the main concerns discussed was the inability of the Planning Commission, or the public for that matter, to trace the code changes from the current code to the new draft code to be released in January.
“This body needs to continue to speak to city staff to ensure that we can track these changes,” said Chair Stephen Oliver.
The salt in the wound, so to speak, was the absence of any CodeNEXT project team members at the Oct. 25 meeting. Oliver said that without someone available for the commission’s questions, it did not feel like the seamless process that was promised. “It’s disappointing,” he said.
On the bright side, Commissioner Nuria Zaragoza said she was pleasantly surprised by the outcome of the joint meeting between the CodeNEXT Advisory Group and City Council on Oct. 19. She said that some advisory group members were “taken aback” that the Planning Commission and the Zoning and Platting Commission would be taking part in the review process upon the draft’s release in January. Although there won’t be too many opportunities to weigh in, she said, “what we do have to say will be listened to.”
Commissioner Trinity White asked if there was a way for the commission to “have more teeth” in scheduling the review on their terms as opposed to just nagging the CodeNEXT team with emails.
Oliver said that he plans to speak to CodeNEXT representatives before the next Planning Commission meeting on Nov. 8. “We need to talk about how to adjust our schedule so that we’re not looking at code at 11 p.m.,” he said.
“I totally agree,” said Commissioner Tom Nuckols. “It’s up to us to decide what’s on our agenda.”
The commission wrapped up the item with the intention of setting its schedule to review the draft code before the end of the year and making its limited input count.
Photo from the CodeNEXT prescription paper on fiscal health.
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Read latest Whispers ›Killed: Christopher Lane with his girlfriend Sarah Harper. Credit:Facebook ‘‘We would have had more bodies that night if we didn’t get them.’’ On one of the alleged killer’s Facebook pages investigators said they found the message: ‘‘Bang. Two drops in two hours’’. Lane’s murder has shocked the residents of Duncan, a quiet city of 25,000 people in southern Oklahoma, and his team-mates at East Central University (ECU), where Lane, 22, won a scholarship to be the team’s catcher. The town has had only one other murder in the past five years.
Tragic loss: Christopher Lane. Credit:Essendon Baseball Club Chief Ford said Lane, who grew up in Melbourne north’s Oak Park, was murdered on Friday afternoon when he left the Duncan home of his girlfriend, Sarah Harper, and went for a jog along Country Club Road, an upper-class area. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The three boys, in a black car, randomly spotted Lane, police allege. ‘‘They followed him,’’ Chief Ford said. ‘‘They came up from behind, shot him in the back with a small calibre hand gun and sped off.’’
I think they were on a killing spree. We would have had more bodies that night if we didn’t get them. Witnesses saw Lane stumble across the road and then get down on his knees before struggling to a drainage area on the side of the road. A woman who came from a nearby house tried CPR while another woman who was in a car stopped and called 911. Despite paramedics and police being at the scene within minutes and transporting Lane to a nearby hospital, he was pronounced dead about an hour later. Chief Ford said the only information investigators had at the scene was the killers were in a black car that had a white sticker on the front left hand side of the driver’s windscreen.
Their big break came about four hours later when a concerned parent called police with the message: ‘‘Several juveniles are coming over to kill their son’’. Police scrambled to the address and found a black car with a white sticker containing the three teenagers in an adjacent church car park. ‘‘Luckily we had officers there really quick,’’ Detective John Byers said. The boys were arrested, with one allegedly confessing they murdered Lane. ‘‘Two of them did not want to talk,’’ Chief Ford said.
‘‘One of them gave the information they did do the shooting.’’ A search of the car found a shotgun, but the handgun was yet to be found, Chief Ford said. However, ammunition for the handgun was found hidden in a fuse box under the bonnet of the car and Chief Ford said surveillance footage showed, minutes after Lane was shot, the boys hiding a weapon in the air box breather in the car’s engine. In between the shooting of Lane and the boys’ arrest one of the boys kept an appointment with juvenile authorities for a previous brush with the law, Chief Ford said. The boys did not have an apparent link to a gang or drugs, he added.
‘‘I know everybody thinks there has to be a reason, but I’ve been in this business for 30 years and there doesn’t have to be a reason with these kids," the chief said. ‘‘It is a sad, sad thing what happened with that young man.’’ Lane and his girlfriend had only been back in the US for three days after visiting his family in Australia. The couple had been together for four years. In a Facebook tribute posted just hours after his death, Ms Harper said she had ‘‘amazing memories’’ and cherished a ‘‘last adventure together.’’ ‘‘I love you so much babe. From 2009 until forever you will always be mine and in a very special and protected place in my heart," she wrote.
Friends and teammates have begun changing their profile pictures on Facebook to images of Mr Lane.Mr Lane had been a generous and friend and ‘‘brother’’ to his teammates in Oklahoma, one friend wrote. ‘‘I don’t think any of us know how or what we are supposed to feel right now about one of our best men Christopher Lane but I do know that we were extremely blessed to have him sent across the world and into each of our lives," Marshall Veal wrote. ‘‘He brought a light to each of us and will be greatfly missed.‘‘Laney would have done anything in the world for all ofr us and we would do the same, he was a best friend, teammate, and most of all a Brother.’’ One former Australian teammate wrote of Lane’s talent and friendship: ‘‘You are one of the most genuine blokes I’ve ever had the privilege to got to know.’’ Dr Jeff Williams, athletics director at Lane’s college, said: ''The ECU family is saddened to hear about this tragedy.''
‘‘Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Lane family and friends. We will do everything possible to support his family and teammates during this sad time.’’Lane’s body is expected to be flown back to Australia later this week. Mr Lane's Australian club also paid tribute to him. ''Essendon Baseball Club is deeply saddened by the passing of Christopher Lane,'' the statement said. ''Chris was a truly talented and highly respected young man whose friendship was valued by all who had the good fortune to know him. ''His loss is felt by each and every member of the Essendon family and our thoughts and prayers are with the Lane family during this incredibly difficult time.''
Mr Lane served on the school council at St Bernard’s College in Essendon North, graduating in 2008. School principal Tony Paatsch said a steady stream of calls and emails were coming through from former students and staff upset at Mr Lane’s death. ‘‘Some of the things that they say: ‘One of the friendliest and loved boys of ‘08’,’’ Mr Paatsch said. Old boys who knew him are preparing to raise funds to assist the family with the repatriation of Mr Lane’s body back to Australia, Mr Paatsch said. Loading Baseball Victoria tweeted: ''Very sad news regarding Essendon Baseball Club player Chris Lane who tragically lost his life''. AAP and Deborah GoughNo one was more excited about the planned Dumb and Dumber sequel than Jim Carrey -- but three months after director Peter Farrelly confirmed that both original stars would reprise their iconic roles, ETOnline has exclusively learned that Carrey has exited from the project.
RELATED - Inside Dumb and Dumber To
According to sources, Carrey grew increasingly frustrated by New Line and Warner Brothers, who he felt showed a lack of enthusiasm regarding the project.
VIDEO - Outrageous Never-Before-Seen Footage of Jim Carrey's Man on the Moon
A sentiment seemingly reinforced by a statement exclusively obtained when ETOnline reached out to the actor's publicist for comment. In addition to confirming the story, Carrey exclusively tells ETOnline, "I would have thought Dumb and Dumber To was a no-brainer, after all it's implied in the title."
While the future of Dumb & Dumber To is now unknown, Carrey's fans can rest easy knowing the actor will be back on the big screen next year in New Line and Warner Brothers' The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.Just ahead of jury deliberations in the Boston Marathon bombing trial, a group of Catholic Church leaders from Massachusetts came out against putting accused killer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.
“The defendant in this case has been neutralized and will never again have the ability to cause harm,” four bishops said in a statement released Monday. “Because of this, we, the Catholic Bishops of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, believe that society can do better than the death penalty.” The statement was signed by Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, Most Reverend Edgar M. da Cunha, Most Reverend Mitchell T. Rozanski and Most Reverend Robert J. McManus.
RELATED: Defense rests in Boston bombing trial
Lawyers on both sides of the Boston Marathon bombing trial delivered closing arguments Monday, teeing up the jury to begin deliberations Tuesday morning. And while it is widely expected that Tsarnaev, 21, will be convicted – his defense team conceded their client committed all the crimes of which he is accused – there remains some question as to whether he will be sentenced to death.
In Monday’s closing arguments, defense attorney Judith Clarke made the case that Tsarnaev’s life should be spared because of his late brother’s role in the crime. “We need to understand who was leading and who was following,” Clarke said.
Tsarnaev is accused of carrying out the April 15, 2013, attack and fatally shooting a police officer three days later as he and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, tried to flee the city.
The bishops quote Pope Francis’ March 20 remarks to reinforce their stance: “[The death penalty] is an offense against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the human person. When the death penalty is applied, it is not for a current act of oppression, but rather for an act committed in the past. It is also applied to persons whose current ability to cause harm is not current, as it has been neutralized – they are already deprived of their liberty.”
Additional reporting by Reuters.The latest survey on the well-being of Wisconsin children finds little has changed, but that more children are living in poverty.
The KIDS COUNT report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation tracked changes in children's education, health and economic status between 2007 and 2013. In Wisconsin, math scores for eighth graders improved and more teens graduated from high school. But, Jim Moeser, of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, said there was also a 5 percent increase in the number of children living in poverty from 2008 to 2013.
He said helping those children means helping their parents "through employment opportunities and employment training" and "things like transportation."
He also said it's important to implement quality early childhood education in lower-income neighborhoods.
Wisconsin ranks 10th in the nation in child poverty. In 2013, a full 26 percent of children had parents without a secure job.A resolution to the ongoing split in Italian Rugby League could be in sight if proposed talks between the FIRL (Federazione Italiana Rugby League), RLIF (Rugby League International Federation), RLEF (Rugby League European Federation) and the breakaway LIRFL (Lega Italia Rugby Football League) bear fruit.
Pierluigi Gentile, founder of the LIRFL, a “rebel” league structure set up with ten thriving clubs across Italy, is calling for a ‘meeting of minds’ by inviting officials from the three other governing bodies to sit down and discuss a collaboration.
Pierluigi explained “We have to do what is in the best interests of Rugby League in Italy and therefore we have an obligation to forge a common path in order to resolve our differences.
“CONI, the influential Italian Olympic Committee, and the FIR, the governing body of “rugby” in Italy, have written to the three organisations expressing aims for a rapprochement with LIRFL and an end to the divide that is both damaging for the game of Rugby League and for sport in Italy. These are sentiments I fully support.
"We have recently gained recognition for Rugby League with CONI, with the FIR as the vehicle for acceptance, and that is a development that fills us with pride and clarifies the importance of the work we are carrying out across all of Italy.
"CONI is an organisation without whose support you cannot effectively develop a sport in Italy. CONI’s insistence on a collaboration with FIR in order to gain recognition has been an obviously contentious issue for a fiercely independent sport such as Rugby League but it has opened up a lot of opportunities.
“This is a chance to make Italy a genuine, emerging force in international Rugby League and continue the great work being done domestically in terms of player and club development, sponsorship and media profile.
“We all need to be speaking with one voice for the benefit of Rugby League in Italy,” added Pierluigi whose motivation to develop the ‘rebel’ Revolution League came about after the existing FIRL opted to chose a 2013 RL World Cup squad composed of Australian-based NRL players.
“We have 77 000 potential Rugby League players at our disposal by operating on favourable terms with the FIR and tapping into their existing structure. The many thousands who have already participated in the thirteen-a-side code through LIRFL love playing the game. This is a perfect platform for growth.
“Italy is a sport obsessed and we have the relevant physical attributes to make our mark, without outside interference. We do not have the burden of history and a collaborative approach represents the best solution for Italy.
“Situations vary from country to country and this represents the best way to grow our game,” added Pierluigi whose LIRFL international representative side recently beat the British Asian Rugby Association 20-18 in an outstanding contest in Rome. They also played in Nairobi in March 2014 against a burgeoning Kenya team, winning 34-24 in another thrilling encounter..
Pierluigi went on: "As previously requested over the last four years, in which communications were sent to the RLIF and RLEF, we are always ready to reiterate our total openness to a reunification with FIRL as long as they are willing to accept a democratic election process, constitution and rigorous development plan as required by CONI.
"I would respectfully ask RLIF RLEF and FIRL to come to the table and discuss unification and draft the best way forward for the growth of the game. This has always been our position and we remain completely open and transparent to healthy and constructive dialogue.
"We should work to overcome these misunderstandings and work for the development of rugby league because in Italy as in many other nations, there are thousands of men, women and children who just want to play this fantastic game," he added.
For more information visit http://www.legairfl.it, http://www.firl.it, http://www.rlef.eu.com, http://www.rlif.com and http://www.coni.itTV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
In “Severance,” the first episode of Mad Men’s final half-season, Ted Chaough pitches a line to Don: “There are three women in every man’s life.” In tonight’s finale, Don places phone calls to three women, and each call provides Don an essential glimpse of the life he left behind.
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First, Don talks to Sally, who’s not interested in hearing her father’s latest tales from out west. While he’s a picture of velocity, spending his days gripping the wheel of a Chevy to see how fast he can speed into the desert horizon, Sally looks burdened and inanimate. She slumps against the wall with tired eyes as she informs Don of Betty’s prognosis. He pledges that he’ll be there to help, the same way he intended to swoop in and rescue Anna Draper when she came down with cancer. “You’re all going to live with me,” he tells Sally.
But that’s not what he really wants—it’s what he thinks he should do—nor is it ideal for Bobby and Gene. Sally is old enough to know all that. She’s old enough to know a lot of things, suddenly. Whereas their last phone call ended with Don shaking his head at his daughter’s irresponsibility, this time Sally is the mature one. The cancer news has sobered her and given her focus. Don hasn’t been around to witness this change, so he thinks he needs to rush home and be the adult. He doesn’t realize that Sally has already filled that role. “Do you understand I’m betraying her confidence?” she says, borrowing the grownup language that Henry used when he broke the news to her. This repetition is a sign of the trust that Sally’s placing in Henry amid this crisis—she’s come to admire him, which is part of why she’s advocating for him to take care of her brothers after Betty dies.
The last thing Sally says to her father on Mad Men is, “I’m not being dramatic. Now please, take me seriously.” It sounds like a version of a plea that Betty would have made in years past, to no avail. (Don even rolls his eyes at Betty’s supposed hysterics during this phone call, before he understands that his ex-wife really is dying.) But unlike Betty, Sally doesn’t demand satisfaction when she asks Don to take her seriously. She doesn’t even wait for an answer. Instead, she hangs up the phone, because while she’d like his help, she also knows that she doesn’t need Don—a wisdom that was hard-won for her mother.
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If Don learns from Sally that he’s not needed at home, he learns from Betty that he’s not wanted. Run down by her illness and lacking the energy for an argument, Betty tells Don that Bobby and Gene will live at their uncle’s house because they need “a woman in their life—a mother and family.” Sally is insinuating herself into that female-role-model slot for now, and maybe she entertains notions of keeping it up for a while, but Betty doesn’t want that for her daughter. Like she said in the letter last week, she sees Sally leading a life of adventure.
And Betty sees the same thing for Don, because she has been paying attention, so she tells him to keep his distance. “I want to keep things as normal as possible,” she insists, “and you not being here is part of that.” It pains him to hear that, and it pains her to say it, too—in the same breath, she calls him “honey” as |
We are trying to talk to the attackers, we want to listen to them about what they want," Ahmed said.
"Some of our people have been injured. Our first priority is to save the lives of the people trapped inside.," he said. He would not confirm the number of those trapped inside.
Earlier this month, authorities in the country rounded up about 1,600 criminal suspects, including a few dozen believed to be Islamist radicals, in a nationwide crackdown aimed at halting a wave of brutal attacks on minorities and activists.
Only 37 of them were suspected to be radical Islamist militants, according to authorities. Those include three charged with alleged membership in the banned militant outfit Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh.
The country saw a significant increase in terrorist attacks in 2015, as groups including ISIS and Al Qaeda targeted foreigners, religious minorities, police, secular bloggers and publishers. ISIS last November called for attacks in Bangladesh in an article in its online magazine, Dabiq.
The Associated Press contributed to this reportIn January 2014, documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that a Canadian spy agency used a unique identifier to follow thousands of Canadians as they moved about the country. The tracking all originated from an unnamed airport.
It got us thinking: how hard would it be to replicate this little experiment, writ small? Could I use one of my own online identifiers as a way to track my own movements through time and space?
The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is: yes. It’s easy to do, and it’s revealing about what I do, when I do it, and where I go.
Like many other websites, Ars Technica employs a system of voluntary user logins. These logins allow you to do things like leave comments at the bottom of every story and engage in our user forums. Each time you log in to Ars, we record the date, time, and IP address that you logged in from. This is a common practice: nearly every website maintains similar records. Typically though, Ars only keeps one record per user of the last date, time, and IP address used. We do not keep any historical records of login data.
However, Ars lead developer Lee Aylward was kind enough to make an exception—me. For 11 days in February 2014, Ars tracked all of my logins. The working theory was that since I’m telling Ars who I am (my login name is the frequently used and obvious “cfarivar”) and loading the site multiple times per day, my logins would actually give Ars a clear idea of my actions and movements.
In turn, I sent this 11-day log along to Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute based in Berkeley, California. It took Weaver just a short amount of time to write a Python script that converted the raw CSV data file (including Unix time notation). It would start with a line like this:
1392056430,335607,
[IP REDACTED],/wp-admin/post.php?post=410003&action=edit&message=10
And Weaver's creation could turn it into something much more human-readable, like this:
Between Fri Feb 14 07:53:51 2014 and Fri Feb 14 10:58:58 2014 at SecuredServers.com
That means Ars showed I was editing a particular story for about three hours on the morning of February 14, and I was connected likely through Private Internet Access (PIA), the commercial VPN that I frequently use. Normally, for privacy reasons, I use PIA to obscure my tracks online. While I tried leaving it off for the purposes of this experiment, sometimes I left it on by accident. That turned out to be useful, allowing us to see what it looks like when online origins are obscured.
Home is where the data is
Looking at the raw data and the cleaned-up script on my own, there were a few things that seemed obvious: first, it showed when I started and ended my work day. Some days, I was logged into Ars as early as 4:14am (February 13) and was active as late as 9:30pm (February 16). But generally speaking, I was consistently online by about 7am and ended around 5pm. There was then a few hours' gap (I knew this was for dinner) and sometimes a check-in again before calling it a night.
Second, the data showed physical places that I knew I visited in the Bay Area: a particular San Francisco office building, an Oakland café, and the University of California, Berkeley, campus.
But Weaver’s analysis was far cleverer than I expected.
“I assumed you worked at home, because you had a residential Comcast IP address,” Weaver said. (He’s right: like nearly all of us at Ars, I work primarily at home.)
I didn’t realize that Comcast distinguishes its IP information in the hostname of business versus residential accounts. Anything that shows up as comcast.net is a residence, while anything else that shows up at comcastbusiness.net is likely a business. (Of course, anyone can sign up for a “Business-class” account at home, like Ars editor Lee Hutchinson, but most people don’t go that route.)
Apparently, the original CSV file he used also contained URL information for which article I was viewing. “I knew what you were reading,” Weaver added. “That tells me what article you were working on, if you're reading old stuff it means you're looking for links.”
(Again he's right. If I’m pulling up the last three stories I wrote about Bitcoin, there’s a high likelihood that I was working on a new story on Bitcoin.)
“When VPN was active I could see that you were active, but not where,” he said.
"I am person X at this location."
The precision of the IP addresses was surprising.
In one instance, on Thursday February 6, at 9:30am, I was logged in at a particular San Francisco IP address. Looking up that IP on myip.ms turned up not only the city, but one of two possible street addresses as well. The search was again correct: on that particular day at that particular hour, I was conducting an interview with Boxbee CEO Kristoph Matthews at The Hatchery, a co-working space and startup incubator at 645 Harrison Street, in San Francisco’s South of Market district.
“If I was Google doing this analysis or the [National Security Agency], I would already have a large database as to what [building corresponds] to this IP address, or what all the information I know about [that IP] is,” Weaver added. “Once you have that, you have a much richer suite of options; you might even know which building [you were in].” (Lots of companies are already doing this, creating physical maps influenced by the location of known, fixed Wi-Fi networks.)
Weaver explained that a stronger and more persistent adversary, like the NSA, would have a much longer-term and comprehensive data set. Data sets like that would include information from plenty of sites beyond Ars.
“Facebook knows if you hit any page that has a Like button on it,” he said. “Same with TweetThis, unless the site goes out of the way to mask them, then these are specifically reporting them to social networks. This is why NSA loves it, is because they can go along for the ride.
“One thing that we know that the NSA does on their non-US wiretaps is bind usernames to cookies, so if you see a request for LinkedIn or YouTube or Yahoo, these are all sites that have user ID in the clear. All you need to do is see a request, and say I don't know who this is or I know who this is, but then you look at the HTML body and look for the username. This is why the NSA went after Google ad networks; they include user identification [broadcast] in the clear: ‘I am person X at this location.’”
Despite the vast amount of data, it's just as easy to store as it is to interpret. “It works out to only a few kilobytes per person for everyone on the planet,” Weaver added. In other words, if I had the access, it'd cost just a few thousand dollars to have enough consumer-grade storage to keep data on everyone in the United States. It would comfortably fit on my desk.
Metadata is surveillance
There was good news from this exercise. Mainly, the digital obfuscatory tools I normally run did help mask my online trail.
Generally speaking, I run all kinds of anti-tracking software on my browser: constant private mode, Ghostery Disconnect, and my VPN. (I also have Tor and use it occasionally. Though the VPN, of course, concealed my location but did not conceal my activity. I was still clearly logged into Ars.) And Weaver said, yes, these tools do help to thwart tracking to some degree.
“The biggest reason why the NSA thinks Tor stinks is that it's actually really hard to link user activity to people,” he said. “Because the [Tor browser] bundle operates [by default] not storing cookies and [doesn’t allow Flash]. The browser bundle is allowed to not have linkages across sessions. Every time you exit the tor browser it looks like a new user. Normal browsers are not set with clear all cookies. The real fault lies in the architecture of the Web. The Web is designed [to allow the] business model of tracking. If you have your browser set to clear cookies every time you quit, it really helps. Tor is overkill; your single hop VPN is still bouncing all over the place.”
As many privacy activists and security researchers have long noted, free products turn the customers into products. Google and Facebook are some of the biggest companies that make billions of dollars by tracking their users' behavior and selling ads against that behavior. But even my work account would have the potential for data mining.
“[Your Ars log] didn't tell me anything new about your site, but it does tell me about your workflow. It tells me where you go and when you're active,” Weaver concluded. “This is why everybody says metadata is surveillance.”I’m writing this post while going 70 miles per hour down I-35. It’s not as dangerous as it sounds…
Vonlane is a new premium bus service that wants to change the way you travel between Austin and Dallas. Spoiler alert: I’m sold.
The concept is simple enough- traveling by plane between the two cities is not fun. By the time you drive out to Bergstrom, park, go through check-in/security, and actually get off the ground, you have a solid 15-20 minutes of paid wi-fi to get anything done. The trip ends up taking about as long as it would have to drive, and business travelers struggle with the loss in productivity. Enter Vonlane.
Let’s start with how easy it is to book your trip. Their site is super user friendly and you can book a seat within minutes of hitting their homepage.
You can arrive as late as 10 minutes before your trip, check any large bags with the driver (for free), and hop on a bus unlike anything you’ve been on before. The seats are as wide or wider than any domestic first-class seats, and I couldn’t reach the seat in front of me if I tried. How far do the seats recline? The answer is, far enough that I accidentally fell asleep on my trip from Austin yesterday.
But it’s actually the service that really makes Vonlane special. When you step onto the bus, you’re greeted by a ‘flight attendant;’ she’ll walk you to your seat and offer to take your coat, which will be hung in a closet rather than stuffed into an overhead bin. You’re then presented with a menu that includes complimentary soft drinks, and food catered from the same companies that cater private jets. I indulged.
The menu then goes a step further to offer essential travel items like noise-canceling headphones, and cushioned lap desks for your computer. They’ll even provide you with a toothbrush and paste if you left yours at home.
I was actually more productive in the three-hour trip today than I typically am at my own desk; less distraction I suppose! I highly, highly recommend this for business travelers in Austin, and with pricing similar to that of flying between the two cities (around $100 each way), I’d actually recommend it for personal travel as well.
Busses leave from the Hyatt Regency on Town Lake several times throughout the day, and they drop you off in Dallas at a hotel near the Love Field Airport. Give them a try on your next trip to Dallas; I promise you’ll love the experience.
www.Vonlane.comDid you know that a typical box of graham crackers tastes better to a kid if SpongeBob Squarepants smiling face is on the label? A recent study published in Pediatrics offers insight into how much the smiling faces of famous cartoon characters on food packages really does entice your children. The results may shock you, turns out those famous faces have a huge influence on kids taste buds.
A group of 40 children aged 3 to 6 years old decided that of the identical graham crackers, fruit snacks and carrots they were served, those with images of Shrek, Dora the Explorer and Scooby Doo on the packaging actually tasted better than those in original packaging. According to all three taste comparisons, the majority of children chose snacks featuring licensed cartoon characters, and approximately 53% of them indicated that the food with the characters actually tasted better.
While the study showed that the children clearly preferred graham crackers and fruit snacks with licensed characters, this did not hold true for carrots. Carrots packaged with cartoon characters compared to plain carrots did not as strongly impact the children’s desire to eat a carrot, the same way those famous mugs made the children want to reach for more sweet snacks. Researchers believe that because children are not typically used to seeing characters on vegetable labels, their taste preference may not have been as swayed as it was with snack food, or that their choices could have been based on levels of familiarity. This could explain why 11 of the 40 children chose plain packaging for the carrots, simply due to their preference for something ordinary rather than their liking of a character.
With children spending more time in front of the television rather than outside playing with friends, the familiar faces from cartoons may be having a stronger impact then years ago. A previous study in 2007 revealed that just two years after Nickelodeon characters SpongeBob and Dora began to appear on fruits and vegetables, 60% of grocery store products featuring similar characters on junk food. In the same year, Shrek became a spokesperson for various US Department of Health and Human Services campaigns while his image also appeared on products from McDonald’s, Cheetos, and Keebler, to name a few. The incongruous nature of using the same character to advertise both healthy and unhealthy products, may be subconsciously confusing children.Put another way, Volkswagen’s goal, based on its strategic approach, is for the e-Golf to deliver the performance and handling of a Golf which happens to have a battery-electric powertrain. Based on a second, and slightly longer, chance to drive the new e-Golf unsupervised, we think Volkswagen has succeeded splendidly in this goal; we find the e-Golf to be a nimble and quiet electric delight.
The e-Golf (“Das e-Auto” earlier post ), the Volkswagen brand’s second series production battery-electric vehicle after the e-up!, is a key model, as it is the best and most current implementation of its strategic decision to begin providing e-mobility based on large-scale production models rather than special “small niche” cars. The Golf is core to Volkswagen; the company has sold more than 30 million units worldwide since the first introduction in 1974. The e-Golf is based on current 7 th generation Golf, itself based on the strategic MQB toolkit.
Series production of Volkswagen’s e-Golf began five months ago in March at Volkswagen’s plant in Wolfsburg, Germany. The e-Golf is currently on sale in Germany, and will be launched late this year or early next year in the US, initially in the ZEV (zero emission vehicle regulation) states (i.e., California, and those states which have signed on to the California ZEV requirements). As part of the run-up to that introduction, Volkswagen of America brought journalists (including GCC) out to Wolfsburg to have some seat time with the new BEV, as well as to take a look at the assembly of the MQB-based e-Golf in the massive Wolfsburg plant; to have a walk through the new battery pack assembly plant in Braunschweig; and to get a better sense of Volkswagen’s (brand and group) thinking on e-mobility.
Strategy. Volkswagen began working with electric vehicles back in the early 1970s, noted Dr. Harald Manzenrieder, head of e-Golf production at the Wolfsburg plant. These—including, for example, an electric version of the T2, the iconic VW van of the late 1960s and 1970s—were mostly test cars and prototype cars, but also small fleets for special purposes.
Now, however, given all the market drivers facing the auto industry (regulations, fossil fuel availability, societal changes, etc.), Volkswagen is positioning itself for a broad-scale strategic shift in the types of powertrains in its vehicles—a shift that, because of its size, mandates an approach that can deliver the types of numbers it requires.
We are working on changing our focus from fossil fuel to higher efficiency for cars and to different possibilities to drive our cars. We are starting with optimizing our conventional drive trains—the TDI diesel engines, the TSI engines, the DSG transmission, all of those technologies have helped us to lower our fuel consumption a lot. We have different alternative fuels in our program such as CNG and LPG, we are working on some synthetic fuel. We have hybrids in our program to lower fuel consumption, mild hybrids, full hybrids, plug in hybrids coming out this year and of course we are working on the pure electric drive.
We are thinking that the right way [to do this] is large scale production, not special small niche cars and we think that a broad product range is necessary to bring this to the markets. —Dr. Soeren Hinze, Volkswagen Electric-Traction (EL) Technical Development
(Dr. Hinze is the engineer in charge of the rollout of the e-Golf and e-up!)
As the number two OEM in the automobile business in the world, it only makes sense for us if we see a certain volume behind it. So we won’t just jump into any technology only to be the first. We are coming with a solution that we think is a fit for the market.
We believe that the right way to bring electric vehicles is to implement them into the models that the customers like the most. For us that is the Golf, the best selling car in Europe and one of the most successful cars in the world, but also in other vehicles. —Christian Buhlmann, Volkswagen Product Communications
This approach requires not just the design engineering of the vehicle, but also the development of the integrated assembly process (enabled by the MQB), plus training of personnel in the plant. (More on this below.)
With the MQB-based designs and processes in the place, Volkswagen is confident that is can respond appropriately with whichever powertrain technologies become in demand.
If you look at the MQB cars, we started out with Golf now, and the successors of current PQ35 cars, which is Passat, Jetta and so on, will all be based on MQB, and are receiving MQB components at this time already, if you think of combustion engines like the 1.8 TSI, the 2.0 TDI latest generation. Those are all components that we are implementing from the MQB into existing models. Once the new generations are coming out, if we see a reasonable market share for EVs and PHEVs, we can deliver [those] without having to redevelop. —Christian Buhlmann
Volkswagen is electrifying all vehicle classes. The use of its modular e-drive components, within the context of the Volkswagen Group’s MQB (driven by the Volkswagen brand), MLB (longitudinal, driven by Audi) and the MSB (sporty, driven by Porsche), will enable rapid deployment of e-drive technologies throughout Group’s product lines—when consumer demand or regulatory requirements necessitate it. Škoda, as one example, will be offering a plug-in hybrid. Click to enlarge.
The e-Golf. The e-Golf is powered by a 24.2 kWh, 323V Li-ion battery pack—318 kg (701 lbs), or 21% of the e-Golf’s DIN unladen body weight—with the component 25 Ah cells and modules (6-cell and 12-cell) provided by Panasonic. The pack is located between the front and read axles. The front end of the battery is equipped with the Battery Management Controller (BMC) which performs safety, diagnostic and monitoring functions and also regulates the battery’s temperature in the Battery Junction Controller (interface to energy supply for the motor).
Left. Early display cutaway of the e-Golf battery pack. Right. Training cutaway of the production battery pack. The modules (in 6- and 12- cell versions) are shipped in from Panasonic, and assembled into the pack at the Braunschweig plant. The pack comprises 264 cells in 27 modules (88s 3p). One of the challenges for the battery team was working through the volumetric geometry of the pack and the orientation of the modules to fit the space available in the e-Golf in adherence with the MQB approach.
The pack has no active cooling system. At the beginning, noted Dr. Manz, Volkswagen thought it might need a thermal management system. However, as the engineers went through testing on the pack with the packaging and the Volkswagen-developed management system, they discovered that they did not need a cooling system. Click to enlarge.
The pack itself is assembled in Braunschweig, and incorporates Volkswagen’s energy and battery management control logic. The production configuration of the pack was a bit challenging, noted Dr. Holger Manz, the head of the battery development department in Braunschweig, because of the need to fit in the space made available by the standardized MQB approach.
The e-drive unit consists of a 85 kW (114 hp), 270 N·m (199 lb-ft) synchronous electric motor (EEM 85) and single-speed transmission (EQ 270) with integrated differential and mechanical parking brake. Both motor and gearbox, which form a compact, modular unit, were developed in-house at Volkswagen. The e-drive unit is made at the Volkswagen components plant in Kassel, Germany.
The power electronics module controls the high-voltage energy flow between the e-motor and the lithium-ion battery (between 250 and 430 V depending on the battery voltage). The power electronics converts the direct current (DC) stored in the battery to alternating current (AC). The primary interfaces of the power electronics are its traction network connection to the battery; 3-phase connection to the electric motor; connector from the DC/DC converter to the 12-V electrical system; and a connection for the high-voltage power distributor.
Top left. Overhead view of electric drive and battery components. Top right. Under the hood of an e-Golf on the Wolfsburg assembly line. Bottom left. Illustration of main electric-drive components. Bottom right. The heat pump for US and potentially other markets. Click to enlarge.
Volkswagen developed a special electromechanical brake servo for its electric cars. This optimizes the driver’s braking force in the same way that brake servos do in conventional cars. However, with the electromechanical brake servo this happens by what is known as brake blending—a process in which low levels of deceleration are produced solely through the e-motor’s braking torque. Stronger deceleration, meanwhile, is achieved by combining the braking torques of the electric motor and the hydraulic brake system.
A newly developed heat pump—which will be applied in the US e-Golf—enables better driving range in colder temperatures. An add-on module to the electric heating (high-voltage heater) and electric air conditioning compressor, the heat pump recovers heat from the ambient air and the heat given off by the drive system components. This significantly reduces the high-voltage heater’s electric power consumption to keep the passenger cabin comfortable. When the heat pump is used, this increases the driving range in cold weather of the e-Golf by more than 30% compared to a conventional heating system.
Volkswagen was able to lower the air drag of the Golf by developing very specific measures such as reducing the volume of cooling air (via a radiator shutter and partially closed-off radiator grille), new underbody panelling, rear body modifications with a rear spoiler and C-pillar air guides, and by developing new aerodynamic wheels (essentially closing off gaps, making the wheels flush with the car’s exterior).
Whereas on the standard Golf (1.6 TDI with 77 kW) air drag is 0.686 m2, air drag was reduced to 0.615 m2 on the e-Golf, which represents a 10% improvement. Correspondingly, the cD value was lowered to 0.281.
Volkswagen was able to achieve another positive effect on energy consumption and range by optimizing the tires (205/55 R16 91 Q). Reducing the rolling resistance coefficient from 7.2 per 1,000 (Golf BlueMotion) to 6.5 per 1,000 for the e-Golf (likewise an improvement of 10%) also improves the range.
The Golf offers the CCS charging system, enabling both AC and DC fast charging. A 3.6 kW charge to 100% SOC will take about 8 hours; a DC fast charge to 80% SOC will take about 30 minutes.
Driving. We had the opportunity to drive the e-Golf from Wolfsburg to Braunschweig—a drive of about 36 km (22 miles) that offers some higher speed highway driving as well as in-city conditions.
The e-Golf reaches a speed of 60 km/h (37 mph) within 4.2 seconds, and 100 km/h (62 mph) in 10.4 seconds, with top speed limited to 140 km/h (87 mph. Range is estimated, on the NEDC cycle, to be up to 190 km (118 miles); Volkswagen suggests a realistic real-world range of 130 km (81 miles) to 190 km, depending upon temperature, driving style, etc.
As we noted earlier, the e-Golf is essentially a Golf: comfortable, quick and with good handling. The weight of the battery pack helps keep the car anchored to the road, but there is no wallowing sensation in quick cornering maneuvers, even at higher speeds.
The instrument cluster. On the left, the conventional tachometer is replaced by a power display (which indicates if the motor is ready, the battery is being charged via regenerative braking or power is being consumed) and the indicator of output availability.
The speedometer, which goes up to 160 km/h (99 mph), remains on the right. Added at the bottom of the speedometer is an indicator showing the charge level of the high-voltage battery.
The color display located between the powermeter and the speedometer (premium multifunction display), now shows a continuous display of driving range; the regenerative braking level that is active; and information on remaining charging time and the connected charging plug.
In a separate LED field in the lower segment of the multifunction display, the ‘READY’ message also appears after starting the motor, indicating that the car is ready to be driven. Click to enlarge.
With its limited top speed, the e-Golf is not designed for scorching down the Autobahn, but it is more than capable of delivering an enjoyable driving experience in standard city and suburban conditions. We had no problems at all with high speed merging onto the highway, and, as with electric drives in general, the immediate torque after starting up from a stop was most satisfying.
Left. The e-Golf features a standard 8" touchscreen radio-navigation system with e-mobility specific functions. Sample functions, top right. The graphical range monitor illustrates the vehicles current driving range (blue); it also shows the range potential (lighter blue) that could be gained by deactivating any of the displayed auxiliary consumers that are active.
Bottom right. The recuperation monitor measure total regen energy since trip start to help the driver to adjust driving behavior. Other functions include an energy flow indicator, e-manager to pre-program up to three departures and charging times; and current potential driving radius of the e-Golf.
Left, bottom. The shifter also provides the means to step through 5 levels of regenerative braking: “D”, no regen; “D1”, “D2”, “D3”, and “B”. With the gear lever setting in “D”, the driver just taps to left to shift D-levels. I.e., one tap, “D1”, another tap “D2”, etc. Tapping to the right moves back down the D-levels. “B”, activated by pulling backwards on the lever, is the most extreme level of regen. All regen states are displayed on the instrument cluster (above). Click to enlarge.
The e-Golf offers two technologies to balance optimal utilization of the vehicle’s energy against the driver’s wishes. One is the five different levels of regenerative brake settings, described above. Higher levels of regen allow the driver to slow the vehicle almost to a stop (with “B”), while recharging the battery. Levels “D2”, “D3” and “B” decelerate the car sufficiently that the brake lights come on.
Switching levels of regen easily with a tap of the shifter allow the driver to customize the vehicle’s performance in response to terrain and driving styles. In combination with the recuperation monitor (again, above), this also gives drivers the chance to learn how best to drive their e-Golf.
The other driver-focused optimizing technology is the three driving profiles: “Normal”, “Eco”, and “Eco+”. The Volkswagen automatically starts in “Normal” mode. In “Eco” mode, the electric motor’s maximum power is reduced to 70 kW, and drive-off torque is limited to 220 N·m (162 lb-ft). In parallel, the electronics reduce the output of the air conditioning system and modify the response curve of the accelerator pedal. In this mode, the e-Golf can reach speeds of up to 115 km/h (71 mph) and accelerate to 100 km/h in 13.1 seconds.
In “Eco+” mode, the electronics limit power output to 55 kW and drive-off torque to 175 N·m (129 lb-ft). At the same time, the accelerator pedal response curve is made flatter, and the air conditioning is switched off. The e-Golf now reaches a top speed of 90 km/h (56 mph) and accelerates at a slower rate. Nonetheless, drivers can still obtain full power, maximum torque and a top speed of 140 km/h in “Eco” and “Eco+” mode by kick-down.
(Our favorite combination in general was “Normal” with “B”.)
e-Golf driving modes Normal Eco Eco+ Air conditioning Normal Reduced Ventilation only Acceleration (0-100 km/h) 10.4 s 13.4 s 20.9 s (to 90 km/h only) Power 85 kW 70 kW 55 kW Top speed 140 km/h 115 km/h 90 km/h
Under the NEDC, the e-Golf is rated with energy consumption of 12.7 kWh/100km. Based on our short “real world” drive (with a bit of a heavy foot on the accelerator), we appeared to achieve between about 11-16 kWh/100 km, based on different conditions; sometimes much lower, sometimes a bit higher. (The touchscreen monitor will show you exactly how much you are consuming, adding to the driver-training aspect over time.)
Volkswagen implemented an acoustic concept for the e-Golf that is specifically tailored to the characteristics of an electric vehicle, greatly enhancing its already quiet attributes.
As one example, the motor’s suspension system was switched to a pendulum mount with modified response characteristics, which greatly enhances the acoustics despite the e-motor’s high torque build-up when accelerating. In designing the motor housing unit, Volkswagen was also able to achieve an extremely low level of noise emissions.
Furthermore, the highly sound-absorbent and yet very lightweight materials used in the interior produce a luxury-class level of acoustic comfort. It is indeed quite quiet.
Owners of e-Golfs can order nearly all the optional features and assistance systems of the full Golf model series.
Production overview. One of the mantras of the Volkswagen Group surrounding the benefits of its modular assembly toolkits is that they enable the streamlined production of a variety of vehicles using common components on the same line. The MQB-based e-Golf is certainly a case in point—with the exception of a detached loop added, for the time being, for high voltage (HV) component assembly. This includes the battery pack, power electronics and all the connections, and first pack power to the vehicle.
Top. Building an e-Golf: the basic production flow for the e-Golf at the Wolfsburg plant. Essentially, the e-Golf is assembled much as other versions of the Golf are, the primary exception being a new loop inserted into the assembly process for the installation of the high-voltage battery pack, the subsequent high-voltage connections, and first power to the car.
In the diagram above, the area for that is designated as “Kleinserie” (“small series”), an area in which Volkswagen also works on specialty vehicles such as taxis, emergency responder vehicles, etc.
The e-Golf moves through assembly of its MQB components, including the “marriage” of the powertrain and drivetrain, and then is towed from the line to the small series area for the installation of the high voltage components. The e-Golf then re-enters the main assembly flow.
Bottom. HV assembly. This sequence outlines the flow of assembly through the small series area from the e-Golf’s being towed in by walkie tow trucks to its self-powered departure. Click to enlarge.
Aside from the detached assembly for the high voltage components, the e-Golf is just another Golf moving through the assembly process; the electric powertrain and drivetrain components are assembled in an area on a floor beneath the main assembly line, along with conventional powertrain and drivetrain elements. These assembled powertrain and drivetrain elements—with a significant gap in the middle in the case of the e-Golf to accommodate the battery pack—are automatically “married” to their appropriate bodies, rising up from the floor underneath in a tightly controlled process.
Audi A3 e-tron production Audi, one of the Volkswagen brand’s Group siblings, is not using a detached high voltage assembly loop for the production of its A3 e-tron plug-in hybrid. With the exception of an added station where the battery pack is installed, the A3 e-tron is moving along the line like every other A3, says John Schilling, Manager of Product Communications for Audi of America.
There were a number of reasons driving the decision to implement a detached high voltage assembly, said Dr. Manzenrieder. These include:
The possibility of an unbalanced work load for each operator due to different bill of materials;
The restricted workshop area ensures optimal safety control;
Flexible production equipment enables optimized process design. This is a learning laboratory as well as a production loop;
The opportunity to establish specific high-voltage component expertise. All operators are HV-experts and ensure best process and quality control; and
The possibility for technical reviews at the car without disrupting the assembly process.
By running this production line, I have the opportunity to focus and to gain expertise on high voltage components, their characteristics and, which is very important, the interaction between components. If it was produced on a stepped production line in one minute steps, I can see only very limited steps. Here I can see all the parts together.
The operators we use in this area are all experts, not only mechanically, but they also know the components. We have optimized this way to control the process and the product. We have the possibility to call other experts from R&D, from the quality department to take a look at each stage within the assembly. Our equipment is flexible so that we can do any other model or generation. —Dr. Manzenrieder
The operators work in teams of two, each team handling the entire final high-voltage assembly process from start to finish.
Top. The high-voltage components addressed in the detached final assembly loop. Bottom left. Installing the battery pack. Bottom right. Connecting the power electronics. Click to enlarge.
Braunschweig battery plant. Volkswagen’s facility in Braunschweig is one of the larger producers of running gear in the world—and the oldest plant in the Volkswagen Group. Since 2007, it has also been the site for the development and production of battery systems for electric vehicles. Beginning in 2012, the pre-series center for the e-Golf was situated there.
Braunschweig is now responsible for the development and production of the battery packs for the e-Golf and the e-up!, and features a new, discrete automated facility dedicated to battery production.
In the run-up to series production, the Braunschweig team had evaluated using prismatic 25 Ah cells from Panasonic, or 18650 cells (i.e., similar to Tesla), said Dr. Manz. Volkswagen opted for the 25 Ah prismatic cells from Panasonic.
We tested several cells and several manufacturers of the cells and Panasonic was the best we could use for this project. —Dr. Manz
Automated battery assembly at Braunschweig. Top left. Panasonic ships pre-packaged modules, which the operators at Braunschweig remove from their shipping crate (foreground) and slide into the reach of a robot, which stacks the modules by type. Top right. The robot then places modules on the battery base, where they are then automatically bolted into place.
Bottom left. Humans connect the modules. (Note the large panel display screens which provide documentation on the task being done. These are also prevalent in the detached HV assembly area in Wolfsburg. The underlying system is also recording all relevant data for each part for 10 years.) Bottom right. The battery pack covers (a carbon fiber reinforced plastic shell with an aluminum cover) are secured using the same fastening system used for windshields. It is also screwed to the base with 8 screws.
I myself don’t want to be a battery system, because I know what is done with such systems. Before we get the release of a battery system we make a test of about 12 weeks with shocks, vibrations and we do a temperature test. At the end we dip it 20 times into water; we heat it before and then dip it into cold water. And after the 20 dips, there should be no leakage. These are the heaviest tests I’ve ever seen for such a system. —Dr. Man |
) aunt and your parents telling you that maybe your scoliosis wouldn’t be so bad if you just lost some weight. Thin privilege is not having your parents slip in comments about how you should exercise, which diet/fad/weight loss tip you should try, what you should eat, etc. Even though you physically can’t do the exercises they want you to because you’ll be in crippling pain due to your scoliosis.
Thin privilege is not having your parents tell you that you are only allowed one bagel with cream cheese per meal, even though all you eat is two bagels with cream cheese for lunch and another set (of two) at dinner (and this is all you eat all day unless someone cooks dinner, which replaces the second set of bagels), coming to roughly 1600 calories for the day.
Thin privilege is having your parents care/notice when you don’t eat all day instead of your parents totally ignoring the fact that you’re starving yourself.
Thin privilege is not having your parents be ashamed of you and hating you because of your weight.
(Once again, I apologize for the length. Thank you for reading.)On one hand, it’s a fitting reflection of the topsy-turvy season in England that, heading into the final four of the FA Cup, the competition’s best remaining player isn’t a world-famous, well-decorated superstar for Chelsea or Manchester City or Arsenal, but rather trophy-barren Everton’s 22-year-old striker. On the other, judging from said striker’s increasingly dominant performances over the years, it’s probably only a matter of time before Romelu Lukaku finds himself a member of soccer’s superstar caste.
Everton played Chelsea on Saturday in the quarterfinals of the FA Cup, and it was Lukaku who made all the difference in his team’s 2-0 victory. For the entire 90 minutes, he showed off all the skills that for years have peaked out from the edges. Now they have emerged, fully-formed, to impose themselves every time Lukaku touches the ball. There was no better example of just how complete his game is than his first goal of the day:
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He uses his positional sense and situational awareness to split Chelsea’s two center backs (okay, not that that was all that hard against some pretty terrible defending) while pointing exactly where he wanted the ball played; simultaneously demonstrates his quickness and strength by squeezing between Branislav Ivanović and César Azpilicueta before muscling off the latter’s attempt to basically hop onto his back like an older brother shrugging off a rowdy younger sibling; stutter-steps past John Obi Mikel; then, in a masterclass of subtle body positioning, completely spins around Gary Cahill with little more than a couple dips of the shoulder and swivels of the hips before sliding the ball past Thibaut Courtois from a tight angle. While maybe not as viscerally compelling at first glance as some of the more flamboyant runs you’ll see, it nonetheless exhibited a whole array of abilities required of a world-class forward—a level that, if Lukaku hasn’t reached already, he’s coming nearer to every day.
The young Belgian’s brace against Chelsea put him at 25 goals in 36 matches in all competitions, already his highest ever tally. His 18 league goals are just one fewer than golden boot-leaders Jamie Vardy and Harry Kane. Everton have maybe been a little disappointing this season, sitting all the way back in 12th place in the league despite a squad armed with loads of talent in a wide open field, but Lukaku has unquestionably strengthened his reputation as one of the best young strikers the world over.
The natural impulse after a game like Lukaku’s this weekend—and his entire season, for that matter—is to wonder where he goes from here. Is Everton too small a club for a player of his caliber? If so, is he already good enough to start for a real Champions League contender? Which of the world’s biggest clubs have both a need for and the means to acquire him?
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While, speculative as they may be, it makes sense to ask those questions, there is a more important concern that underlines all of those and keeps the focus on where it should be, on the pitch itself. After coming so far already—from Anderlecht to Chelsea to West Brom to Everton, at all times evincing glimpses of future greatness and slowly but surely making good on that promise—exactly how high in the sport’s hierarchy can these talents of his take Lukaku? The answer, first and foremost, is at least to the FA Cup semifinals with Everton. It is our unique privilege to watch where he goes from there in due time.
Photo via GettyOn Easter Sunday, as families gathered at Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in Lahore, Pakistan, a bomb targeting Christians killed at least 69 people, many of them women and children. Hundreds more were injured.
The bombings weren't greeted with the outpouring of tributes and vigils that accompanied the attacks in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday. But there was at least one exception: A Dallas hotel, the Omni, was lit up with the Pakistani flag on Sunday night in honor of the victims.
After the attacks in Brussels, One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the US, displayed the colors of the Belgian Flag. So did landmarks across London; the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin; the Eiffel Tower, in Paris; and the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai.
When false rumors circulated on social media that the Eiffel Tower was lit up with Pakistani colors on Sunday to honor the victims of the Lahore attacks (the photo was actually from 2007, and had nothing to do with Pakistan), Paris's city government gave a blunt statement explaining why different attacks merit different levels of attention.
"There are attacks regularly around the world, and we honor the victims in different ways," according to a statement given to the Europe 1 radio network. "The attacks in Brussels have a special resonance because we have an exceptional link with Brussels."
Lighting up monuments is a symbolic gesture. But the debate over how much attention people pay to deaths and tragedy in non-Western countries is often about symbols: headlines, rallies, tributes.
As Max Fisher wrote for Vox in November, after an outcry over whether the media had paid too much attention to the attacks in Paris relative to those in Beirut, the outrage is not only about the media:Social media strategist is a position that didn’t exist a decade ago and now is used by 288,610 people on LinkedIn. But for those working in the trenches — on the front lines at agencies as social strategists — the reality is far from rosy. In this edition of Confessions, a social media strategist talks about why social media is actually a bubble built on cliches, not strategy.
What’s the biggest problem with social strategy roles?
I’ve been working in social and digital for seven years. When I graduated high school, social was not a thing. Now, there are classes in digital and social in college. I have burned out on social. What is happening is there are too many platforms that brands don’t need to be on, but they’re being advised by younger millennials with no training in strategy. It’s really BS.
Why?
Everyone thinks if they have a Facebook account, they can work in digital marketing. But the people getting the job are people talking in online buzzwords, like “content is king.” I’m finding that there are so many students and entry-level grads that don’t know enough about business or marketing. Creating cool content does not mean we’re properly marketing. There’s a huge lack of strategy and insights. There’s a huge canyon between executives and entry-level. That’s why the bubble is going to pop, so I’m not hitching my tractor to that. Social is not about platforms, but it’s about consumer and human behavior.
Are agencies hiring these people?
Yes. Every agency executive says, “You’re 25, you know how to Snapchat, now go,” but these people have no formal training in marketing or strategy. When I look at people who have positioned themselves as ninjas or gurus or other bullshit, you know it’s nonsense. If you can speak in cliché, you can get the job.
Everyone’s telling me, everything is digital, it’s going to be digital in 10 years. But I see the writing on the wall. I don’t want to position myself as a digital or social expert now. I have to look beyond it.
But client dollars are supposedly going toward social.
There is an issue where you have agency execs who don’t know enough about digital talking to clients. Not every client should be on Snapchat or Twitter. Not enough clients are being educated. We’re not doing our jobs. There are too many agencies who have for too long not prepared themselves for digital, but they’re trying to get any digital business at all. So they’re doing this.
What about the brands?
It’s easy to get caught up in the smoke and mirrors if your agency is selling you on some social stuff. Clients, they’re so big. There’s so little communication between the arms of business. Everyone is reacting to each other. Competing brands are reacting. Pepsi does something, Coke does it. They’re focused on that. The problem with social is that it’s easy for brands to see what everyone is doing. Everyone is reacting — to each other and to their bosses. Ultimately, agencies aren’t doing due diligence when it comes to advising on platforms. The prices are so high on some of the new ones, too. But it doesn’t matter to agencies. They just want to be “digital.”
How much do things like measurement errors on platforms matter?
Not much. That’s not what scares me about social. But platforms keep analytics close to the vest. [Agencies] are making so much money off of measuring their platforms. There are entire agencies dedicated to social analytics. And that’s going. Now, we can’t drive insightful recommendations. Five years ago, you got data, but now you get no data from Snapchat and Instagram. Agencies are losing business. That’s a small example of why I don’t want to hitch my career on social. It’s such a fickle beast.(h/t David)
McCain booster Sen. Lindsay Graham has his talking points and he's not going to deviate from them, no matter how much logic and reality may interfere.
Even though highly visible (and amazingly, still respected) Republicans have openly criticized the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president and endorsed Obama, Graham will have you know that Palin has energized the base like no other. Pay no attention to those polls, people. Strangely, Graham asserts that even though her appeal is to the Republican base, if she was a Democrat, she'd be more popular than "sliced bread". How does that work, Huckleberry?
But incongruously, even though that base is energized by Palin, McCain is still that mavericky man unafraid to take on his party. Does Graham think that might depress the energized base? Maybe this is where those sliced bread Democrats come in. But even more incongruously, Colin Powell (that 'not-real-Republican', according to Graham) is nervous about McCain's SCOTUS picks, which would be just like Bush's selections of Roberts and Alito. How mavericky that is.
My head is spinning from this bizarre, logic-free rationalizations of a campaign without a clear narrative and imploding on itself. So I'll merely leave with the best line from Graham:
Governor Palin is what John McCain has been trying to do in Washington, she has done in Alaska. She has -- filing a complaint against a sitting attorney general of your own party with a Democrat takes a lot of guts. Taking on the oil interests, you know, cutting taxes. She is -- running against an incumbent governor. John sees in her many of the qualities he sees in himself.
And this is a good thing?The Federal Reserve was once content to be the giant elephant in the room that nearly everyone ignored. Few were questioning what the Fed was doing behind closed doors, let alone the mere existence of the central bank. But the rise of the Ron Paul phenomenon over the past few years has finally brought U.S. monetary policy under the spotlight where it belongs. It's time for a full comprehensive audit of the Fed.
The Fed has been forced to open some of their books twice this year. Both times top Fed officials claimed that releasing their loan information to the public would cause "severe and irreparable competitive injury" to borrowing banks. That poor excuse sure did signal that the Fed has a lot to hide. The central bank is more powerful than Congress, yet has less accountability than even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That kind of power and privacy is dangerous in the hands of an institution that has a complete monopoly over our money supply.
Bloomberg News first forced the Fed to release documents back in April. The financial news organization went through an arduous, three-year court battle to make some documents public through the Freedom of Information Act. The Fed, which repeatedly appealed court decisions and requested numerous delays, took its fight for secrecy all the way to the Supreme Court and lost.
Our suspicions proved true when the 28,000 pages of released documents revealed massive foreign bank bailouts during the height of the financial crisis. The Fed secretly loaned money to the Bank of China, Brussels- and Paris-based Dexia SA, Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc and even the Arab Bank Corporation, which was partly owned by the Libyan central bank at the time. No wonder the Fed fought tooth and nail to keep these documents under wraps.
The first ever audit of the Federal Reserve was conducted back in July. Due to a provision under the misguided Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a one-time, watered-down audit of the central bank. It gave the American people their first peek into the central bank's books, but prevented investigators from peering into their deliberations on interest rates and the most crucial transactions of the Fed. The audit findings were infuriating but should have surprised no one.
It exposed that unelected bureaucrats at the Fed "loaned" out $16 trillion at 0% interest to corporations and banks around the world in less than three years. To put that number into perspective, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) -- the value of all economic activity within a country -- of the U.S. is only $14.12 trillion. Billions of dollars may even be missing from their released records. The central bank just handed out colossal amounts of money to its Wall Street cronies without a single vote taking place in any chamber of Congress.
The watered-down audit conducted last month was a victory, but we still have a long way to go in the fight for Fed transparency. The documents that were released in April and July are further evidence that we need a true audit of the Fed. While these documents are disturbing enough, just imagine what kind of mischief we would find through a real audit. The Federal Reserve loaning trillions to foreign banks may just be the tip of the iceberg.
An overwhelming 75% of Americans want a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. We deserve to know what is happening to our money supply behind closed doors. This is a transparency issue that has transcended left vs. right politics. Fiscal conservatives such as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Rep. Ron Paul, Texas, as well as self-identified Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont, are working to shed light on the Fed's manipulation of monetary policy. No one has a good reason to oppose an audit of the world's most powerful central bank.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is looking a little more nervous these days. He knows that the calls for a true audit of the central bank are getting louder and stronger. We will keep the pressure on until transparency and openness ultimately win.
Matt Kibbe is president and CEO of FreedomWorks, a nation-wide grassroots organization fighting for lower taxes, less government and freedom and the co-author of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.Welcome to the biggest and best site on the internet for spotting watches in movies!
This site is meant as a resource for other watch enthusiasts (WIS) like myself who cannot help but to notice watches as they pop on the screen during a movie or television show. The site has thousands of images from hundreds of movies and TV shows and we are adding more every week. There are lots of imitators and content thieves, but there is only one, original Watches in Movies.
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This site would not exist without the help of the watch community and my WIS friends. If you have a screen shot of a watch from a movie or TV show you would like to submt, please head over to and read the Submit page for a how-to (please note the new guidelines). Your submission will be added to the site with you credited as the submitter.
Participate
Comments are enabled on the site so browse around and feel free to contribute. There is a large number of unknown watches in the list, so take a look and see if you can fill in some blanks.
Additionally, you can pop over to the new discussion forum to post your questions about a particular watch or show, or even submit your own screen shots.
Running Watches in Movies is a one man show; I post all the photos and maintain the site out of my own pocket. The ads help, yes, but if you’d like to help yourself to keep the site running, feel free to visit the donations page.
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(Note: All the images here are the property of their respective production studios and used here for reference and entertainment purposes only.)
[ad name=”Page Ads”]Image copyright PAcemaker Image caption No-one was injured in the explosion but the reception area was extensively damaged
Bombers who attacked a hotel in Londonderry on Thursday night have been called cowards by the local police commander.
A masked man threw what police have described as a "firebomb" into the reception area of the Everglades Hotel, in the Prehen area of the city.
It was evacuated after the device was reported at 23:15 BST on Thursday.
The device exploded a short time later when Army bomb experts were working to make it safe.
No-one was injured in the explosion but the reception was extensively damaged.
PSNI Chief Superintendent Stephen Cargin said: "A masked man went into the hotel and left a hold-all at the reception desk saying he was from the IRA.
'Ball of flames'
Image caption The device exploded in the reception area of the hotel when Army bomb experts were working to make it safe
"He warned that people had 40 minutes to get out. He then ran out of the hotel. No recognised code word was given
"He then got into a red Volkswagen car which was later burnt out in the Glendara area of Derry.
"The hotel did a great job in evacuating the building. They have no doubt saved lives."
Mr Cargin told BBC Radio Foyle: "It was what we would describe as a firebomb. When the Army technical officer started to work on the device it burst into a ball of flames and engulfed the place in flames.
"It has caused extensive damage to the hotel. It doesn't bear thinking where we could be today. The army technical officer is ok.
"The hotel had people evacuated within about ten minutes, which is a remarkable job.
"The whole reception area is damaged and a lot of smoke and water damage throughout the building. This is an attack on the people of this city.
"We had a PSNI recruitment event at the hotel recently but we will be keeping an open mind here as to who is behind this attack.
"These people are cowards."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption PSNI Chief Superintendent Stephen Cargin said a masked man left a holdall on the counter
Condemning the attack, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said: "Derry is a place looking to the future and those promoting and building the changing city will not be held back by those living in the past.
"Those behind this attack have nothing to offer and should end their futile actions now."
Hotel guests were transported to alternative accommodation in Derry.
Gary Rutherford witnessed what happened on Thursday night.
"We had a death in the family and I parked outside reception to leave family members off," Mr Rutherford told BBC Radio Foyle.
"A man ran past the car with a hoodie and a hold-all. He threw the bag at the desk.
"It wasn't until he came out again, we realised his face was covered up.
"I suddenly realised what had happened and I went to get out and run after him. Thankfully my wife stopped me.
"It was very shocking. Someone then set off the fire alarm after I called the police. The place was then evacuated.
'Mayhem'
"It was quite confusing at the time for most of the guests because they were in bed. It was mayhem.
"It is a very difficult time for my family anyway due to a bereavement. We are preparing for a funeral today.
"Some of my family couldn't get to their medication inside too so we ended up in A&E too. It's emotional enough when you lose a family member. This made it even more difficult.
"It's really hard not to get angered. Everyday people do not need this in their lives."
Victoria Road has been reopened.
Image caption A red Volkswagen car was also found burnt out in the Glendara area of Derry on Thursday night
Secretary of State Theresa Villiers said: "I totally condemn this attack. Such attacks can have no place or justification in our society. It was pure luck that no one was hurt or injured.
"Those responsible have nothing to bring to their community or Northern Ireland and I urge anyone with information to bring it to the police."
Foyle MP Mark Durkan said the explosion "is an attack against the whole city".
"So many people are working hard to move the city forward, but those behind this device are trying to drag us all back to worse times.
"Such methods demonstrate only a negative, violent capacity, not a viable strategy or credible rationale.
"We must be united and strong in rejecting their ways, and affirming peace and progress as our chosen determined collective right."
DUP councillor Gary Middleton said it was fortunate no-one was killed.
"There were so many lives put at risk last night. This is completely unacceptable.
"We must commend the work of the staff at the hotel and the swift work of the PSNI."
Justice Minister David Ford described the incident as a "reckless attack" carried out by those with "a total disregard for life".
"Thankfully, primarily because of the swift action of the hotel staff, there have been no injuries," Mr Ford said.
"I know that the overwhelming majority of Derry people will be appalled by this attack, and we stand with them against those who want to stop their city moving forward."BELFAST (Reuters) - Northern Irish police said on Wednesday they fear rioting in Belfast could escalate to the point where someone gets killed, threatening to upset a delicate peace between Catholics and Protestants in the British-controlled province.
Police in armoured jeeps come under attack from youths throwing missiles on the Newtonards Road, Belfast, June 21, 2011. REUTERS/Stringer
A press photographer was shot and wounded on Tuesday evening in the second night of clashes between pro-British loyalists and Irish nationalists in some of the worst rioting in east Belfast in recent years.
“There are people potentially at risk of being killed by the level of violence,” Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay told journalists. “We need to see cool heads to pull this back.”
The violence in the Catholic Short Strand enclave of mainly Protestant east Belfast comes at the start of the “marching season,” a time of annual parades by Protestants which has triggered violent protests by Catholics in the past.
Police blame members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), one of the deadliest pro-British paramilitary groups of Northern Ireland’s bloody past, for initiating the disorder, though they said they may no longer be in control.
The UVF said two years ago that it had completed the decommissioning of its weapons in line with other militant groups after a 1998 peace agreement mostly ended three decades of violence in the province.
Local people said the paramilitaries were motivated by a feeling they had been marginalized since the peace deal.
“Protestants in this area feel that they have lost out on the promised dividends from the peace process,” said John Kyle, a member of the Belfast council for the Progressive Unionist Party, which has historical links to the UVF.
“There’s also a perception that the loyalist community’s fears about attacks on their homes have never been addressed. But the violence is wrong, totally wrong.”
An east Belfast resident with ties to the UVF said the militants were increasingly angry at investigations by the Historical Enquiries Team, set up to investigate killings between 1968 and 1998.
“The East Belfast UVF want to keep up their gangster activities,” he said. He declined to give his name.
The trouble flared only 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the airport in Belfast where golfer Rory McIlroy was arriving home after his historic U.S. Open win and local newspapers lamented a rare piece of good news had been overshadowed.
Northern Ireland was torn apart during the violent “Troubles” between loyalists, mostly Protestants, who want it to remain part of the United Kingdom, and Irish nationalists, mostly Catholics, who want it to form part of a united Ireland.
The peace deal paved the way for a power-sharing government of loyalists and nationalists. Violence has subsided over the years, but there are still dissident armed groups opposed to the deal.
Annual protestant parades commemorating notable British victories peak on July 12 and are regarded by marchers as an expression of cultural identity. Many Catholics see them as provocative and they are often accompanied by violent protest.
Police fired plastic bullets and used water cannons on Tuesday night as rioters threw petrol bombs, fireworks and bricks. They said 350-400 people were involved, cutting their earlier estimate of 700 people.
The streets near where the riots flared were deserted on Wednesday, with many windows boarded up. Residents said they feared the riots could spiral out of control.
“On Tuesday night we heard loyalists shouting that they were going to burn us out,” said Catholic Shauna O’Hara whose father John was murdered by loyalists 20 years ago. “People just don’t know what is going to happen next.”Xiaomi became the world's most valuable startup following a straightforward plan. "We noticed a trend of switching from feature phones to smartphones in China," says Liu De, who co-founded the company in 2010. "We thought, 'Hey, there could be a big opportunity there.'" So Xiaomi made good phones, stirred up excitement for them online, and sold them at a good price. By 2014, it was the fifth-largest seller of smartphones on the planet and worth $46 billion.
Instead of just making and selling smartphones, Xiaomi wants to make and sell just about everything.
It didn't last. Fellow Chinese upstarts Oppo and Vivo now outsell Xiaomi, which has seen its Chinese market share drop by more than a third. Users are now buying their second or third phones, and are willing to pay more to get more. Even as the average price for a smartphone dropped worldwide, it spiked in China as people embraced flagships like the Huawei P9 and Oppo R9. Xiaomi may be worth a fraction of what it once was, and faces the question that's plagued the likes of BlackBerry and Apple: You had one good idea. Now what?
For Xiaomi, the answer is build the coolest, most desirable phone anyone's ever seen, and move into any market that isn't already saturated. Oh, and instead of making and selling smartphones, make and sell just about everything.
Liu De, co-founder and Vice President of Xiaomi Amy Lombard for WIRED
The Smartphone Orbit
Xiaomi's first successes came from the rise of smartphones and its early understanding of e-commerce. Now De says another wave is coming. The Internet of Things, he believes, could be bigger than phones. "Every electronic device you use in your life could also become smart," he says. Xiaomi started exploring the idea in 2013, and quickly realized no single company could dominate the entire sector. Consumers own one phone but will have dozens, even hundreds, of connected devices.
Instead of trying to build them all, Xiaomi went shopping. It has invested in 77 companies, giving them access to its designers, marketers, and massive supply chain in exchange for a 10- to 20-percent stake and the right to brand and sell those products. "We're using our entire platform to lift these companies to the next level," De says. It has sold more than 50 million connected devices under that strategy, and seen four of its portfolio companies hit a market cap over $1 billion. The Mi Air Purifier, the most popular air purifier in China, emerged from a small startup under Xiaomi's watchful eye. Xiaomi proclaims itself to be the world's most successful hardware incubator.
This outsourced-but-integrated approach could make Xiaomi among the first to offer a complete portfolio of connected devices, controlled by a single app—Mi Home. It wants to be The Everything Company. And because it sits right next to some of the world's biggest manufacturers, Xiaomi just might pull it off. No waiting weeks or months for prototypes to come back, no sending engineers and product designers on expensive trips to faraway factories. "It's a unique model that I haven't seen before, and that I think is only viable for a company that comes from China," says Hugo Barra, the company's global VP and English-speaking spokesman. Xiaomi isn't alone in thinking this way, either. LeEco, Huawei, and Lenovo are among the companies who've found they can do more, faster, than competitors in the US and Europe.
But ultimately, everything comes back to the smartphone. It's the most important device people own, the most popular device on the planet. If Xiaomi (or anyone else) wants people to buy its other stuff, it must sell a lot of phones first. And the best cheap phone won't win anymore. Only the best phone wins.
Aiming High
About two and a half years ago, CEO Lei Jun told a small team of engineers to start working on a new phone. He didn't give them a deadline, but he did give them a goal: Create a phone without a bezel. He wanted something that looked like a piece of glass, that felt different than the slew of identical handsets on the market. With such an audacious goal, Jun thought it might finally free Xiaomi from the endless cycle of incremental improvements.
Xiaomi's (almost) bezel-free Mi Mix. Xiaomi
This was no easy task. This clandestine team had to figure out how to ditch the speaker and make the case transmit sound. The engineers tossed the proximity sensor in favor of an ultrasound, gesture-recognizing one. They moved the camera to the bottom of the phone and shrunk it by half. They ended up with a device that was 93 percent screen, the closest anyone's every come to a bezel-free phone. Xiaomi called it the Mi Mix and sold it as a limited-edition "concept phone." It sold out in 10 seconds.
"It came at a time when people were questioning us," Barra says. "All of a sudden they're like, 'Oh man, this is Xiaomi.' Now they're back to paying attention to our products instead of just thinking about shipment volumes and all these other boring business metrics."
Those boring business metrics matter, though. People notice when you miss your sales targets (2015) and end the year with a melancholy note from the CEO promising "the worst is over" (2016). Of course, he did end that note saying 2017 would be all about artificial intelligence and internet finance and other big things, and he said the company's mission is "innovation for everyone."
He means everyone, everywhere. Including here.
Hugo Barra, Global Vice President of Xiaomi Amy Lombard for WIRED
The China Brand
Xiaomi's first product to officially go on sale in the US was the Mi Box, a $70 Android TV set-top box. Before launching it, Xiaomi beta tested it with 100 members of the Android TV sub-Reddit. That sounds masochistic, but it's in line with the company's MO. "Our playbook is very simple," Barra says. "We look for hardcore fans, people who love technology, and we focus on having a conversation with them."
Like other companies that have reached their saturation point in China (or have been rejected there outright), Xiaomi is currently focusing on India. The country looks a lot like China did not long ago: massively populated and largely unconnected. First movers with a solid product can quickly establish a lead. And so Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note 4 there this week. "Even this year, we'll have one or two products selling in India that start to approach the volumes we have in China," Barra says.
The rest of the world won't be so simple. The US in particular poses a problem to Xiaomi and everyone else. "Its biggest challenge will be trying to get in through traditional channels," says Tuong Nguyen, an analyst at research firm Gartner. Xiaomi excels at selling phones online, but Americans don't buy phones that way, and getting into an AT&T store is tough. "Huawei, who’s been in it a lot longer than they have, can attest to how hard that is," Nguyen says. It's the same story in Latin America. "It's often much cheaper and more convenient for me to walk to the store and look at the phone, rather than look at it on my phone, because bandwidth is so expensive," Nguyen says.
Another problem: People don't associate Chinese brands with innovation or luxury. They aren't cool. And don't forget that President Trump has made it clear just where he stands on China and everything made there. Still, the growth potential is so great that Xiaomi can't not try. It helps that the time is right for an Everything Company with a suite of connected devices. "I don’t need more boxes," Nguyen says. "I have lots of boxes that do many things. But I don’t have boxes that work together."
Everyone wants to build the one system that unites all things, the sole platform for all the connected thing in your life. If one company could not only build the platform, but the things as well, it would change everything. And it may only be possible if that company is made in China.Renewable energy target: Economic modelling shows household bills to rise in short term, drop long term
Updated
Economic modelling for the renewable energy target (RET) review has found that keeping the clean energy scheme would result in lower household bills over the longer term.
But between 2015 and 2020, the report shows prices would be higher.
Australia's pledge to use renewable energy sources to produce at least 20 per cent of the nation's power by 2020 is currently being reviewed by an expert panel.
Modelling done for the review by ACIL Allen predicts that repealing the RET would sacrifice around $16 billion in new wind investment and around $2 billion in solar.
Earlier this year the ABC revealed that several clean energy companies, like First Solar, were reconsidering their future investments in Australia.
ACIL Allen's modelling is similar to the findings of financial news and data firm Bloomberg, which warned the Federal Government in May that if it scraps Australia's renewable energy target it could cost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in potential investment.
The Bloomberg report suggests that renewable energy sources contribute to cheaper wholesale electricity prices.
The RET review is being led by Dick Warburton, who has said he is sceptical about human-induced global warming but is not a climate change denier.
The company director and former Reserve Bank board member told AM earlier this year he was keeping an open mind for the review.
The other panellists are Shirley In't Veld, former head of WA's biggest coal generator, and the Australian Energy Market Operator's Matt Zema.
Almost 3,000 jobs lost in renewable energy industry last year
Meanwhile, new figures from the renewable energy sector show almost 3,000 jobs were lost in the past year.
The Clean Energy Council's annual snapshot has shown the number of people employed by the renewable energy industry has fallen from 24,300 to 21,400.
But it has found the share of renewable energy in 2013 increased to 14.76 per cent, up from 13.14 per cent in 2012.
The industry figures show the amount invested in the sector has increased by almost $1 billion to $5.2 billion.
Clean Energy Council deputy chief executive Kane Thornton said that was likely to be on ice for now.
"Certainly 2014 is proving to be a challenging year for the industry with a lot of uncertainty around the policy settings and in particular the review of the renewable energy target which is seeing investment certainly go on hold and is likely to see lower investment numbers into 2014," he said.
Know more? Contact us at investigations@abc.net.au
Topics: alternative-energy, federal-government, environment, environmental-policy, climate-change, emissions-trading, australia
First postedIn America, as in Tunisia, Egypt and throughout the Arab world, the battle of the age pits the insular power of oligarchs against the great mass of the people. This holiday season in America, that battle is most evident on two seemingly quite different fronts. One front is the battle over guns in the form of seeking gun safety laws to stem the plague of gun deaths America suffers from. The other front is the battle over butter - the generic term for material sustenance - in the form of Tea Party-inspired attacks on America's already notoriously weak and undersized welfare state.
The latter battle is considerably obscured behind layers of political warfare back and forth over the past two years and more. But make no mistake, while the Democrats simply want some rather limited tax increases - returning to the Clinton-era rates for a tiny sliver of high-income Americans - what Republicans are after is a systematic dismantling of the welfare state, turning public programmes like Social Security and Medicare into private programmes, with the federal government staying on as the collection agency only.
And thus, the "grand bargain" that President Obama is so obsessed with will inevitably mean taking the first few steps down the road to dismantling the welfare state that Republicans have already mapped out. That is what's really at stake in the battle over the so-called "fiscal cliff".
There is a distinct parallel here with the gun safety debate, which also pits a small minority - the gun industry lobby and its front group, the NRA - against the vast majority of the American people. The parallel between these two political battles is anything but superficial. In fact, they can be grouped in terms of six broad points of similarity, as described below, all of which have their origins in the fact that they pit the interests of the oligarchs against the well-being of the people as a whole. Here then, are the points of |
and faster work flow.
As mentioned earlier, many of the shortcuts presented here were designed to be for the Photoshop Keyboard shortcuts for Mac. However, you may have noticed the section at the beginning gave the minor adjustments one needs to make and the Photoshop Keyboard shortcuts for windows are nearly the same as for Mac.
These shortcuts are the most commonly used, and hopefully you will find them useful in your Photoshop retouching work. You may find that once you get used to using them, your work may move along a little faster than you expected.
You may find useful in my other related tutorials:
6 Photo Editing Tips
Photoshop Pen Tool TutorialActress Susan Sarandon predicted Thursday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be indicted over her use of a private email system while at the State Department, an issue that has hung over her entire campaign.
Sarandon, an outspoken supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, told MSNBC Thursday that she made the remark when discussing the potential of flipping some superdelegates who support Clinton to Sanders side.
"Nobody's even talking about this indictment. What happens with that?" Sarandon told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "Besides the trust issue of catching her in so many lies..."
"Well, there has been no indictment," Jansing responded.
"No, but there's going to be. There's going to be. I mean, it's inevitable," Sarandon said. "[W]e don't know that he's not going to get the numbers either," Sarandon added.
The famed actress also said that it is unlikely that she will back Clinton if she were to win the Democratic nominee, and pointed to her hawkish foreign policy as a main reason. She has also been a constant critic of Clinton throughout the primary race, having campaign extensively for the Vermont senator. In April, Sarandon tore into critics of female voters supporting Sanders, telling them to stop "shaming" them for doing so."
Sanders famously declined to make Clinton's use of a private server an issue in the campaign, saying in the first Democratic debate that he was tired of hearing about her "damn emails."VICTORIA — When Premier John Horgan promised to “align the actions of my government with the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples,” it wasn’t clear how that would play out with specific decisions.
Now one example has come to the fore during the current imbroglio between the NDP government and some First Nations over fish farming and the threat to wild salmon stocks.
On Friday the lead cabinet member on the file, Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, sent out a chilling letter to fish farm operator Marine Harvest Canada regarding its continued presence on the B.C. coast.
“I have recently become aware of Marine Harvest’s decision to restock the Port Elizabeth salmon farm,” wrote Popham, referring to ongoing activities at one of the company’s dozen or so operations off northern Vancouver Island.
“It comes at a very sensitive time,” she continued. “We are entering into sensitive discussions with some of the First Nations in the (area) who remain opposed to open-net pen salmon farming in their territories.”
So sensitive a time that some of the offended Indigenous people and their supporters have briefly occupied the constituency offices of both Popham and Horgan.
The minister then proceeded to put the company on notice regarding its obligations toward First Nations, as the NDP sees it.
“Our government has committed to implementing the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous people,” she wrote. “Practically, this means that companies should make every effort to develop and maintain healthy relationships with First Nations in whose territories companies are doing business.”
The UN declaration runs to 46 specific articles. The key one entitles First Nations to “free, prior and informed consent on any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.”
Or as Perry Bellegarde, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, has put it, the UN declaration gives Indigenous people “the right to say ‘yes’ and the right to say ‘no.’”
Marine Harvest, which has operated here for decades and employs more than 500 people, has established working relationships with 15 First Nations, including seven First Nations-owned businesses. Which presumably amounts a considerable measure of free, prior and informed consent.
Related
But the region in question — the Broughton Archipelago near Alert Bay — includes other First Nations, who want the fish farms removed from what they regard as their traditional territories.
The problem of overlaps among the traditional territories of some 203 recognized First Nations in B.C. is one reason why the previous B.C. Liberal government balked at endorsing UNDRIP. They saw it as a recipe for overlapping vetoes.
But the New Democrats endorsed it anyway, all the while insisting that “free, prior and informed consent” was not the same thing as a veto.
Listening to New Democrats on that score, I have been reminded of Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
In any event, Horgan’s embrace of UNDRIP was also incorporated into the mandate letters for individual cabinet ministers.
“Our government will be fully adopting and implementing UNDRIP,” his directive to Popham read in part. “As minister, you are responsible for reviewing policies, programs and legislation to determine how to bring the principles of the declaration into action in British Columbia.”
Now armed with her marching orders from the premier, Popham was in effect telling Marine Harvest to establish a healthy working relationship with every holdout First Nation in the region of its fish farms as well.
If not? Well that implied question sets the stage for the most telling part of her letter, namely an implied threat to yank the company’s ability to continue to operate in provincial waters.
“Whatever operational decisions you should choose to make,” the agriculture minister advised Marine Harvest managing director Vincent Erenst, “the province retains all of its rights under the current tenure agreements, including potentially the requirement that you return possession of tenured sites at the end of the current terms.”
The tenures in question are provincial government approved leases to operate floating fish farms over the ocean bottom. They run for five years and all expire next June.
The actual renewal process is in the hands of the ministry of forests, lands, natural resource operations and rural development, headed by her cabinet colleague Doug Donaldson. But he’s no less bound to respect UNDRIP than is Popham.
“My colleagues from the (other) ministry will be in touch with you to describe the process for you to initiate applications for replacement tenures,” the agriculture minister continued.
Last time the renewal process took years, and that was under the Liberals. This time, well, let Popham tell it:
“As you are aware, “ she wrote, “government will be reviewing tenures and will make a decision on renewals before the current leases expire.”
Lest the company be in any doubt about the precariousness of its position, she added this: “Issuance of any replacement tenure or any permission to allow you continued occupation of existing sites on a month-to-month basis remains subject to future decision-making processes and cannot be guaranteed.”
Still she closed with a cheery “we look forward to your input on the lease renewal decisions,” never mind that the rest of her letter read like the first draft of an eviction notice.
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Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.comThis story is about Published Nov. 2015
Hate, vandalism and Big 12 titles: Inside the ancient feud, bad blood between Baylor and TCU Share This Story On... Twitter
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Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer TCU Horned Frogs quarterback Trevone Boykin (2) attempts to break the grasp of Baylor Bears defensive end Shawn Oakman (2) during the first half of play at McLane Stadium in Waco on Saturday, October 11, 2014. (Vernon Bryant/The Dallas Morning News)
By Kate Hairopoulos, Staff Writer Contact Kate Hairopoulos on Twitter: @khairopoulos
Feel the disdain Friday night in Fort Worth when TCU Horned Frogs and Baylor Bears gather in the name of football. This is the 111th meeting between the programs, moreover it's the rematch that's been anticipated since Baylor's 61-58 comeback victory last year in Waco. "Fans here, as much as we hate to admit it, we still think about 61-58 all the time," said Jamie Plunkett, a 2009 TCU graduate and the managing editor of fan site FrogsOWar.com. "Only because Baylor won't let us forget....The past few years the Baylor week has brought a different energy. "People hate Baylor." Last season's head-to-head triumph became the centerpiece of the Bears' unsuccessful campaign to get into the inaugural College Football Playoff. Both BU and TCU, 2014 co-champions of the Big 12 separated by 90 miles on I-35, ended up excluded from the final four. With TCU saddled with two losses, it can no longer win the 2015 Big 12 title, but it can make sure Baylor doesn't keep hopes alive of winning its third straight championship. The Bears could hoist another trophy and maybe crack the playoff bracket if they win at Amon G. Carter Stadium and beat Texas the following week. But they also need Oklahoma State to knock off Oklahoma on Saturday in the "Bedlam" game in Stillwater, Okla. The Bears are without injured quarterback Jarett Stidham, turning to third-string quarterback Chris Johnson, while TCU could be without quarterback and Heisman hopeful Trevone Boykin. Animosity is natural, with Baylor holding the slightest all-time series lead, 52-51-7. TCU coach Gary Patterson and Baylor coach Art Briles are contradictions -- defensive and offensive minds, unfiltered emotion and brash country cool.
The stakes in the series have risen of late, with TCU and Baylor both in the national conversation. TCU rejoined Baylor in conference play in 2012 after initially being left out of the Big 12 when the Southwest Conference disbanded before the 1996 season. At the time, Baylor was the lone private school that made the cut. Long before the recent run of touchdown-fest shootouts between the schools, the rivalry began when both schools were then located in Waco - with a 0-0 tie in 1899. Despite the history, Dan Jenkins, the acclaimed sports journalist, author and unofficial TCU historian, is still unconvinced that Baylor has joined TCU's traditional roll call of bitterest rivals, on which he includes SMU, Texas and Texas A&M. "If Baylor has joined that list," Jenkins wrote in an email interview, "it started last year in Waco when one of TCU's greatest teams was denied an unbeaten season by a group of zebras I can only describe as incompetent or pushovers for catching 'home fever' in the last quarter. "Perhaps the rivalry will grow into something truly hateful in the future. One can only hope." An 'Ancient Feud'
A 1925 excerpt from The Dallas Morning News, trumpeting a Baylor-TCU game.
The rivalry has certainly generated more attention in recent years, particularly with last season's meeting marking the first time the programs played while both were ranked in the top 10. Baylor came back from 58-37 down in the fourth quarter, scoring 24 straight points and winning on a field goal as time expired. This Black Friday game between purple and green has been considered can't-miss virtually ever since, though it is not the de facto league championship game many anticipated. "It's a lot better to talk about Baylor-TCU, then Texas-Oklahoma," said Sammy Citrano, owner of George's, the famous Waco establishment, earlier this week, on his way to watch the Bears practice. "We're proud of it." While the Bedlam game up north could settle things this week, what Texas clashes can match Baylor-TCU this season? Texas A&M, now in the SEC, didn't schedule a single Texas opponent. And restoring the Thanksgiving meeting with UT is infamously not in the current cards for Longhorns or Aggies. TCU has dominated SMU 14-2 in the "Iron Skillet" rivalry game since 1999. Baylor-TCU continued playing after TCU, initially named AddRan College, suffered a fire to its Waco campus and moved to Fort Worth in 1910. They reunited at the State Fair in Dallas in 1925 after a break in play since 1920, with both schools by then members of the Southwest Conference. "Christians and Baptists Will Renew Ancient Feud Tuesday at State Fair," trumpeted The Dallas Morning News. Baylor is the largest Baptist institution in the world and TCU is affiliated with Disciples of Christ. The published account from the era also noted the grudge match's history. "Sometimes, the combats were not confined to the gridiron battle but spread to the more pugnacious elements in each student body." TCU found glory in the 1920's-1950's. The stretch featured national championships in 1935 and 1938 and star players Davey O'Brien and Sammy Baugh and coach Dutch Meyer, a Waco High product. Baylor didn't register the same level of success. "All I recall Baylor offering was the chicken fried steak at the Elite Café on the Circle," Jenkins wrote. When Grant Teaff, Baylor's winningest coach by victories -- whose tenure ran from 1972-1992 -- arrived in Waco, he researched the Bears' regional rivalries and learned beating TCU was important. When the Bears defeated the Frogs in Teaff's first season, it was BU's first win over them in the last nine tries. Teaff noted learning about the time a Baylor player changed his uniform at halftime to wear TCU's colors, confuse the Horned Frogs and spark a second-half comeback. Also in the history books: for some time, the outcome of the 1907 game was disputed. Reports say even the officials disagreed if TCU actually tackled a Baylor ball carrier in his own end zone for a safety late in the game because the goal line had disappeared in the dust. For his part, Teaff fed his team frog legs in the cafeteria during TCU game week. "The guys didn't like that much," Teaff said. Keeping up with the big boys
Paul Moseley/Star-Telegram Head coach Gary Patterson, TCU Horned Frogs quarterback Andy Dalton (14) and linebacker Tank Carder (43) acknowledge the TCU fans after the Forgs beat Wisconsin, 21-19, in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 2011. (Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Paul Moseley)
The end of the Southwest Conference came shortly after Teaff retired. Political connections going up to then-Gov. Ann Richards famously helped Baylor and Texas Tech make it into the Big 12 with Texas and Texas A&M, merging with the school of the former Big Eight. TCU -- along with SMU, Houston and Rice -- were left to fend for themselves. "I really think it comes from Baylor getting into the Big 12 and TCU being left out," said Dave Campbell, the founder of Texas Football magazine, former sports editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald and a member of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, of the main source of the angst between the schools. "I don't think Baylor had much choice other than to go with the big boys. They were being invited to go, and they had real problems until they got the current coach Art Briles." TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte said the school had started working to get back to big-time football from that day on. Before TCU celebrated its acceptance to the Big 12, effective July 1, 2012, it competed in the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA and Mountain West, nearly heading to the Big East before the Big 12 invitation came to help stabilize the league that lost Texas A&M and others. Guided by Patterson since December of 2000, TCU busted the Bowl Championship Series twice, including winning the Rose Bowl after the 2010 season. "We were going to get in because we were going to earn our way back," Del Conte said. "As good as BYU and Utah were, those games didn't resonate locally....Regional rivalries matter....It affects the water cooler, the Internet, the blog. It's all part of what makes it awesome." Del Conte praised Patterson for his role in accomplishing TCU's "audacious" goals of getting the Frogs back in the big-time, and refurnishing Amon G. Carter Stadium. Plunkett, a minister in Dallas who serves Horned Frogs, Aggies and even Bears, said while TCU climbed back up, TCU fans kept an eye on what Baylor was doing. "We're winning the Mountain West, we're going to all these big bowl games," he said, "the Big 12 kind of looks down on us...but we're still holding up our end of the rivalry." Then came Baylor's Briles breakthrough. The Baylor renaissance
Michael Ainsworth/Staff Photographer Baylor Bears head coach Art Briles accepts the Big 12 trophy from Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby on Dec. 6, 2014. (Michael Ainsworth/The Dallas Morning News)
Baylor's renaissance has included quarterback Robert Griffin III winning the Heisman Trophy in 2011, surviving its own scare of being left out during the last wave of realignment and the opening of McLane Stadium on the Brazos River in 2014. Baylor had gone 11-85 in Big 12 play before Briles arrived in 2008. "Two of the very finest football coaches are now at Baylor and TCU," Teaff said. "It hasn't always been that way....Few have come into the situations that they came into and turned things around." The relationship between the two coaches has had tense moments. Patterson chided the class and actions of Baylor players he last two years. Baylor has been under fire this season with how it handled the case of a player ultimately convicted of sexual assault. When TCU players were arrested earlier this fall on assault and robbery charges, Patterson commented that "It's not even close to what happened south of here." The schools issued a joint statement earlier this season when a statue of Griffin was vandalized with purple spray paint and then 61-58 graffiti turned up on the TCU campus. Del Conte said there had been no further incidents.
Walking the Baylor campus and came across the RG3 Statue... Classless vandalism by TCU fans #SicEm pic.twitter.com/diZIPmyXGH — Hunter Mandel (@HunterMandel1) October 8, 2015
Baylor's team photo featured a player in the front row wearing No. 61 next to a player in the No. 58 jersey. Weird coincidence, Baylor officials proclaimed. "Apparently, we caused a huge scene when that picture came out," said Baylor left tackle Spencer Drango, who wears No. 58. "That was honestly a complete accident. I don't think we could have planned that. To the fans, it's a huge, big deal. But to us, it's a hard-fought game where we came out with a win."
Briles, Patterson and the Baylor and TCU players stuck to the week-of-the-game script this week, offering only compliments, setting the stage for another, ahem, serene meeting Friday night. "This is what college football is all about," Del Conte said. "You've got to have someone that boils your blood." Twitter: @khairopoulos
This Topic is Missing Your Voice.I purchased this on a complete whim - I was in-store and the colorful packaging attracted my eye, and I saw it was advertised as a game. I pulled up the reviews on my phone, and was excited by the concept. We got it out and played for about an hour, just messing around in freestyle mode. It was tons of fun, and unlike anything we had ever played before. Unfortunately, though, in the game mode, if you were to receive and open a text, or switch to another app quickly, the board would disconnect and you would have to restart your game from scratch, while also resetting the board. After we had had our fill of it for the day, we put it away. I went to play again the next day, and the board wouldn't even turn on. We did some internet searching, and found this to be a fairly common thing amongst buyers. Seeing as how it's a new game and a new concept, and that the exchange policy with Best Buy was quick and painless, it's not a HUGE deal, but definitely an inconvenience. I hope they upgrade the hardware in the future. We haven't opened the new one yet, so who knows if it'll do the same. Considering that it's app-based, I see huge potential in the future for new game modes and overall growth. The expansion packs aren't unreasonably priced, either. We purchased 5 of those and they're a lot of fun to add to the mix.
Read moreStar Fox 2 Review – Written by Jose Vega
Borrowed a friend’s SNES Classic Edition for the sake of reviewing this game.
Star Fox 2… it’s a game that many thought never would see the light of day. It was originally supposed to be released in 1995 for the SNES but Nintendo at the last second canceled the game to put their focus towards Star Fox 64. Star Fox 64 would go on to be a huge success but Star Fox 2 would end up being lost to gaming history. The game would eventually be leaked out years later in the form of near-final builds but the true complete version never came to be. During E3 2017, Nintendo announced the SNES Classic Edition, including the completed version of Star Fox 2. Does it hold up or did Nintendo make a mistake by releasing it?
Before I continue, I am reviewing the game on its own merits. Later entries in the franchise used features from this game that were better implemented.
Taking place after the events of the first Star Fox on SNES, Andross returns with one goal: revenge. He would then unleash his space fleet to conquer the Lylat System. Gen. Pepper asks the Star Fox team for their aid against him. It’s a straightforward plot. Nothing special.
Star Fox 2 plays similar to the first SNES game. The controls are similar and you can choose between 3 different styles. However, this game incorporates a number of additional features. You can choose two out of six playable pilots to use. Along with the main team, there are two new characters: Miyu and Fay. They’re also categorized into three Arwing classes: Balanced, Defender and Interceptor. Fox and Falco are Balanced being in the middle. Peppy and Slippy are Defenders with more health but less speed and longer charge. Miyu and Fay are Interceptors with less health, fast speed, and quick charge. I like this option better than how it was in the first game. You also have the option to switch between your chosen pilots with the Select button. Useful in case one of your wingmen is near death and you need someone fresh. It makes me wonder why they never implemented this in future games.
As for the rest of the game, battles occur in a map similar to some RTS games. You have your mothership that can be used to repair your fighters. The objective is to retake planets captured by Andross while having to contend with his forces. At the same time, you must ensure that Corneria is unharmed since Andross will order all his forces to attack the planet. If you fall or Corneria falls, game over. You move from one planet to the next. When you cross paths with an enemy, the game shifts into a flight section where your job is to take out enemies before they get away. When you arrive on a planet, the mission shifts to activating switches to access the enemy’s base. Then you go into the base, reach the core and destroy it. Planets also allow the Arwing to turn into a walker for ground combat. A nifty addition that adds a change of pace. Some planets have bosses you need to take out to access them. They offer a bit of challenge to the game especially since you are timed. As you progress, so does the enemy. Skill and planning are needed to take down Andross and his forces. Along the way, you will encounter the Star Wolf team in 1-on-1 dogfights and they can be challenging.
Depending on difficulty, the game can take from 40 minutes to more than an hour. You start with Normal and Hard. After beating the game on both difficulties, Expert Mode is available. With each increase in difficulty, Andross raises the challenge by adding more occupations, ships, forces, etc. Expert is considered to be the ultimate test with Andross pulling out all the stops. The replay value is high as with up to six playable characters each having unique styles, three difficulties and a great amount of challenge, it’s a game that will test you. It will really test you but it also gives you this drive to keep going especially in the harder settings. The game also grades you for how skillful you are in completing the game. Beating the game in Expert skillfully in the highest rank nets a nice reward for future playthroughs.
Star Fox 2 also has its fair share of secrets with the Pepper Medals. Collecting them (depending on difficulty) will unlock a secret area that you can use to power up and take on the challenges aside. This, unfortunately, makes the game easier but it’s a reward for diligent players who put the effort in finding the medals. The music is good with some tracks being catchy. They don’t hold a candle compared to the original’s music but it’s acceptable.
Though the game offers a lot, it does have its flaws. The game can have a tendency to slow down when too many things happen on the screen. It’s similar to the original but not as much. Controls can be clunky especially when you operate the walker Being that it was a game that should have been released back in the mid-90s, it’s to be expected. Star Fox 2 also has its voice acting in the form of sound effects, similar to the original. Though they aren’t as memorable sad to say.
It took Nintendo 22 years to finally release it and does it hold up? Not really but it shouldn’t stop anyone from playing the game and finding out what they’re missing. Sure the game is flawed in some aspects but the game is an enjoyable one. Many features that were introduced in this game such as the Walker would be implemented a lot better in later entries and it feels similar to the original but with some additions. Regardless Star Fox 2 is a game that should have been released back then. Had they released it then, it would have been revolutionary but Nintendo felt otherwise or in some cases scared. It isn’t for everyone but for those who want to give it a chance, you should. Star Fox 2 is worth it. Good luck trying to get the SNES Classic Edition just to play it that is.
I give Star Fox 2 an 8 out of 10.
Advertisements1 Chelsea boss Antonio Conte and striker Diego Costa
Diego Costa is set to commit his long-term future to Chelsea after turning down a staggering deal to move to China.
The Spanish striker’s future at Stamford Bridge was in serious doubt only weeks ago after he had his turned by a £30million-a-year offer from the Far East.
Costa rowed with manager Antonio Conte amid fears he was looking for a way out and was dropped for the 3-0 win over Leicester on January 14.
But the 28-year-old made peace with Conte and, having being restored to the team, he now wants to stay with the Blues and is poised to sign a new contract.
According to The Sun, Costa’s representatives have already reached an agreement in principle that will see the forward sign a five-year deal worth £220,000-a-week plus bonuses.
The deal will make the former Atletico Madrid star the highest paid player at the London club – and will come as a huge boost to Chelsea fans.
Costa has been a huge success since arriving from Atletico in 2014 and his 15 goals this season have helped fire the club eight points clear at the top of the Premier League this season.When Eddie Vanderdoes (Auburn, Calif./Placer) made his pledge to the USC Trojans on Wednesday, the Oregon Ducks missed out on perhaps their most important target in the class of 2013.
Losing out on a recruit to USC is nothing new, but the Ducks typically find a way to soften the blow. So where do the Ducks go from here?
The defensive line is always a position of need, especially in Eugene. Putting together another strong class of defensive linemen to add to last year's crop of talented big men would have the Ducks flying higher than ever before. Losing out on Vanderdoes might seem like a big blow, but it's only July and a lot can change between now and signing day.
Ducks fans need to look no further than last year's top defensive lineman from the Sacramento area, Arik Armstead.
There are a number of elite defensive linemen left on the board, including Vita Vea (Milpitas, Calif./Milpitas), who is quickly rising the charts and has the size to play inside or out in the Oregon defensive system.
The Ducks are no strangers to missing out on the top defensive line targets and they have managed to win three consecutive league titles with the pieces they have picked up along the way.
While top West Coast prospects such as Vanderdoes and Elijah Qualls (Petaluma, Calif./Casa Grande) are committed to USC and Washington, respectively, a verbal pledge is sometimes nothing more than a talking point.
The Ducks have plenty of time to adjust their focus and the coaching staff will fill in the blanks with guys who fit the Oregon system.
Unlike the quarterback position, the Ducks absolutely need to add a couple defensive linemen in this class. New prospects will emerge, commits to other schools will visit Eugene and the Oregon staff will put together a solid group on the defensive front.
While missing out on a big prospect at such an important position always leaves an empty feeling for fans, nothing in certain in recruiting. Last year at this time, Shaq Thompson and Armstead were considered locks to Cal and USC.
Thompson is now playing summer league baseball in the Boston Red Sox system before heading to Seattle to strap on the pads for the Huskies. As for Armstead, he is already enrolled in Eugene and ready to make an impact on the defensive line, regardless of who is lined up next to him.Bears punter Adam Podlesh is spending his off-season on a very worthy cause. Podlesh is using his name and stature as a Bear to raise money for a six-year-old with cancer.
Podlesh, a cancer survivor, met Gavin Waterman through Phil Zielke, another cancer survivor who founded Phil's Friends, a charity that supports people with cancer. Gavin was recently diagnosed with Ewings Sarcoma, a cancer that forms in bones or soft tissue.
The visits to Loyola University Medical Center, four hours away from the Watermans' Mattoon home, medical bills and time off work became a drain on the Waterman family. Podlesh stepped in to help raise money by convincing teammates to give up their hair.
"We had been throwing out ideas on what we could do to help them out and we decided on raising money shaving heads for Gavin, which is applicable because with his chemotherapy he'll be losing his hair in the next week or two," Podlesh said to the Bears website.
Podlesh will shave his head, along with Robbie Gould, Blake Costanzo, James Anderson and Austin Signor to raise cancer awareness and encourage donations to the Gavin's patient assistance fund. He also is running a raffle of Bears memorabilia. Anyone who donates $25 or more will get be entered to win.
He even took Gavin and his dad to a Cubs game, where they ran into another Bear, and Gavin's dad caught a foul ball.
Out at the Cubs game with my bud Gavin, @waterman_jacob @philsfriends06, and even @chrisconte47 came by to say hello twitter.com/Adampodlesh08/… — Adam Podlesh (@Adampodlesh08) May 19, 2013
Podlesh was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary gland in 2010. He is now cancer-free, but the experience moved him to want to help other survivors.
"I don't think that I would be as involved with cancer charities and events as I am now if I hadn't been diagnosed with cancer," Podlesh said. "After going through remission and being cancer free, I've really made it my purpose to try to do whatever I can to help the fight against cancer."
If you want to help the Waterman family, click here to donate.
Copyright NBC Owned Television StationsMOENCHENGLADBACH, Germany (AP) Jupp Heynckes has ruled out extending his fourth stint in charge of Bayern Munich beyond this season.
Club president Uli Hoeness said on Friday it was ”possible” the coach could stay, but Heynckes squashed that on Saturday.
”I don’t know what prompted Uli to say that,” Heynckes told Sky Sport TV. ”We have a very clear agreement that the work goes on until June 30, 2018. What other people say, whether players or officials, that I should keep going – I don’t want to comment on it every week because it’s a clear agreement and that’s how it’ll stay. Nothing will shake that.”
Heynckes returned to the club this season after Carlo Ancelotti was sacked.
He endured his first loss in 10 games when Bayern fell at Borussia Moenchengladbach 2-1 in the Bundesliga.
”We invested far too little, played too slow and never really got into a rhythm,” Heynckes said. ”`Gladbach relied on counterattacks and played a clever tactical game.”
Bayern’s lead was cut to three points by second-placed Leipzig, which won at home over Werder Bremen 2-0. Heynckes’ team is five points ahead of Schalke."Potentially the most important app to ever be created by anyone. Ever!"
-Steve
"Facebook will probably offer like a billion dollars for it."
-Garry
"Prepare to have you mind fartestroyed!"
-Carol
Chances are this is probably the first thing you thought when you saw this project or viewed the trailer/video. Well a while ago I was stuck at work with a friend who farted a lot, I happened to have some spare time and decided to quickly make a game about how much he farted. This turned out to be quite an addictive game so I decided I would see if I could turn it into an actual game for smart phones and here we are!
Essentially you have two bars: The Fart bar, and the Poop bar. The aim of the game is to balance both bars for as long as possible without letting either one reach its maximum. This is achieved by simply holding down your finger on the screen to blast ass. Too much though and you'll need to change those pants, too little and the building pressure will shoot you into outta space!
As the game progresses so does the difficulty and amount of random strangers to fart on which increases your score multiplier leading to bonuses. The longer you last, the hotter the farts, the more the bonuses! Make sense? probably not, so here's a video to watch which might help.
You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with
sound 00:00 00:00
$2000
Additional 5 levels!
$3500
5 additional ULTIMATE high-score rewards!
5 more levels!
$5000
2 INSANELY EPIC FART POWER UPS!
$10,000+
3 more INSANELY EPIC FART POWER UPS!
5 more levels!
I will video tape myself farting on strangers and then probably get hammered on a two or three day bender with part of the money...
Nope, that's it! Its a pretty simple game so lets not over complicate things.We know it’s not easy creating and operating a massively multiplayer online game like SWTOR. That said, it can be equally as difficult to keep it filled with enough content on a regular basis so that players do not get bored. Have you ever wondered how BioWare built enough content to fill The Old Republic and how they continue to give us great content again and again.
Some of you might remember back in 2011 when BioWare designer Georg Zoeller did a talk at GDC Online about Star Wars: The Old Republic and explained how spatial analysis can be used to support a rapid content iteration process during the late stages of MMO development.
For those of you who heard the talk, he goes on to explain how BioWare’s homegrown ‘HoloProjector’ spatial visualization toolkit was used in the day to day development of the game. It also helped the BioWare devs with decision making, content validation and more. He talks about the lessons the team of devs have learned from these experiences and at the end also gives some info on how to get started with the topic of your own game.
If you want to see this blast-from-the-past talk that is still interesting today, you can do so for free at the GDC Vault.
(Visited 53 times, 1 visits today)0.147*. Increase during viewing conditioned snake and spider video. Viewing snake and spider video conditioned with an electric shock to the second phalanx of the right index and long fingers versus viewing video before conditioning. WOEXP: 310.
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0.137*. Visuospatial attention with cue effect to invalid cues. Visuospatial attention with directional cue either by central expectancy where a central diamond indicated left/right cue or by a change in luminance in a peripheral square, and with cue effect to invalid cue. WOEXP: 373.
0.110*. Hot pain in 2 second for P750 component. Dipole source for the P750 event-related potential component associated with hot pain during 2 seconds. WOEXP: 423.
0.106*. Hot pain in 1 second for P750 component. Dipole source for the P750 event-related potential component associated with hot pain during 1 seconds. WOEXP: 422 |
paint as a heavy-handed retaliatory gesture that further isolates Russia from the global community.
Officials in Russia’s far eastern Chukotka region said they would breed local reindeer to replace that region's usual imports of American meat, according to The Moscow Times.
Medvedev on Wednesday also signed a decree that excludes from the banned items list salmon and trout hatchlings, as well as sweet corn and peas for planting, a move observers said is aimed at reducing pressure on local farmers. The measure also excludes lactose-free dairy products and a number of supplements.
Officials in the world's fifth-largest recipient of agricultural imports have also taken measures to dampen potential discontent with the ban. The Federal Antimonopoly Service has even launched an internet hotline through which consumers can file complaints over what they believe might be unjustified price hikes.
Those measures apparently couldn’t come soon enough.
Officials in various Russian cities have already reported rising food costs, from 6 percent for processed meat in Moscow to a whopping 60 percent increase for chicken on the far eastern Sakhalin Island, the Kommersant daily newspaper reported.
Critics at home and abroad have railed against the Kremlin’s knee-jerk response to sweeping Western sanctions, which have targeted Russian banks as well as the country’s defense and energy industries.
Reactions on social networks — the virtual meeting place for much of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia — have so far been colored mostly with dark humor. One popular joke that’s made rounds online holds that “Russia imposed sanctions on itself.”
But many others have argued the move is part of a broader trend of elite manipulation that harks back to the moral decay of the Soviet Union.
“In strict hierarchical fashion, Communist Party bosses, celebrated actors, prominent artists, engineers and scientists would get their food in special distribution centers,” Maxim Trudolyubov, a liberal Russian newspaper editor, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last weekend.
“Top officials lived in palazzos while the rank and file had to wait for years to get access to cramped spaces in prefabricated apartment blocs.”
Still, there are also plenty of signs the Kremlin embargo will indeed hit its intended target, at least in part.
Dutch officials said Tuesday that their country stands to lose an estimated $400 million in agricultural exports compared to last year, Reuters reported.
Other European farmers and businesses, some of which also send a fair chunk of their produce to Russia, fear the negative effects of oversupply on their domestic markets. The European Union has announced it would spend more than $160 million to help them weather the apparently crippling ban.
Meanwhile, Russian officials appear at least outwardly calm about the future prospects for their country's own food market, even trumpeting the ban as a way to stimulate domestic food production.
Alexei Nemeryuk, head of the Department of Trade and Services for the city of Moscow, says food prices in the capital will probably continue to rise through the end of the year.
But he dismissed suggestions that ordinary Russians will suffer from a deficit of food on the domestic market, claiming that “more than 100 companies in Latin America are prepared to supply us with meat and fish,” local news agencies reported him as saying.
More from GlobalPost: Britain searching for Foley killer
Other officials have appealed to Russians’ most cherished culinary traditions in a bid to soothe potential concerns.
Ilya Shestakov, head of the Federal Fishery Agency, said herring and red caviar — longtime favorites for feasts and other special occasions — would not disappear from the table during New Year's, the most popular holiday in Russia.
“Of course, the assortment on store shelves will change a bit, but there’s no need to be afraid,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “On the contrary, it should be welcomed.”In a new twist to the surveillance debate, conservative groups are asking the National Security Agency for help obtaining phone and email records about the Obama administration.
Republicans on Capitol Hill and right-leaning organizations have asked the National Security Agency to hand over email and phone records about the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. They say they have little other recourse because agencies have stonewalled their requests for documents, at times by claiming messages were lost or stolen.
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“If the government can collect data on American citizens without a warrant and use it in court or investigation, there is no immunity exempting government officials from having their data collected without a warrant and used in court or investigations,” Donny Ferguson, a spokesman for Rep. Steve Stockman Stephen (Steve) Ernest StockmanFormer aide sentenced for helping ex-congressman in fraud scheme Former congressman sentenced to 10 years in prison for campaign finance scheme Rising expectations could change North Korea forever MORE (R-Texas), told The Hill in a statement.
“If Obama is going to violate rights it must apply to government officials as well or else we have an oligarchy.”
On Friday, Stockman asked the NSA for any and all “metadata” on emails sent by former IRS official Lois Lerner, who has been at the center of a controversy over the agency’s scrutiny of Tea Party organizations seeking tax-exempt status.
His letter came hours after the tax agency said that nearly two years’ worth of emails had been lost when Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, news that prompted broad condemnation from Republicans in Congress.
Under an NSA program known as Stellar Wind, which continued until 2011, the agency reportedly collected bulk data about where people sent and received emails, but not the actual content of those emails.
Stockman isn’t the only one looking to the NSA for help in tracking down officials’ records.
Last week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Free Market Environmental Law Clinic and the Energy and Environment Legal Institute filed a lawsuit against the NSA for not handing over records about text messages and calls that EPA chief Gina McCarthy Regina (Gina) McCarthyOvernight Energy: Joshua Tree National Park lost M in fees due to shutdown | Dem senator, AGs back case against oil giants | Trump officials secretly shipped plutonium to Nevada Overnight Energy: Ethics panel clears Grijalva over settlement with staffer | DC aims to run on 100 percent clean energy by 2032 | Judges skeptical of challenge to Obama smog rule Judges skeptical of case against Obama smog rule MORE and former Administrator Lisa Jackson made through their private accounts and devices.
The groups say that McCarthy and Jackson likely communicated with environmental lobbyists and performed other work-related business in those messages, yet the proof has remained hidden because they were not on official lines of communication.
The groups first sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the EPA but were told that the records were personal and, in at least one case, that thousands of McCarthy’s text messages had already been deleted.
After that, the groups turned to the NSA, which tracks information about which numbers people dial, and the length and frequency of their calls under another program revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden last year.
The NSA has refused to comply with their request, prompting the lawsuit.
“NSA possesses at minimum the metadata that will help further illuminate this (non-) excuse for wholesale destruction of an entire class of records,” said Chris Horner, the lawyer suing the NSA on behalf of the three groups, in an email. “And NSA has refused to produce information to assist the taxpayers in seeking to get to the bottom of an unlawful, wholesale EPA record-destruction operation.”
Horner added that the agency “can be a resource going forward for other document-destroying federal agencies it inadvertently sweeps up in its broader information gathering activities on citizens.”
Steven Aftergood, who leads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, was skeptical that FOIA requests or letters would be enough to sway the NSA to hand over records, however.
“I think it’s unlikely they would be released in the course of a routine political dispute and especially under the Freedom of Information Act,” he said. “There’s a slightly greater chance that they would be disclosed in response to a subpoena or in response to legislation to compel.”
Since the Snowden leaks last year, the NSA has received thousands of FOIA requests but has not complied in many instances.
There are nine exemptions allowing an agency to deny a FOIA request, including documents classified to protect national security and to prevent the invasion of someone’s personal privacy. On top of that, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act imposes various restrictions on the records that could prevent some information from getting out.
Horner said that none of those should prevent his request from going forward.
“Certainly not to EPA’s phone bills and other evidence helping reconstruct unlawful EPA record destruction,” he wrote in the email.Federal resources minister Matt Canavan was in a celebratory mood Tuesday after Indian mining giant Adani announced it would go ahead with its controversial Carmichael mega-mine. Canavan, an LNP senator from Queensland, fronted the press conference with state premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Adani executives, and was in good spirits.
"Now the time for waiting is over and the time for doing is beginning. That is a great thing for our state," Canavan said.
"A great message for north Queensland and a great future now that we can all get along and work on."
But within hours, Canavan's celebrations were dampened -- not only due to countless environmental groups scoffing at the "green light" announcement as a mere PR stunt from Adani, which is still yet to secure necessary financial backing for the project after every major Australian bank ruled out working on the enormous coal mine project, but after Canavan himself was thoroughly roasted online over a series of gloating social media posts.
I love the new bumper sticker I got in Townsville. Hugely popular up here! pic.twitter.com/pNzpPCTihA — Matthew Canavan (@mattjcan) June 6, 2017
Canavan's iPad sticker -- "don't take my coal job and I won't take your soy latte", seemingly a jab at the hipsters and greenies who conservative politicians love to rail against -- set off a long round of roasting. Aside from confusion over a minister equating a damaging, polluting industry with a beverage, most people seemed quite happy to give up coffee in exchange for climate change action.
As long as my soy latte doesn't give you emphysema 🙄 — lucyham (@lucyham) June 6, 2017
Buddy, I can't drink a latte when the cafe is 8 meters under the ocean — Quadrant Kaczynski (@PitySexTour) June 6, 2017
No one's worried over a soy latte.
People are worried about the Great Barrier Reef.
You may have heard of it?
Hugely popular everywhere! — Psyberus (@Psyberus8) June 6, 2017
Alright, I'll give you my soy latte. Fair trade for the survival of our species. — Daniel Neumann (@danielneumann64) June 6, 2017
The tweet scored 130 retweets and 324 replies, as of publication time -- the sort of ratio which almost always signals a good roasting has occurred.
Hahahahaha it's funny because climate change is going to ruin everything I hold dear 😂 — James Clark (@_spock) June 6, 2017
Hey Matt, there are more Baristas than coal miners...coffee also contributes more to the economy than mining profits that go offshore — Gippo (@gip1972) June 6, 2017
The joke is based on the suggestion that only soy-latte-loving inner-city hippy types care about the reef.
Hilarious 😒 — Psyberus (@Psyberus8) June 6, 2017
Don't take my hugely subsidized short-term coal job which helps bleach the reef and I won't take away whatever you're drinking now — Floyd the K (@floydthek) June 6, 2017
My soy latte isn't destroying others' lives, environment, jobs and economy. — Jack Bertolus (@jackcb1991) June 6, 2017
It kept going along those lines for another few hundred tweets. A little later, Canavan got back on Twitter to explicitly call out those "greenies", spruiking a screenshot of Adani's stock price:
To all those greenies saying Adani jobs announcement is a stunt: Adani share price up 6.5%. Some stunt! pic.twitter.com/0R3DxmvxWk — Matthew Canavan (@mattjcan) June 6, 2017
But again, just half an hour later, the minister had been shot down, as someone else also checked out the stock price but over a longer period:
Matt, you always got to look at the long term trend. Oh boy... pic.twitter.com/0JWwWMaaW5 — Michael Mazengarb (@MichaelM_ACT) June 6, 2017
Actually, Canavan's troubles started just seconds after he started speaking at the press conference. The senator said "good things come to those who wait", and then added an interesting footnote to that old adage.
"I Googled it and found Abraham Lincoln had a modification. 'Things may come to those who wait, but those who hustle get what is left'," he said, a reference to working hard instead of just waiting around.
We thought it was odd that Abraham Lincoln would use the word "hustle" in this way, back in the 1800s, so we Googled it too. There is a quote commonly attributed to Lincoln which goes, "great things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle".
There is no evidence Lincoln actually said it. When we Googled the quote, the number one search result was this article, 9 Popular Quotes Commonly Misattributed to Abe Lincoln. According to the Abraham Lincoln Association, "Lincoln Never Said That".
"A search of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln shows that Lincoln used the phrase "things may" only three times in all his writings. But he never used the phrases, "things may come," "things left," or the word hustle," the ALA said in a 2003 newsletter.
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ALSO ON HUFFPOST AUSTRALIAUsing NASA data and new computer simulations, researchers say they've discovered how the sun would have lined up with an Egyptian obelisk and the famed Ara Pacis in ancient Rome.
The Ara Pacis, or "Altar of Peace," was dedicated in the year 9 B.C. to honor the Pax Romana, an era of relative peace established by Rome's first emperor Augustus. Today the building is recognized as a masterpiece of Augustan architecture, and it is housed in a glass, cube-shaped museum along the Tiber River. But in ancient times, it would have stood in the northern outskirts of the city, near an Egyptian obelisk that the Romans uprooted from Heliopolis and repurposed as a gnomon, or giant sundial.
Many historians had long accepted German scholar Edmund Buchner's theory that the shadow of the obelisk (which now sits in the Piazza Montecitorio) would hit the center of the facade of the Ara Pacis on Augustus' birthday, Sept. 23. Bernard Frischer, a professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University Bloomington, said he wanted to use this well-known alignment as part of an interactive 3D simulation of the Ara Pacis in its original context. [In Photos: Ancient Bronze Age Sundial Discovered]
"I made the simulation more to illustrate a technical point about how we can publish such [an] interactive simulation on a webpage along with the text discussing it," Frischer told LiveScience in an email. "But the simulation, once completed, showed that Buchner was wrong. That was a big surprise."
The simulation used data from NASA's Horizons System, which can conjure up the position of stars and planets at any time in history as seen from any spot on Earth. The model also drew on archaeological information about the sundial's original meridian line and the obelisk's original height.
Frischer and colleagues found that the sun would have appeared on top of the obelisk not on Augustus' birthday, but on Oct. 9, the annual festival of the Temple of Palatine Apollo. Though the find was surprising, Augustus did have a major connection to Apollo, his favorite deity and patron god. The Temple of Palatine Apollo was the most lavish new temple that Augustus built, and inscriptions also show that Augustus dedicated the obelisk to Apollo, Frischer explained.
"I think Buchner erred because he was too concentrated on Augustus' birthday and so only made one calculation of where the shadow would fall," Frischer said, "Before we made our simulation — which can instantaneously calculate a lighting solution for the shadow of the obelisk over a forty-year period for anyone virtually exploring the 80,000 sq. meter area — scholars only proposed a single date, time and observation point."
Buchner probably only did a single calculation for practical reasons, as traditional methods to find solar alignments were very time-consuming and subject to error, Frischer said, but in his new simulation, "millions of calculations can be made instantaneously."
Frischer said he calls this kind of work "simpiricism," or empiricism supported by computer simulations. He announced his findings earlier this month at the Vatican's Pontifical Archaeological Academy in Rome.
The project isn't Frischer's first foray in reconstructing pieces of ancient Rome bit by bit. Back in November, he unveiled the Digital Hadrian's Villa Project, which turns the opulent Roman compound into a video game-style virtual world to be explored using avatars.
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ]]>After a week of chaos, Gawker Media will attempt to wipe the slate clean (so to speak) on Monday by relaunching Gawker.com. Not only that, but the name “Gawker” might be on its way out too.
“We have an awesome portfolio,” Denton told Digiday. “We produce a lot of drama. And sometimes, we become the story. We don’t want Gawker.com to be limited by the needs of the company. And there is a strong argument for a company name that is not the same as Gawker.com.”
The relaunch is just the latest bit of news in what has become a Gawker-heavy week. It started last Friday, when staff writer Jordan Sargent posted a terrible item that outed a married man. The post was then deleted, despite widespread opposition from Gawker staffers. The deletion of the post led to editors Tommy Craggs and Max Read resigning. And ever since then, staffers have essentially acted like spoiled children.
What’s next for Gawker? According to Capital New York, Denton told staffers he wants the new site to be “10 to 15 percent nicer” than the old site. Denton also said that any staffer that doesn’t like that new direction is welcome to quit and they’ll get full severance pay.
It’s a good move. Denton has put the ball squarely in the court of the many staffers who weren’t outraged that Gawker outed a married man and possibly ruined his family’s life, but could not tolerate the fact that the post was deleted. Priorities can be a funny thing.It’s sunset on an unnamed mountain, in an unexplored corner of one of the greenest countries on earth. We’ve arrived by helicopter across a rumpled landscape of swamps and hills, and it feels as if we’re the first humans ever to pass the night here.
Now five of us sit on a remote ridge of Suriname’s Grensgebergte Mountains, watching the mist settle over forested hills beyond forested hills, along the border with Brazil. A pair of macaws fly below us, showing off their brilliant colors. A hummingbird whips past, hovers briefly to sip nectar from a costus flower, and vanishes again into the dusk.
“What the hell was that?” cries Brian O’Shea, an ornithologist from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “That’s not a great-billed hermit. That’s something totally different.” His head swivels toward a fellow birder. “Did you see how long the tail was? We have to investigate that.”
Somewhere out along the ridge, a flock of marbled wood quail call like a cuckoo clock striking the hour. The scrim of daytime sky gives way to a bright spangle of stars. The birders go off in search of other bird songs, and the herpetologists head out to chase frogs into the night.
Back at base camp a few days later, Piotr Naskrecki, an entomologist from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, remains incredulous. “A new hummingbird? Impossible. I mean, it would be fantastic. It would make this trip.” He hesitates just long enough for his competitive instincts to kick in. “Well, not really. I have better stuff.” Then he heads off to catch a flight to the mountaintop.
**********
We’ve come here, across roughly 240 miles of uninterrupted forest from Suriname’s populated coast, to discover new species and, in my case, to take a firsthand look at what species discovery is all about. Our expedition is set to last just three weeks, closer to a modern bioblitz than a 19th-century voyage of discovery, but with a fair share of the latter’s potential for disease, discomfort and frustration, leavened intermittently by the chance to see something no one has ever seen before. Our group includes 18 scientists, among them ornithologists, botanists, entomologists, mammalogists, fish squeezers and snake grabbers. We also depend on a cadre of local boatmen, builders and cooks to set up camp and negotiate the unpredictable Palumeu River.
The expedition is the result of 15 months of planning, two reconnaissance overflights and $300,000 in expenses, part of a long-term Conservation International effort to identify and protect biodiversity worldwide. It is one of many such projects that are helping make this a new age of species discovery. About 18,000 new species get described in scientific journals each year, according to the International Institute for Species Exploration. This ongoing search for life on earth is not nearly so highly publicized as the search for life in outer space. Many of the species being discovered would cause a global sensation if only they had the sense to turn up on another planet. Finds from the past several years include, for instance, a North African spider that cartwheels its way out of danger and a pancake batfish from Louisiana that hops on its fins.
A point of order about the meaning of discovery: Even a crocodile that has existed only as a fossil for the past 130 million years can suddenly become a “new species.” In fact, most of the new species named each year are specimens from existing museum collections that have been described for the first time in print, with a genus and species name, following the rules of scientific classification. So far, humans have identified about 2 million species; estimates put the total number out there anywhere from 10 million to 100 million. The process is painfully slow: A taxonomist knowledgeable in a particular group has to examine a promising specimen in microscopic detail and compare it with related specimens preserved in natural history museums around the world. If a species proves to be unique, the taxonomist designates a representative sample, or “type specimen,” at a scientific institution.
This process may seem like a colonialist enterprise, a way for Western scientists to take over the flora and fauna of less developed nations. But the same basic urge occurs in almost all human groups. It’s called “folk taxonomy” when barefoot farmers do it. In India’s Western Ghats, for instance, locals recognize three separate species of the genus Biophytum, a leafy little plant in the wood sorrel family, where the scientists long noted only one. The nuances matter to the farmers because they use one for treating scorpion stings, another for earaches and a third as bait. In 2008, genetic analysis showed that the folk taxonomy was right, leading to the description of several species, which thus became “new to science.”
The strength of scientific taxonomy is that it puts local knowledge in a global context. Scientific names are a common language, spoken on this expedition by an Amerindian primatologist, a Canadian mammalogist of Chinese extraction, a Surinamese herpetologist from a Hindu family, a Polish entomologist living in America, a Dutch botanist living in Denmark, and a polyglot band of others.
**********
Our expedition begins in the capital city of Paramaribo, where scientists gather to study maps and overflight photos. The target area includes a couple of inaccessible mountains. That’s promising, because their isolation and elevated topography make them possible havens for new species. But helicopter landing areas appear to be lacking. Andrew Short, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, suggests jumping off while the chopper hovers, then climbing back aboard after a “lightning” raid for specimens. He wants to do this for microscopic water beetles, which are his passion. Someone worries that an overeager explorer might fall off a cliff in pursuit of his quarry. Naskrecki studies the landscape and tries to be reassuring. “You’ll roll off. You won’t plummet.”
An advance team, mainly members of the Wayana and Trio communities along the Palumeu River, has set out ahead in eight boats loaded with 6,600 pounds of equipment. Heavy rains have complicated their route, forcing them to unload the boats below the Kasikasima Rapids and haul each one uphill through the forest. The team must carry the cargo on their backs, reload it onto the boats, and push upstream again—repeating the process over and over. It takes them ten days to reach the destination. Then the team sets to work expanding an agricultural clearing to serve as a helipad.
For those of us arriving in leisurely helicopter relays, that helipad looks like a pinhole cut in the dense, endless forest. Our pilots gently deposit us, and the biologists vanish into terra incognita. Naskrecki almost instantly has his first potential new species. It’s a fungus that has taken over the body of a jumping spider. He notices it only because the spider’s eyes still rise plaintively above the thick mat of parasitic growth. The fruiting bodies on its back look like a tray of cream cupcakes topped with red candy drops. “Or nipples,” says Naskrecki. There’s also a fungal stalk jutting up in front of the spider’s eyes, like a rhino horn.
Suriname is still almost 95 percent forest, and becoming a hotbed for species discovery could make for a powerful nation brand, according to Russell Mittermeier, the executive vice chair of Conservation International, who has visited more than 30 times over the years. “Suriname is the greenest country on earth,” he says one night at base camp. “The whole damned thing is green. We’re trying to demonstrate that developing a green economy based on natural resources is the way to go. You could easily make this competitive with Costa Rica.” The new-species angle, he adds, could be “the piece that says this is something new and exciting. People always connect with that. They connect with the adventure part, too. You’re flying around in remote areas, and sometimes the helicopters don’t work.”
Our own helicopter has just come down to earth with its engine smoking. There are not nearly enough boats to bring us all back to camp. At dinner that night, Naskrecki notes in a tone of purely scientific interest that there are more sand flies than he has ever seen anywhere, and that sand flies transmit leishmaniasis, a dreaded affliction among tropical explorers. Someone else reports having seen an open leishmaniasis sore on one of the boatmen. Then the rain starts rattling down.
We have mosquito nets, tarps and ripstop nylon tents. But the sense of being stranded in the wilderness recalls past explorers who endured far worse in the pursuit of new species—the 19th-century English naturalist Henry Walter Bates, for instance, who went hungry and occasionally barefoot (“a great inconvenience in tropical forests”) during 11 years of collecting on the Amazon. Or his Welsh colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, who endured the fungal smell of clothes that never quite dried (not to mention malaria) during four years in South America—only to lose his collections when his ship burned and sank in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And yet where modern readers might expect misery, the journals of these explorers instead delight in discovering new beetles, butterflies and other species.
A replacement helicopter eventually arrives and sets Short down on a bare saddle of the mountaintop. As a kid growing up in Newark, Delaware, Short used to dam up pools in the stream behind his family’s house, and it eventually led him to specialize in aquatic insects. Now he travels to remote elevated regions, finds the places where water seeps down rock faces and gets out an ordinary kitchen dish brush to scrub up the algae and make his water beetles come scrambling out. Here on the mountain, he spends 14 hours and collects what he believes to be a dozen or more new species, and four new genera, all swimming in a plastic vial he refers to as “the awesomeness.”
When he returns later, someone remarks that they look like dirt. Short patiently explains that there’s also dirt mixed in (“otherwise the awesomeness would be blinding”) and that most of the beetles are smaller than pinheads. These are all “beetles no one has ever seen before,” he says. “So everything that’s known about these beetles is in my hand, or in my notebook, or in my mind.”
O’Shea is also back from the mountaintop, but his mood is less luminous. “Stop asking about the f------ hummingbird,” he mutters. He caught his quarry from the costus flower and delicately extricated it from his mist net. But in the sober half-light of the forest, he recognized it as the well-known sooty-capped hermit. Disappointment is the bleak wingman of discovery.
What did Naskrecki find? Up the trail behind base camp, he aimed his headlamp at a leaf, then reached out with the sort of tongs used to grab groceries on a high shelf. It had two strainers attached, and he clapped them together to trap a katydid inside. After studying his catch, Naskrecki said, “Oh, my God.” Most male katydids make their mating song by sweeping their wings together in front of their bodies. One of their wings has a scraper, like a violinist’s bow, and the other has an amplifying box, like the body of the violin. This katydid was a silent male; it had no violin. “The loss of sound production is extremely rare,” he said. “It’s happened in only four species in a family of 10,000. This is the fifth.” He bagged the specimen. “Wow! Incredible.”
For all his delight in such discoveries, Naskrecki takes a grim line on why they matter. “What I see taxonomists doing,” he says, “is putting names on tombstones.” Species are currently disappearing far faster than new ones are being discovered, largely because of habitat destruction, deforestation and climate change. Naskrecki hopes to describe as many as possible before they vanish forever. “I can’t stop extinctions,” he says. “But at least we will know what we have lost.” Species that look identical to human eyes can be dramatically different from one another, says Burton Lim, a small-mammal specialist from the Royal Ontario Museum. Over the past few years, DNA sequencing has allowed humans to peer into these differences for the first time. The largest land mammal on earth, for instance, has turned out to be two separate species of African elephants; the tallest mammal turns out to be four species of giraffes. Once biologists are clued in to these genetic differences, they frequently find that newly identified species behave differently. One bat may prey on a different species of moth than another, for instance, or pollinate a different flower, and it may take both species to keep a habitat healthy.
One common argument for species discovery is that a newly identified plant or animal may one day prove invaluable to humans. For instance, the antiretroviral AZT, which turned AIDS from a deadly global pandemic into a manageable disease, was derived from an obscure Caribbean coral reef sponge discovered in 1949. This utilitarian argument is not, however, what motivates the expedition scientists. They do not expect their new species to provide the cure for cancer or the next biofuel. “Probably 99 percent of species on earth have no direct impact on our affairs,” says Naskrecki. But naturalists are driven to discover them anyway for the same reason space scientists work to discover new planets: “We want to know what’s out there.”
**********
One day the rains come, and keep coming, till it dawns on us that we have sited our base camp on a flood plain. Short builds a dam to block the rising water, but the Palumeu soon threads channels around us.
“Get out of bed!” a voice cries in the darkness before dawn. “Get out of bed now!” It’s the insistent, sleep-wrecking voice of camp counselors and drill sergeants. We peer over our hammocks, and the river is right there beneath us. Everyone scrambles to pack up specimens, equipment and baggage.
At the helipad, O’Shea and Serano Ramcharan, a Surinamese wildlife specialist, identify bird calls. “White-throated toucan,” says Ramcharan, of a sound like puppies being tortured. O’Shea picks out the wolf whistle of the screaming piha. They go back and forth, rapid-fire. It takes them just ten minutes to get 20 species. As we lift off, the helicopter pilot, also in a musical mood, sings “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music.
At our new camp just above the Kasikasima Rapids, the scientists redeploy their dragnet of seines, mist nets, pit traps, Winkler extractors, aluminum boxes and other collecting devices. Specimens flow into the tent. Many of the researchers carry sophisticated species databases with them on their laptop computers, including photos of type specimens. Thus they can experience the euphoria of a new discovery in the morning and, by mid-afternoon, be crestfallen when the database reveals that somebody else described the same species a century ago. But it’s better to be disappointed quickly and move on to the next thing than to linger for months in false hope.
Lim has what looks to be a new species of mammal, a kind of rice rat with unusually large hind feet, although closer examination back in the lab will reveal that it’s simply a big-footed version of an existing species. But Naskrecki’s katydid will be confirmed as a new species. Short will return home with an estimated 26 new species and 8 new genera (though it will take years for them all to be published with formal names). The expedition, all told, will come back with about 60 species that are new to science. Conservation International will use these discoveries to help inspire Suriname’s National Assembly to preserve 72,000 square kilometers of rainforest. (The Trio and Wayana communities declared this area an indigenous conservation corridor in 2015. Now CI is working with the government to set up legal designation, zoning and financing for the nature preserve.)
Near the end of the trip, we make the long climb in from the river to the mountain called Kasikasima. Massive granite boulders, grooved and mossy from eons of rainfall, remind us that we are traveling across one of the oldest geological formations on earth, the Guiana Shield, largely unchanged in billions of years. We step out of the brush onto a bare plateau, as if stepping onto a stage.
Below us, the shadows of clouds make their way across endless forest, and the sunlight catches on a bend in the Palumeu River. Someone points out the Orange Mountains off to the east. The story among locals is that they are home to “ape men.” Even now, almost anything is possible here on earth. Below us, howler monkeys are roaring. For a moment, it’s as if the most extraordinary planet in the entire universe lies spread out before us, still waiting to be discovered.Facebook has found a new leader for its virtual reality endeavors.
Facebook said on Wednesday that it hired former Google executive Hugo Barra to lead the company's virtual reality efforts, which include Oculus VR. Barra, who will serve as vice president of virtual reality at Facebook, most recently worked at Xiaomi in Beijing and led product for the Android operating system at Google, now part of Alphabet Inc. In a Facebook post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Barra shares his belief that "virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform." Zuckerberg said he has known Barra since he helped build Google's Android system.
“It’s been a dream of mine to work in virtual reality even back when AR/VR were just figments of science fiction; now we’re taking selfies in virtual worlds,” Barra said in a comment on Zuckerberg’s post, which includes an image of Zuckerberg and Barra meeting in VR as avatars.
"There's no greater calling in our industry than taking breakthrough tech and making it available to the greatest number of people," Barra added. "Really looking forward to doing just that at Facebook — taking VR mainstream."
The top leadership role at Oculus had been vacant since former CEO Brendan Iribe stepped down in December. Iribe now oversees one of two Oculus units, and Barra will manage virtual reality efforts across the company.
Oculus' path hasn't been without its bumps. Shipments of its Rift headset had hiccups last year. And during the U.S. election cycle, Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey came under scrutiny for donating to a pro-Donald Trump political organization called Nimble America. Most recently, Zuckerberg testified in a Dallas court earlier this month in an intellectual property case against Oculus. Facebook acquired Oculus for about $2 billion in 2014.In public conversations such as The Huffington Post, it's common to see people deriding "liberal" biblical scholars, as if the world is just full of people whose dearest wish is to undermine the Bible and turn Jesus into nothing but a symbol for a bizarre mushroom cult.
(And by the way, that Jesus-mushroom thing? It was actually proposed.)
Biblical scholarship is an academic discipline, taught and studied at universities, colleges and divinity schools all around the world. So it should be no surprise that biblical scholars run |
explained to them that their job is to work for the people of Australia, not to squire rich fat cat Liberal donors around the capitals of the world. I’m amazed that Malcolm Turnbull has let this matter go on for five days.”
Labor’s shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, labelled Turnbull as “the prime ditherer” for waiting until parliament rose to dump the minister. Bowen also seized on Morrison’s defence of him as evidence of government dysfunction.
“There has rarely been a clearer case of a breach of ministerial standards than Stuart Robert’s trip to China on behalf of a major Liberal party donor, in clear breach of the standards,” Bowen said.
“He said he was on private business. The ministerial code of conduct says you cannot help a company as a minister in your private capacity. It is crystal clear … Stuart Robert’s own defence convicted him.”
An official from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade agreed in a Senate estimates hearing on Thursday that the people he had met thought they were dealing with Robert in his ministerial capacity.
Robert denied wrongdoing but refused to answer specific parliamentary questions over the course of the week. The statement of standards say ministers “may be required to resign if the prime minister is satisfied that they have breached or failed to comply with these standards in a substantive and material manner”.
It was also revealed on Friday that employees in Robert’s Department of Human Services – the biggest commonwealth agency – had comprehensively rejected the government’s latest pay offer.
The Community and Public Sector Union said more than 26,000 employees participated in the ballot and about 80% voted against the proposed enterprise agreement. The department includes Medicare, Centrelink and child support staff.Transgenderism is being loudly promoted in seemingly every area of society, including the education system.
It has been obvious for a while that those in the transgender movement want their cause to be the next big diversity issue thrust upon society. You don’t agree with them? You’re obviously a bigot. You teach your children something different at home? You’re clearly intolerant of others. How transphobic of you.
What parents teach in their own home is one thing. What a school teacher chooses to not only actively promote, but parade in front of their young students is quite another.
At the Rocklin Academy, a charter school in Rocklin, California, a kindergarten teacher decided to not only discuss transgenderism with FIVE and SIX-year-old children but allowed a transgender child to reveal their “true” identity in front of the class.
As expected, many parents are not too happy.
CBS News reports:
At Monday night’s board meeting, the teacher at the center of the controversy spoke out. With emotions high, she addressed a packed house. “I’m so proud of my students, it was never my intent to harm any students but to help them through a difficult situation,” she said. The teacher defended her decision to read two children’s books about transgenderism including one titled “I am Jazz.” She says the books were given to her by a transgender child going through a transition. “The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or a girl,” said England. Parents say besides the books, the transgender student at some point during class also changed clothes and was revealed as her true gender. And many parents say they feel betrayed and blindsided. “I want her to hear from me as a parent what her gender identity means to her and our family, not from a book that may be controversial,” a parent said. “My daughter came home crying and shaking so afraid she could turn into a boy,” another parent said.
And why shouldn’t those children have reacted in horror? They are a handful of years old and at school to learn letters of the alphabet, not whether little Johnny believes he should have always been a Jennifer and wants his penis removed from his body. These kids haven’t the slightest clue about sexuality and the hormones that will rage within them in less than a decade.
Of course, the teacher at the center of the controversy is only doing these things out of love and concern for her young pupils. You see, it’s all about diversity and healthy, tolerant minds!
It is California and the Left Coast, so I shouldn’t expect much in the way of common sense, should I? Apparently, other teachers – and even the school district itself – don’t possess much of a spine.
“When we head in the direction of banned books or book lists, or selective literature – that should only be read inside or outside the classroom, I think that’s a very dangerous direction to go,” said 7th grade teacher Kelly Bryson. The district says the books were age-appropriate and fell within their literature selection policy. Unlike sex education, the topics of gender identity don’t require prior parental notice. In a statement during the board meeting, the district said: “As indicated by Superintendent Robin Stout in a communication last week, staff will be engaging parents and teachers in discussions about how materials outside our curriculum will be addressed in the future.”
Let’s face it: transgenderism is entirely opposite of societal norms. At the very least, it indicates mental irregularity within the individual. The school district’s policy requiring parents be notified in advance for sex ed topics but not gender identity ed says all you need to know about the desire to sweep these delusions under the rug.
We could get into the subject of parents themselves promoting transgenderism in their homes and with their own children. This, I believe, is nothing short of child abuse. Those who do this are, more than anything, focused on being trendy, hip friends to their kids and not focused on actual parenting. It is entirely unhealthy and sets the stage for long-term repercussions of the mental and sexual kind.
However, it is even worse to see a teacher tasked with educating her children take the reigns and introduce these ideas to young, very impressionable minds incapable of understanding much complexity. Discussions like these should be left to parents. Period.
This is sure to be the tip of the iceberg as normalizing transgenderism continues to be the goal for those “tolerant” people among us. Unfortunately, some of these people inhabit classrooms across the country and we call them educators.Geese and Ganders
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A white man is seen bound and gagged on the floor in the corner of a room.
2. White supremacists have been trying to tie this brutal attack to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as a means to label BLM a terrorist organization and convince the world that BLM means danger for white people because it radicalizes black people. What those white people, and any other, need to know is that BLM doesn’t radicalize black people; white supremacy does. How long did you think black people would remain docile under a system built on our dehumanization? How long did you think you could show those videos of unarmed black people — black children — being murdered on camera by police, and police getting off scot-free, before those videos cause an effect? As long as white supremacy exists, and as long as you pretend that it doesn’t in order to keep it intact, you are in danger. If you think the way to eliminate that danger is to destroy black people, you’re wrong; 500 years of trying (and failing) to destroy us should have already made that crystal clear to you. The *only* way to eliminate the danger is to eliminate white supremacy. Period. Point blank.
4. Because we live in a white supremacist society, we can all be assured that these people who kidnapped that white disabled man will pay for what they did in a way that white offenders in identical situations likely don’t/won’t. That is, after all, the entire point of white supremacy: to make even poor white folks think they have something over black people (See point #1).
5. Isn’t this kidnapping/torture situation just a complete nightmare? Can you imagine the pain that man must have endured? Devastating, right? Now multiply that by 500 years, hundreds of millions of people, laws and mores that co-sign it, and everyone and their father denying it all, and you *might* have some small inkling of what black people have endured on the daily in this country, in the face of denials, dodges, excuses, disregard, and gaslighting from white supremacists.
6. Some people think this whole situation was staged as a part of some conspiracy to discredit black liberation movements. I don’t have any evidence of that other than the situation does seem to line up almost perfectly, in terms of language and stereotype, with other hoaxes where white people blamed something on black people. Nevertheless, I believe that the way to end violence is to end violence. And white supremacist patriarchy — and people’s desire to wield it — is the source of all violence in this country, maybe even in the world. End that and all violence will end.
7. I refuse to be like white supremacists who find glee and orgasm in a black person’s pain or can’t, themselves, empathize with black people simply because they’re black. Unlike them, I’m an actual human being. So:
May the victim in this situation find healing and peace.Jane Fonda regrets not speaking up earlier about Harvey Weinstein.
The film star, who is also an active women's rights advocate, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Thursday that she "found out about Harvey about a year ago."
"I'm ashamed that I didn't say anything right then," Fonda said.
The Oscar award winning actress said that she was never assaulted by the movie mogul.
In the past week, multiple women have come forward accusing Weinstein of rape, assault and other misconduct.
The movie producer denies the charges and released a statement earlier this week, through a representative.
"Mr. Weinstein obviously can't speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr. Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual," the statement said.
The stories revealed that Weinstein's actions were something of an open secret in Hollywood.
Fonda, 79, said that her friend and fellow actor, Rosanna Arquette, had recounted a troubling experience with Weinstein.
Related: Explosive Weinstein stories expose mogul's power over media
Fonda declined to discuss what Arquette told her. But Arquette is among the handful of actresses whose experiences with Weinstein were detailed in the New Yorker this week.
Arquette said she denied advances Weinstein made in a hotel room. "He made things very difficult for me for years," she told the New Yorker.
When asked why Fonda didn't say anything publicly after she spoke with Arquette, Fonda said, "I guess it hadn't happened to me, and so I didn't feel that it was my place."
Fonda, an Academy Award winner, spoke to Amanpour about her own past experiences with sexual harassment and abuse. She says she was abused as an 8-year-old child and explains why therapy was important for her recovery. "You realize what I'm feeling is ok because this person is sharing my pain," she said.
In recent years, she's championed women's issues and co-founded the Women's Media Center in 2005.
Fonda told Amanpour that Weinstein's pattern of abuse is not an isolated phenomenon.
Related: Harvey Weinstein sexual assault scandal grows as more women come forward
"Let's not think this is some unique, horrific [incident]. This goes on all the time," she said. "It's this male entitlement -- in Hollywood, and everywhere. In offices and businesses all over the world, in bars, and restaurants and stores, women are assaulted, abused, harassed and seen for just being sexual objects, there for a man's desire, instead of as whole human beings."
She added that President Trump's election marked a setback for the effort to combat such behavior. There are documented claims that Trump has harassed and insulted women, and he was also famously caught on tape bragging about being able to grab and touch women due to his social status.
"When you are a star, they let you do it," Trump said in his now infamous videotape.
"You can do anything," he boasted.
Fonda says the fact that Trump won the election "counteracts a lot of the good that we're doing, because a lot of men say, 'Well, our president does it, and he got elected even after people discovered that he was an abuser, so I'm just going to go ahead and do what I want to do."
"We have to stand up to them," Fonda added.Lese majeste fugitive Wutthipong “Ko Tee” Kochthammakhun - the hard-core Pathum Thani red shirt - has called on his "red guard army" and red shirts to wage a war against opposition groups in the wake of the Constitutional Court’s ruling to remove Yingluck Shinawatra from office.
A letter said to be written by Ko Tee urges hardcore red shirts to wage a 'war' against opposition groups (Photo from Facebook of Lung Yim Ta Sawang)
Mr Wutthipong made the call in a letter sent to a well-known red-shirt soothsayer Pruek Prueksunant, better known to social network users as Lung Yim Ta Sawang.
Mr Pruek on Wednesday posted a picture of a handwritten letter claimed to have been sent to him by Mr Wutthipong.
In the letter headlined “Class war begins … against injustice”, the fugitive red shirt called the Constitutional Court an illegal gang and said Wednesday's ruling was expected. He urged members of his red guard army and the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) to joint his fight.
“It’s time to fight. Carry out the planned ideology!! Above the ground, our brothers and sisters who don’t have to fight cases in courts … fight them! Underground, all the stuff needed for a guerrilla unit is in place! I will coordinate the move with the ‘independent reds’,” the letter said.
“No more giving speeches or collecting signatures. For today’s situation, [we] must hunt for their heads only because they have attacked us repeatedly... I have started … now my brothers and sisters can follow.”
Mr Pruek, a 54-year old native of Lamphun, has established himself as a fortune teller whose predictions about political violence such as bombings or shootings allegedly perpetrated by red-shirt extremists have proven to be accurate.
He often posts his predictions on his Facebook page.
However, Mr Pruek said he did not agree with all the moves suggested by Mr Wutthipong. He added the court decision was still acceptable and did not create a power vacuum, and so the underground war was not needed yet.Ready, set, make your reservations beginning at 7 a.m. August 20 at 407-WDW-DINE for Be Our Guest Restaurant in the New Fantasyland at Magic Kingdom Park.
You can make reservations up to 180 days out – the very first seating will be for dinner on November 19 by calling 407-WDW-DINE (3463), or visiting any Guest Relations theme park location or Guest Services desk at a resort. Online reservations will be available August 22 by visiting www.disneyworld.com/dine.
On the Disney Dining Plan, Be Our Guest is one quick-service entitlement for lunch, and one table-service restaurant entitlement for dinner.
Lunch is quick and casual, with guest-activated terminals that make ordering a snap (there also will be traditional cashiers for cash orders and special dietary requests). You order, take a seat and lunch is delivered to your table – on china, not paper. Dinner is table service. You can find the lunch and dinner menus here.
Cuisine is French-inspired to match the hit animated film’s theme, with three themed dining rooms: the mysterious West Wing with the “enchanted rose”; the Rose Gallery with twirling, larger-than-life figures of Belle and Beast; and the elegant Ballroom with domed ceiling, twinkling chandeliers and glimpses of softly falling snow outside.
Initial sneak peeks (and tastes) are amazing! We’ll share more details and photos of the restaurant and food soon.
Read more about Be Our Guest Restaurant in the posts below:The Golden Compass Is Getting A TV Series, Hopefully It Won't Suck By Jessica Rawden Random Article Blend The Golden Compass (Northern Lights in the UK), was made into a spectacularly bad movie back in 2007. The project is being made for BBC One.
The popular set of novels follow Lyra Belacqua and her daemon Pantalaimon, who roam the grounds at Jordan College until a plot to kill her Uncle Asriel sends her on a mission to look into a mysterious entity called “dust.” This takes her well beyond the college’s walls on an adventure through her world, where she meets the beautiful but cold Mrs. Coulter and many other heroes and villains along the way. The fantasy series is comprised of three books: The Amber Spyglass and The Subtle Knife, but we don’t know exactly how this story will be fleshed out into a full series, yet.
The BBC’s report today notes that Charlotte Moore and Polly Hill have commissioned the series, which is being produced by Bad Wolf and New Live Cinema. Executive Producers will include Philip Pullman, Jane Tranter, Julie Gardner, Toby Emmerich, Carolyn Blackwood, Bethan Jones and Deborah Forte. No other big details are forthcoming at this juncture, except that the new series will be shot in Wales. If all goes well, hopefully the drama will get a worldwide release, as well.
Obviously, this is huge news for fans. The His Dark Materials novels have sold millions of copies and been translated into numerous languages. They have an intense, avid fanbase similar to other fantasy franchises, including the likes of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (but not quite that big). And while the heroine in this novel, Lyra, is a young girl and the partner she meets along the way, Will, is a young boy, fans of all ages still enjoy the stories, similar to The Chronicles of Narnia and other youth-based fantasy series.
Still, this is a bit of a risky venture. Pullman’s
Obviously, the His Dark Materials series is moving forward over at New Line Cinema is getting into the TV business, and the company has a really large project planned for its first big foray onto the small screen. This morning, the company announced plans to produce a series based on His Dark Materials, the beloved children’s series by Phillip Pullman. The first book,in the UK), was made into a spectacularly bad movie back in 2007. The project is being made for BBC One.The popular set of novels follow Lyra Belacqua and her daemon Pantalaimon, who roam the grounds at Jordan College until a plot to kill her Uncle Asriel sends her on a mission to look into a mysterious entity called “dust.” This takes her well beyond the college’s walls on an adventure through her world, where she meets the beautiful but cold Mrs. Coulter and many other heroes and villains along the way. The fantasy series is comprised of three books: The Golden Compass and, but we don’t know exactly how this story will be fleshed out into a full series, yet.The BBC’s report today notes that Charlotte Moore and Polly Hill have commissioned the series, which is being produced by Bad Wolf and New Live Cinema. Executive Producers will include Philip Pullman, Jane Tranter, Julie Gardner, Toby Emmerich, Carolyn Blackwood, Bethan Jones and Deborah Forte. No other big details are forthcoming at this juncture, except that the new series will be shot in Wales. If all goes well, hopefully the drama will get a worldwide release, as well.Obviously, this is huge news for fans. The His Dark Materials novels have sold millions of copies and been translated into numerous languages. They have an intense, avid fanbase similar to other fantasy franchises, including the likes of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (but not quite that big). And while the heroine in this novel, Lyra, is a young girl and the partner she meets along the way, Will, is a young boy, fans of all ages still enjoy the stories, similar toand other youth-based fantasy series.Still, this is a bit of a risky venture. Pullman’s books have been made into movies, radio shows and stage productions in the past, but they’ve never been made for the small screen (although that might actually be a better fit for this type of material). The first book was made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig just a few years ago, and despite pulling in $372 million at the box office, that wasn’t enough to help the studio to want to continue with the franchise. Plus, it didn’t do super well critically and hasn’t lived on as a beloved movie with fans who have read the books over and over again. What the BBC needs is to capture the spirit of the books, the scientific probing and the ability to think critically about those in charge (in the book’s case a theocratic organization ) that makes His Dark Materials such a special series. What the BBC needs to do is make something that doesn’t suck.Obviously, the His Dark Materials series is moving forward over at BBC One, which means we should start hearing about casting and more in the weeks that come. We’ll let you know as soon as the series begins moving forward in earnest. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topWe recently fact-checked a claim from the Reclaim America PAC about background checks for gun purchases. In a TV ad, the PAC said Kelly Ayotte "voted to fix background checks." We rated the statement Half True, noting that Ayotte voted for a bill that left in place exceptions for gun shows and purchases over the Internet.
After we published this fact-check, Mayors Against Illegal Guns contacted us, suggesting that the ruling should have been lower than Half True. We gathered more information from them, as well as from the proponents of the bill. We have decided to leave the claim rated Half True, but we also learned additional details about the bill that Ayotte voted for. Here’s what we learned.
Truth behind the incentives
It’s important to understand the context of the amendments on the recent gun background checks.
On April 17, senators voted on a series of amendments. Advocates for stricter rules for gun purchases put most of their hopes in a bipartisan amendment, sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that expanded background checks to gun shows and Internet sales, but did not require them of family members and friends giving or selling guns to each other. The amendment was seen as a compromise, replacing stricter language from Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013.
But the Manchin-Toomey compromise amendment still fell short of the necessary votes. Ayotte joined Republican colleagues in a mostly partisan vote, defeating the measure 54-46. (Procedurally, the amendment needed 60 votes to pass).
The same day as the vote on Manchin-Toomey, Republican Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a substitute amendment.
The Grassley amendment did not expand the requirement to cover any new firearms sales, such as at gun shows or over the Internet. But it would have provided incentives for states to submit relevant mental health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and required federal courts to do so. It also would have allocated money for prosecuting violations of the background check requirement.
For the most part, Democrats favored Manchin-Toomey, while Republicans favored Grassley-Cruz. A bipartisan group of eight senators ended up voting in favor of both measures.
In their second pitch to PolitiFact, Mayors Against Illegal Guns argued that the incentive provided in the Grassley-Cruz bill was not as advertised. The incentive was an authorization for grant money to help states submit records to the NICS. That can be an expensive undertaking because some records are not digital or aren’t housed in a centralized office.
Ted Alcorn, senior policy analyst with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said the program has always been authorized at more than $100 million per year. President Barack Obama, among his executive actions following the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, asked for $50 million. Manchin-Toomey authorized $100 million.
But Grassley-Cruz set a new cap of $20 million.
"That is the exact opposite of what is needed," Alcorn said. "This bill essentially reduces the opportunity for states to get that funding. It doesn’t improve it."
But there’s a finer point here. Authorization and appropriation are often very different things in Washington. (Authorization means funding is permitted under the law; appropriation means the program actually gets the money.) Alcorn acknowledged that the grants have never been appropriated at more than $17 million per year. Some years it’s been as low as $10 million.
To the bill’s supporters, the lower cap is sensible policy.
"Grassley-Cruz was a realistic promise to fund these grants," said Sean Rushton, a spokesman for Cruz.
"We thought it was a signal to the appropriators to fund above what they’ve been giving," added Nick Podsiadly, counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And the penalties
Both sides agree that the penalty system for states that fail to submit records is faulty. States are supposed to estimate the number of records that should be submitted to the background check database, and then if they miss that target, they can be penalized by losing out on other grant funding.
But the estimates have never proven reliable. The Grassley-Cruz bill eliminated that requirement.
"They had to guess how many people would be prohibited (from buying a gun), and their measure of performance would be tied to that guess," Podsiadly said.
Under Grassley-Cruz, states that failed to submit records would still have seen a decrease in grant money -- some 10 percent after five years.
Alcorn countered that the penalties have not been very effective, which is all the more reason to focus on boosting incentives.
"The states that got money have submitted more records than states that didn’t obtain funding," he said.
What about the mentally ill?
Mayors Against Illegal Guns argued that Grassley-Cruz eliminated some categories of mentally ill people who were prohibited from buying guns.
For example, a person who has been deemed unable to manage their own affairs would no longer be banned from gun purchases, Alcorn said.
In addition, someone who is involuntarily committed to a hospital or psychiatric facility could be sent there by a police officer, paramedic or doctor. Then the person would typically have a right to a court hearing, but many people are released before that happens.
The Grassley bill would have counted only commitments that are court adjudicated.
"If a court has not issued an order committing someone, then their commitment doesn’t count, and that’s the vast majority of commitments," Alcorn said. "Your garden variety involuntarily committed person would never be prohibited. They would pass a background check."
Podsiadly called that an interpretation that doesn’t align with typical state practices -- that judges would not automatically remove people from banned lists for buying guns.
Podsiadly also noted that the Grassley-Cruz bill provided resources to states to deal with mentally ill people in jails and assist veterans with mental health and substance abuse problems -- provisions that were not in either the Manchin-Toomey amendment or the underlying bill sponsored by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid.
"Grassley-Cruz was labeled as do-nothing, but if you actually read what our bill would do, I’m confident that it would have made a greater dent in gun violence," he said.
Our conclusion: We are still convinced that each bill would have addressed the background check system in different ways. Our ruling stays at Half True.Today we are excited to announce the launch of the Office 365 Channels on IFTTT to coordinate information flow in an automated way. IFTTT enables people to link to the various Triggers that exist for Internet apps, and then complete Actions against other products or apps. For example, you could have the lights in your house turn on when you are minutes from your house.
The Office 365 Channels include:
When you activate these Channels, you are able to automate what happens with your Office 365 data to increase your productivity even more. For example, you create Recipes to program activities, like automatically save a photo to OneDrive for Business when it’s posted to Instagram with a particular hashtag, or sharing that a new Office 365 contact was added to the team’s Trello board or Slack team.
We created some Office 365 sample Recipes to help you get started.
Mail Channel
We live in our email these days. The Mail Channel helps you create a centralized place to review of all of the information coming in from across the Internet.
For example, this Recipe sends an email when you receive a refund in Square:
OneDrive for Business Channel
We all like to share highlights of our successes to our friends and peers.
This Recipe saves a photo from your Camera Roll on your iPhone to your OneDrive for Business if you’re within a particular radius of a location. This is a great way to automatically save all conference-related and team-building photos to your team’s OneDrive for Business photos folder:
Another great Recipe uses Instagram photos with the #work hashtag. For example, this Recipe saves photos from Instagram to OneDrive for Business to create a great #work photo album and share conference and team activity pictures with the rest of the team:
Calendar Channel
The Calendar Channel, keeps you on top of your meetings and important events all the time.
This Recipe creates a card in your team’s Trello board, reminding them of a team meeting, and then adds a task to follow up with meeting notes:
Or use the Calendar Channel to schedule a gym appointment for you for in the evening when you haven’t reached your FitBit steps goal by 5 p.m.
Contacts Channel
Keeping track of relationships and key contacts is critical today.
This Recipe creates a page in your OneNote when you add a new contact to Office 365:
This next Recipe creates an automatic follow–up calendar item for an easy reminder to follow up with a new contact a week after your initial meeting:
Get started today by visiting the Microsoft’s profile page on IFTTT, where we’ve posted 30 recipes to help you get started.
We’re looking forward to seeing the creative ways you can increase your productivity with IFTTT and Office 365.Rather than giving voters real and more diverse choices, the inclusion of new and numerous sectoral groups in the party-list system is an indication that traditional politicians have found an easier way into public office through “dubious” and “fly-by-night” groups, according to political analysts.
The “sheer perversion” of the party-list system, originally meant to give marginalized sectors a better chance at winning elective positions, has led to newer and relatively unknown sectoral groups overtaking powerhouse left-wing and progressive blocs in terms of votes, said Richard Javad Heydarian, a political science assistant professor at the De La Salle University (DLSU).
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“The sheer perversion of the political parties is the cause of the proliferation of these dubious groups… and the Commission on Elections (Comelec) should play a vigilant role in stamping out these groups because the party-list system is the last bastion of real, participatory and progressive democracy,” Heydarian said in a phone interview with the Inquirer on Friday.
Lax party-list rules
DLSU political science professor Antonio Contreras blamed the Supreme Court’s lax party-list rules for opening the floodgates to more groups joining the elections, which he said naturally scattered the votes.
“The groups [were competing] for a limited number of votes,” he said, adding that the lack of information and interest among voters also resulted in lackluster support for party-list groups.
The partial, unofficial tally of the May 9 party-list elections showed relatively new organizations surpassing the votes that old party-list groups, including the so-called Makabayan bloc, used to corner in previous elections.
Ako Bicol seemed to have sealed its standing at No.1 with 1,634,986 votes, followed by Gabriela party-list, apparently one of the two left-wing groups in the Top 10, with 1,339,112 votes or 4.26 percent of the total votes counted.
Newcomer 1Pacman or One Patriotic Coalition of Marginalized Nationals remained unmoved on third spot with 1,287,461 votes, or 4.09 percent of the more than 43 million votes counted as of 2:13 p.m. Friday.
ACT Teachers, a progressive and militant organization representing the education sector, garnered 1,151,095 votes based on the Inquirer’s partial and unofficial tally using data from the Comelec’s transparency server.
Bayan Muna, which ranked third in the 2013 midterm elections, moved down to the 15th spot with 586,193 votes so far, while Anakpawis was on the 29th spot with 354,909 votes. Kabataan was on the 38th spot with 293,784 votes.
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Multimillionaires
Akbayan, which placed fourth in the previous elections with more than 820,000 votes, was currently at No. 13 with 589,161 votes.
Contreras said the lenient rules of the party-list system had a big impact on these left wing and progressive groups, which was competing against more varied sectoral groups.
In 2012, the Comelec had tried to cleanse the system according to the Constitution and the party-list law by reassessing so-called marginalized groups and screening their representatives in Congress which, the poll body noted, were either multimillionaires, former government officials or members of powerful political clans.
But the high court subsequently ruled that party-list groups need not represent marginalized sectors, revising the rules it laid down 15 years ago and allowing political parties and groups not representing the marginalized and underrepresented sectors to participate in the 2013 elections.
Analyst Edmund Tayao, a political science professor at the University of Santo Tomas, said the age of information “had inadvertently worked against some progressive organizations, as information on the ground could easily be shared by everyone through social media.”
“While the so-called leftist bloc is pushing for real reform measures in Congress as party list representatives, they are also known to be associated with rebel armed groups,” he said, adding that the association was hard to counter especially in the advent of social media.
Tayao said another factor that resulted in poor poll numbers for old-timers in the party list groups was their assumption that they no longer needed to ally themselves with traditional political parties that earlier enabled them to enter government.
‘Dynastic’ party-list groups
Election Commissioner Rowena Guanzon said as much. “It’s very hard for those not affiliated [with political parties] to generate votes on their own,” she said, adding that this could explain why “the usual top three winners had slid down to [numbers] 12 or 15.”
But former Akbayan Rep. Walden Bello disagreed, saying that being identified with a political party did more harm than good for the organization.
“I don’t want to rub it in at this point but since I’ve been asked, I think the loss of over 200,000 votes from 2013 and then slipping from fifth to 13th [was probably due to the party’s] identification with the Liberal Party and pushing for daang matuwid,” Bello said.
Former Bayan Muna Rep. Teddy Casiño meanwhile attributed the party’s poor showing to its inability to match the huge resources and the alleged vote-buying operations of the rich and “dynastic” party-list groups.
“In fact, the party-list system is now dominated by groups composed of, funded, and supported by political dynasties, big business and landlord interests,” he told the Inquirer.
But Casiño also admitted that there was a sense of complacency among members and supporters of the organization due to the party’s high profile and excellent performance in the 2013 elections.
“Many thought we had two or three seats in the bag even with minimal campaigning, which was of course wrong,” he said. In total, he estimated that the Makabayan bloc would have at least eight seats in the 17th Congress. TVJ
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MOST READ10 Futuristic or out of the ordinary projects that accept Bitcoin
Financing novelty projects can be a challenge when it comes to gather supporters, but Bitcoin might be a great help. In these cases, when the projects sound too outrageous for conventional financial investment, cryptocurrency steps in to change the game. Take a look at these 10 examples.
1. The Mars One Project
The nonprofit foundation and project Mars One has recently started accepting Bitcoin donations to take humans to the Red Planet in 2023. The goal is to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars.
2. Edward Snowden defense fund
Wikileaks created the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund and it didn’t lose too much time thinking about its first project: raising funds to help Edward Snowden, the man who revealed the truth about PRISM and the North-American surveillance program. The campaign accepts Bitcoins.
3. Erowid
“Erowid accepts donations through Bitcoin, a geeky anonymous digital currency”, you can read on the project’s website, which studies the complex relationship between humans and psychoactives.
4. LewRockWell
You can help this “unique anti-war, anti-state, pro-market site” to grow with your crypto-contribution.
5. The Khan Academy
It’s already possible to support this non-profit organization that provides free education for people around the planet with your Bitcoins.
6. Libertarian Party
Since “many Libertarians have begun using Bitcoin”. the party decided to start accepting cryptocurrency as well.
7. Electronic Frontier Foundation
This project is all about defending the users’ rights and freedom in the digital world, especially against the surveillance programs managed by authorities like the NSA.
8. The Virtual Doctor Project
This project uses the Internet to help save lives in rural Africa. The Virtual Doctor Project is now accepting Bitcoins to boost primary healthcare in remote locations.
9. The Bitcoin Education Project
This project was created to solve two problems in the Bitcoin ecosystem: reduce the knowledge barriers and allow everyone to enter the Bitcoin world and make Bitcoin more relatable to mainstream activities.
10. The SETH group
This project is all about a group of scientists exploring “the truth” in the healing field. You can donate Bitcoins to help the SETH Group and its interdisciplinary team of scientists.The Norfolk Southern railroad runs just beyond this mural on Chicago’s South Side, a crime-ridden area made more dangerous by gang members breaking into trains and stealing guns.
CHICAGO -- When street-gang thieves slipped with ease into a Norfolk Southern rail yard on Chicago's South Side and ripped locks off one train, they likely expected to see merchandise like toys or tennis shoes. What they beheld instead was a gangster's jackpot: box after box of brand new guns.
Photo by AP/CHARLES REX ARBOGAST
Pastor Corey Brooks of New Beginnings Church in Chicago’s South Side stands near the razor wire that no longer tops the wall separating the church basketball court from |
BY Sarah Brown
Donut deliciousness is coming to Bank Street South this Friday (Nov. 25).
Maverick’s Donut Company is a collaboration between five partners, who are already working together in various capacities for the Vittoria Trattoria and Lapointe Fish restaurants: Harjeet Singh, Dominic Santaguida, Geoff Vivian, Kyle Hector, and Jake Ellis.
City Bites Insider caught up with Vittoria Trattoria’s Singh, conducting a quick interview as the busy co-owners and staff raced around finalizing all the last-minute details ahead of this weekend’s opening.
Between Vittoria Trattoria and the Lapointe’s restaurants, you guys already run seven places. Aren’t you busy enough?
I know! But Geoff [Vivian] loves donuts, so he convinced us to jump on the bandwagon.
What flavours do you have?
I’m a chef by training so I have been experimenting for months — I must have experimented with about 40 flavours. But we have narrowed it down to six signature [donuts] that will be available every day: peanut butter & jam; Death by Chocolate; Wake ’n Bacon; Lemon Ricotta; Crème Brûlée; and Pina Colada. But customers can also create their own, perfect donut.
Custom donuts, too?
Exactly. You can walk up to the counter and choose the donut, then choose what icing dip you would like. There’s chocolate, maple, vanilla, and caramel. Then you move along to the toppings and decide what to put on. We’ve got sprinkles, toffee bits, crushed KitKat, Oreo cookie crumbs — there are a whole bunch of options.
Kids are going to love this.
They will. I can see adults coming in for a really good cup of coffee and a gourmet donut from our menu, and kids making their own. Of course, lots of adults will want to make their own, too.
Will the standard gourmet flavours change over time?
Definitely. We’ll be adding to the mix once we see how things go. We’ll have a suggestion box so customers can tell us what they’d like to see. Sometimes you’re stuck in your own bubble, so it will be great to hear their ideas.
I love that customers can see the donut machine at work.
It is neat. I travelled to the U.S. four times to check out machines before we bought this one.
Tell me about the location.
We chose the Blue Heron Mall because we know the area — this mall is always packed. There’s room for about 30 in here, with a combination of seats and standing bars. We plan to get a liquor license so we can also host corporate functions as well. It would be a great place for a beer and a donut.
What about donut lovers who aren’t in the Bank Street South area?
We are working on a plan to offer a delivery service for larger orders. We’re also looking at a second location in 2017, though I can’t give any details yet. And we’re in talks to wholesale Maverick’s donuts to coffee shops, banquet halls, and food stores.
Wholesaling — great idea.
Yes, Kyle [Hector] and Jake [Ellis] are very involved with the wholesale side of Lapointe’s, so that’s what they’ll be working on. What’s great about having five partners in the business is that we all have different specialties, so we divide up the responsibilities.
You’ve been in the food industry for a long time. Do you have a sense of how people will react to Maverick’s Donut Company?
It’s a unique product, so I think people are going to be really excited. They’ve been coming and trying to look in the windows ever since we put the signs up.Could law enforcement catch criminals and suspected terrorists using voice-recognition software?
Photo by MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images
Intercepting thousands of phone calls is easy for government agencies. But quickly analyzing the calls and identifying the callers can prove a difficult task.
Now one company believes it has solved the problem—with a countrywide biometric database designed to store millions of people’s “voice-prints.”
Russia’s Speech Technology Center, which operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States, has invented what it calls “VoiceGrid Nation,” a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices. The idea is that it enables authorities to build up a huge database containing up to several million voices—of known criminals, persons of interest, or people on a watch list. Then, when authorities intercept a call and they’re not sure who is speaking, the recording is entered into the VoiceGrid and it comes up with a match. It takes just five seconds to scan through 10,000 voices, and so long as the recording is decent quality and more than 15 seconds in length, the accuracy, SpeechPro claims, is at least 90 percent.
The technology has already been deployed across Mexico, where it is being used by law enforcement to collect, store, and search hundreds of thousands of voice-prints. Alexey Khitrov, SpeechPro’s president, told me the company is working with a number of agencies in the United States at a state and federal level. He declined to reveal any names because of nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements. But Khitrov did divulge that various versions of the company’s biometric technology are used in more than 70 countries and that the Americas, Europe, and Asia are its key markets. Not all of its customers are law enforcement agencies, either. SpeechPro also designs voice recognition technology that can be used in call centers to verify the identities of customers. Depending on the size and specifics of the installation, it can cost from tens of thousands up to millions of dollars.
The FBI is separately pursuing voice recognition as part of its efforts to take advantage of various biometric methods of investigation, and the National Security Agency has also supported the development of the technology.
However, the advance of a mass, countrywide voice recognition system raises some obvious concerns. Russian secret services watchdog Agentura.ru reported earlier this year that Speech Technology Center’s products have been sold to countries including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Thailand, and Uzbekistan—hardly bastions of human rights and democracy. What if the VoiceGrid Nation system were in the hands of an authoritarian government? It has the technical capacity, for example, to store a voice-print of every single citizen in a country the size of Bahrain—with a population of 1.3 million—which would allow state security agencies to very effectively monitor and identify phone calls made by targeted political dissidents (or anyone else for that matter).
When I ask Khitrov about this, he uses an analogy about the character Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who killed an old woman with a stolen ax. “People have used axes domestically for hundreds of years, but some people choose to turn it into a weapon,” he says. “We just make sure that we work with trusted law enforcement agencies and try to make sure that they use it properly.” SpeechPro’s technology is used for only “very noble causes,” he adds, citing a case in Mexico where he says it was used to identify and find kidnappers who made ransom calls before they were about execute a person. Though when I ask for more examples of how VoiceGrid is being used in Mexico, he admits, “We don’t know the specifics because that’s their information.”
Like iris-scan databases and facial recognition systems, it seems inevitable that voice recognition will eventually become a staple law enforcement tool. Companies selling voice-changers could be in for a windfall.by April Bender, September 15, 2013
www.stankovuniversallaw.com
Dear Georgi,
Below is the latest from HS. After reading the latest posts by Carla on Agartha, I felt strongly compelled to check in with HS. About 15 years ago I was first visited by Zora of Argatha, she was actually the one who showed me my first glimpse of the new 5D earth. I have since connected with her only on occasion, and only once when Adama was present, and I am now recalling the last instance of contact, when it was shared that the Agarthans would disclose themselves to the ascending population once PAT detonation of the Supernova occurred.
Interestingly enough, while Carla has been travelling to Agartha, I have been visiting the great university on Sirius, of which I have many old friends residing. I myself have taken and taught many classes there over the course of my ascending career so I have been delighted to find myself there in light body during dream time once again.
So imagine my surprise and joy to hear of Carla’s latest experience, something is indeed afoot here with all these latest “other worldly” encounters. HS attempts to explain both of these experiences and more below in her latest message. She is very earnest at times about the importance of these deeper connections.
As always I am eager to hear your initial response and if this is too long, please feel free to edit it down. I hope you and others find the message helpful as I did.
Much love and light,
April
______________________________ ______
HS Message 9-15-13
HS: Do you recall the words of Prime Creator? Specifically in regards to your newer expansive state of Communion with All-That-Is? The plethora of new streams and modes of higher communication and insight now available to you and residing all around you if you but only tap into them? Do you and the PAT fully understand what this means and the honor that has been bestowed you?
Let me explain. Whereas in the past you would have fleeting moments of communication/ communion with say Gaia’s plant and animal kingdoms, Gaia herself, or your soul family, other upper /inner realms or beings, etc… now you, the first wave ascenders as a collective, will have unlimited/ unfettered access to such places and energies anytime you simply WILL it. For these nodes of communication/ communion are fully open and accessible as they are a natural part of and connect to the circuitry system of 5D. These circuits and pathways have recently been realigned, purged and activated in preparation of this as other channeling sources have indicated (see GaiaPortal).
Put plainly, the dimensional level of 5D opens up entire other worlds of access than what was previously available to you in 3D or even 4D. The field of higher energetic resonance stretches/ extends much further in 5D and beyond, thereby integrating and connecting many more realms of information and experience – thus inducing a deeper and expansive sense of Self/ Oneness and how you personally and impersonally experience that multi-dimensionally.
You are being prepared, or better yet, are remembering as the final veil lifts and the Creator’s gifts and graces pour out upon you, just how to do this and very soon your entire group will once again be very proficient at accessing this type of “boundless awareness.” This adds light to you and Carla’s latest experiences and visitations to other realms intimately connected/ tied and invested in this grand ascension plan. You could say these are your closest neighbors and allies.
The Agarthans, for example, are deeply tied to earth’s ascension process as you all know. They hold a very high stake in the outcome of all of this and they are about to take on a much more active and visible role as previously discussed. Their energies will add great stability to the Cities of Light which are very close to activating, becoming visible to those ascension candidates on the uppermost rungs of 4D. This will occur AFTER the forced confrontation (global war, note George), and these Cities will be a place of refuge for those choosing ascension after their “confrontation” experience.
It is during this time that you will be newly, physically ascended, and will reappear on these upper 4D timelines to assist in getting others to these places of refuge, the Cities of Light OR landing areas for the Galactic Federation of Light ships that will be utilized for those candidates unable to reach a City of Light (the PAT as rescue teams, see also Jahn’s message “Rescue Squad on 4D /8th Level“, comment George)).
Therefore, Carla’s recent visitations to Agartha are another herald to your group that this time of confrontation and Agarthan deployment are nigh. It is also another testimony to the PAT, that these lines of communication are open to all first wave ascenders and should be explored and utilized daily. It is time for all forces in service of the divine plan to unite, establish a communication platform, and mobilize! The Creator has just bestowed a great gift upon you all – NOW USE IT!!! It matters not which faction of the light you make contact or have communion with only that you do and that you do so in earnest. Where much has been given, much is now expected. This will be easier for some than others to begin, but all in your collective have this capability now and are expected to develop it.
Let us now look at one other example of the coming together of worlds/ allies. You have been visiting the great university on Sirius. You know this place very well. Explain to the group what you have encountered here.
Me: Well, the first time I consciously recall visiting this place in this lifetime was when I was about 1 4 years old. I had a very lucid dream in which I found myself at this great hub of learning and social interaction for our local star system.
There was a group of us, all in what appeared to be orange robes/toga’s. Our instructor also wore one. This signified to me that we were all part of the same soul group, and our instructor had been assigned to us. He led us all down, down, into the lowest, darkest levels of the university. It looked like a stone dungeon maze of a castle, with torches along the walls, providing the only source of light. We followed the narrow hallway until we reached a large cavernous room. Within this room was a large hole, an abyss that seemed to go on and on into the bowels of darkness. The expanse of this large crevice or hole was enormous. You could not just jump across it. Our instructor pointed out a platform that stood at one end of the crevice. It reminded me of a diving board at the edge of a swimming pool, except for there was no water below – there was no bottom – only darkness. Our instructor then told us that our test would be to cross this dark abyss with nothing but our faith. Our faith that with each step, the foundation or platform for the next would appear from the darkness below and with each subsequent step of faith we would be guided safely across.
This exercise he said, was in preparation for incarnation on earth. I was the first he asked to go and I have to admit, I was a little nervous. I stood on that first platform looking into the dark abyss below me, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, called on the Creator and stepped into nothingness – strangely enough my foot landed on a hard surface, the next platform had appeared from nowhere!! I closed my eyes and repeated this process until I had made my way across the entire abyss and was safely standing with my peers. Joyful shouts of congratulations resounded.
I have never forgotten this profound lesson and it has served me tremendously while here on Gaia. I’ve also had other visitations there where I was in more of a normal classroom type setting, teaching classes of higher learning on various subjects, mostly from what I can recall, on the emotional nature of Earth and how to navigate that. I also recall in other dimensional experiences of Self, of delivering messages to the great university or to some of its instructors. So it is indeed not only a great university but also hub where many local beings/worlds intersect/connect.
Recent visitations in the last couple of days have shown me that they are preparing for an influx in student’s/new arrivals.
HS: Yes,wonderful! That is precisely so! Just as the Agarthans are moving into final preparations and posturing so are the Syrians! As are the GF, and many other connected beings and realms.
The university on Sirius is another important one to mention though as many of the PAT will eventually be teaching/ presenting on what they have experienced during this grand time of ascension once it is in the main, completed. For you must remember that this is the first time mass ascension has been done in this way and there will be many lining up to hear you tell of it. You will be much sought out presenters and teachers on the topic. And it is true, many new souls will be acquiring access or more expanded access to this higher/ inner university.
Therefore, I stress again the importance of staying attuned to and even seeking out such communion/ communication with other closely connected realms and beings of light in preparation of your final transfiguration and roles of service. The Creator does not give you something for nothing. Yes you deserve this, but you must also utilize it! To be true co-creators you must co-create with your brethren within the essence of Unity, which IS Prime Creator, and Prime Creator has thrown open wide all doors and receptors of such communication for you. It is time to step into the full splendor and glory of who you really are! For the time of confrontation is here!
______________________________ _________________
Dear April,
I had to smile when I received your email because I was just about to write you an email and ask you to check with your HS about Carla’s visit to Agartha, as she also asked explicitly for your validation.
But you have already read my thoughts and have presented the response. This is a convincing example for the incredible synchronicity these last days.
I will publish immediately this message as it is an important contribution to our key topic:
“How to utilize our new acquired gifts from the recent Communion with the Prime Creator as to facilitate the ascension process and begin to create the destiny of the new mankind consciously in the Now.”
This is a huge challenge – it is like giving your first lecture as a teacher to a big audience or appearing for the first time on the stage as an actor. You must be very confident in your creative abilities and at the same time you must be able to overcome in a sovereign manner your “limelight fever”, your anxiousness. But when the old knowledge due to our remembrance of our enormous creative potential will overwhelm us immediately after our ascension, we shall very easily adapt to our new roles as Earth Keepers.
With love and light
Georgephoto by ISIphotos.com
By FRANCO PANIZO
The U.S. Men’s National Team’s Gold Cup campaign will essentially be one giant tryout for the players involved.
That was the easy message to take away from Jurgen Klinsmann’s conference call on Thursday, one in which the U.S. head coach discussed his player selection for the upcoming Gold Cup at length. Klinsmann revealed many of the reasons why players were summoned or left behind and he touched on the status of former captain Carlos Bocanegra, whose international future seems to be in jeopardy after being left off this Gold Cup team.
“With Carlos, I had a long talk,” said Klinsmann. “He’s basically in the middle of another move, in the middle of another change. He’s going to leave, it looks like today, Racing Santander and he’s in the middle of making up his mind of where he wants to go, where he wants to kind of continue his career. We simply agreed to leave him out of the roster in order for him to have all options open to join a new team right away from the start in preseason and not coming in kind of late into this new opportunity.”
Klinsmann also spoke about the status of Mix Diskerud, a Norwegian-American midfielder who could represent either country but has in recent years represented only the United States. Diskerud will be cap-tied to the U.S. should he play in one of the Gold Cup matches, and Klinsmann hopes to accomplish that as well as help the youngster with his development.
“With Mix, we have a very special talent that he showed in the (U-23) team and showed that in some moments with us. We want to continue to develop the way he reads the game, how he has opportunities to go in the box, he scored a goal in Russia in the last second there. We want to continue to build him. We’re happy to have him back. He made his decision to go with us, the U.S., and that’s exciting. If he plays a game now in the Gold Cup, he’ll be tied to us and that’s great as well.”
Here are some of the other topics Klinsmann touched on during the conference call:
On Landon Donovan’s return to the squad after his self-imposed sabbatical:
“Landon coming back to our group is exciting and this (is) a wonderful opportunity for him now to prove where he’s at now after his break and after a couple months now back with the Galaxy. We’re curious to see how he picks up the rhythm, the speed and tempo and all the elements, and therefore we’re excited to have him back. … We’re simply happy to have him back and to see him now over a stretch of seven games performing.”
On the inclusion of Philadelphia Union striker Jack McInerney:
“We are obviously following him, we’re excited about the progress that he’s making. I had a long talk with his coach and we see a lot of talent coming through. He’s a hungry kid, he’s hungry for goals, he can score goals in many different ways, he’s providing assists, he’s chasing people down, he’s highly energetic, so we just kind of want to open him the door as part of our group and kind of see him on a daily basis in training and possibly in games as well. It’s a huge step for him in our senior program.”
On the status of midfielder Stuart Holden:
“He’s very close, he’s very close. The plan was to kind of give him a rhythm, give him high-intensity training, give him opportunities there and continue that throughout the summer. I think that plan is going well so far and not only that he’s kind of improved with us day-by-day in training. He also was very crucial in these couple of weeks there with the World Cup qualifiers in terms of chemistry because he’s a pure giver, he’s a guy that puts everybody in a good mood, he’s looking after younger players, he’s looking around where are issues, where are things maybe (he) can help with. The plan so far is coming along and now obviously he’s getting closer to start games himself.”
On the omission of New England Revolution forward Juan Agudelo:
“We wish in terms of Juan that he’s just getting more consistent, more consistent game-in, game-out, not only in terms of scoring goals, which obviously for a striker is very, very important and it gives you a lot of confidence, but performance-wise as well. It’s a process he still has to learn and he has to go through, too many still up-and-downs, so he’s working on that and hopefully he can get that balance and get that consistency and then he’s right back in our picture as well.”
On the absence of Chicago Fire attacker Mike Magee:
“Mike is a player we follow, absolutely, but he didn’t make then the 35 but we follow all the MLS games, we follow what goes on everywhere, we talk to the coaches. Mike is in our picture as well but not now for the Gold Cup.”
On why winger Brek Shea was not included in the final roster:
“With Brek, I had long talks and also with his new coach Mark Hughes and after those long talks we decided that it’s really best to Brek to join their preseason at Stoke (City) starting on July 8. But I also agreed with Mark Hughes and with Brek that he could come into San Diego and join that week with us because I want to spend a couple of days with Brek and have a couple of conversations and be in that group. Brek will join us for that week in San Diego plus the game against Guatemala and after that game he will basically leaves us on July 6 going to Stoke and getting on the right foot with Stoke. It’s really, really important that he starts out well with Stoke and gets a starting spot there and breaks in in order for him to get a breakthrough in Europe.”
On why centerback Oguchi Onyewu was called in despite having little playing time with Malaga this past season:
“We kept in touch. We talked always openly about it. In certain moments, he was actually promised to play games by his coach who moved on to Manchester City and for whatever reason he didn’t have that opportunity. But obviously knowing him over the last few years, we know the quality of Gooch. We know what his level can be and we talked two, three months ago about that opportunity at the Gold Cup.
“I told him, ‘I’m thinking of bringing you in but you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to be sharp, you’ve got to be ready, you’ve got to be strong,’ because if he is in very, very good shape and he’s very focused and he he picks up the rhythm he can be the centerback that you all know.
“There are always moments as a coach where you have to make a compromise in how you approach things. Yes, you want all the players playing at their club teams regularly, always as a starter and hopefully always playing consistently at a high level. But then there are moments where you also look at players (who aren’t playing) and there’s a reason, circumstances, whatever they are, you try to analyze them, you try to talk to them and then you come up with your decision.
“Having him in that camp as one of the leaders then because automatically with his experience, with Clarence Goodson there, we have two very, very experienced and strong centerbacks that can lead a whole back line and it’s big. He understands that moment for him is the opportunity for him to get back in our (picture).”
On where forward Herculez Gomez stands in his return to full fitness following a knee injury:
“He’s good to go but obviously we’re going to see right away in the camp how much he caught up. I think it was the right decision just to send him to Athlete’s Performance from the May-June camp and get all the work and all the treatment that he needed. If he’s cleared to go, he’s ready but what we’re going to do on July 2 is the entire team will go through fitness testing at Athlete’s Performance. We’re going to see clearly then what his conditions are and if he’s running behind by a couple of days, it’s no problem then he will catch up over the next few days, so we’re very positive on Herculez.”
On the style of play he hopes to implement at the Gold Cup:
“We definitely kind of want to be consistent with the way we play and tactically our games, but as a coach you always adjust to the players that you have. We will see in training with the players that join in now, but the good thing about going to the Gold Cup is definitely that we have a whole bunch of players that were already with us in the May-June camp that understand exactly how we kind of pick up the rhythm and how we want to play, to continue that path now also in the upcoming games. But when you have different personnel, you adjust to that different personnel. Hopefully, it’s going to be exciting the way we play in the upcoming games.”
On whether he will use the four permitted replacements following the group stage of the Gold Cup:
“It’s very likely the case, looking at it today, but maybe things go extremely well with all 23 now. We have no injuries, no issues. It’s really down to those 23 players to make their mark, to make their case and then we’ll see how we want to switch things around after the group stage is done.”Sustaining the prophet is a sacred privilege, Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles declared during the Sunday morning session of general conference on Oct. 5.
“How do we really sustain a prophet?” Elder Nelson asked.
“Often we sing, ‘We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet,’ ” he said. “Do you and I really understand what that means? Imagine the privilege the Lord has given us of sustaining His prophet, whose counsel will be untainted, unvarnished, unmotivated by any personal aspiration and utterly true!”
But sustaining the prophet is more than just raising one’s hand — it means standing behind the prophet, praying for him, defending his good name and striving to carry out the instructions he gives as directed by the Lord.
“My dear brothers and sisters, if the Restoration did anything, it shattered the age-old myth that God had stopped talking to His children,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. A prophet has stood at the head of God’s church in all dispensations, from Adam to the present day. We honor the Prophet Joseph Smith as the prophet of this last dispensation. And we honor each man who has succeeded him as president of the Church.”
Prophets testify of Jesus Christ — of His divinity and of His earthly mission and ministry — and are called by the proper authority. Counterbalances and safeguards abound so that no one man can ever lead the Church astray.
“This gives us, as members of the Lord’s Church, confidence and faith as we strive to keep the scriptural injunction to heed the Lord’s voice, as it comes through the voice of His servants, the prophets,” he said. “All leaders in the Lord’s Church are called by proper authority. No prophet or any other leader in this Church, for that matter, has ever called himself or herself. No prophet has ever been elected. The Lord made that process clear when He said, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you.’ You and I don’t ‘vote’ on Church leaders, at any level. We do, though, have the privilege of sustaining them.”
The ways of the Lord are different from the ways of man, Elder Nelson taught. “Man’s ways remove people from office or business when they grow old or become disabled. But mans’ ways are not and never will be the Lord’s ways.”
Members sustain the prophet through personally committing to do their utmost to uphold the prophetic priorities. The sustaining is an oath-like indication that recognizes the calling of the prophet to be legitimate and binding.
The calling of 15 men — from different educational and professional backgrounds and differing opinions about many things — to the holy apostleship provides great protection for members of the Church because decisions of the those leaders must be unanimous.
“The Church today has been organized by the Lord Himself,” he said. “He has put in place a remarkable system of governance that provides redundancy and backup. That system provides for prophetic leadership even when the inevitable illness and incapacities may come with advancing age. Counterbalances and safeguards abound so that no one man can ever lead the Church astray. Senior leaders are constantly being tutored such that one day they are ready to sit in the highest councils. They learn how to hear the voice of the Lord through the whisperings of the Spirit.”
Recognizing the lifelong service of President Thomas S. Monson, Elder Nelson said: “We honor you! We love you! We sustain you, not only with uplifted hands, but with all our hearts and consecrated efforts.”Of Eurovisions and Riots in Macedonia
March 3, 2013
What links Eurovision, EU mediation and riots on the streets of Skopje? Not much at first glance. It is still an odd coincidence that a scandal over this years contribution to the Eurovision song contest by Macedonia and major riots in Skopje occur at the same time these days. The song “Empire” by Esma Redzepova and Vlatko Lozanovski (aka Lonzano) is at first glance the class kitschy pop that works well at the Eurovision song contest (although definitely not the caliber to do particularly well there). The lyrics are banal, but what to expect from ESC song:
Vlatko:
Odam,cekoram po nebo, I walk, I walk through the skies,
Letam jas niz vremeto, I fly through the times,
I koga zaspivam, And when I fall asleep,
Pesni jas sonuvam I dream of music
Background vocals
Ejgidi more dejgidi,
Nasi pesni ubavi Our beautiful songs
Esma:
Zivotot e muzika, Life is music
Energija, Energy
Nasata imperija Our Empire
Chorus:
Imperija,imperija, Empire, Empire,
Muzika caruva na zemjata, Music rules on earth
Imperija,imperija, Empire, Empire
Najmokna sila na planetata Most powerful force on the planet
Vlatko:
Koga spie cela vselena, When the whole universe sleeps,
Peam vo nokite, I sing in the nights,
Gi dopiram svezdite I reach for the stars,
So krilja na notite With wings of musical notes.
[the video of the original song imperija has been deleted and is now been purged from cyberspace and replaced by the new song, F.B. 19.3.2013]
Of course from the lyrics it is clear that the empire they are singing about is music. However, the link between a video clip that looks like a promotion of the controversial Skopje 2014 building program and references to “Empire” with images of the statue of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Arc de Triomph do evoke not only musical empires. So unsurprisingly some media in Greece took offense (‘ONCE AGAIN FYR MACEDONIA PROVOKES GREECE’ and a moronic comment by the Greece ESC participant Agathonas Iakovides: “The Greek history cannot be insulted by anyone I am Greek from head to toe”), as did Bulgaria and Esma and Lonzano cancelled their trip to Bulgaria. Luckily Germany did not protest over the video showing a monument that looks a lot like the Brandenburg gate & Siegessäule in miniature or France (and Romania) for the depiction of an obvious copy of the Arc de Triomphe or the Bucharest Arcul de Triumf.
Also domestically, the video came under extensive criticism for showing off Skopje 2014 project that is rejected by many as kitschy, wasteful and nationalist. The combined international and domestic protests thus made the MRT withdraw the clip as “it did not comply with the broadcasters requirements.” In its stead, some really funny spoofs popped up, the one being the clip below, a wonderfully cut duet of Darth Vader and Jabba the Hut
[unfortunately this spoof has been deleted for copyright infringement, F.B. 19.3.2013]
So what does this silly story have to do with the unrest that has been going on in Skopje in the days since Talat Xhaferi, a former NLA commander, was named Minister of Defense or the mediation of the EU in Macedonia a few days ago over the opposition boycott of parliament and the threat to boycott elections?
The current government has maneuvered the country in a very difficult and volatile situation. The unrest first by Macedonian war veterans against Xhaferis nomination, followed by Albanian counter protests demonstrate the volatility of Macedonia and the risks of playing with nationalism in an environment were few of the underlying prejudice and segregation has been tackled. Instead, the ruling VRME-DPMNE has been combining its nation building strategy with accommodating the largest Albanian party–a double act that seems to be running out of steam. At the same time, the opposition boycott and EU intervention is reminiscent of the polarization that has plagued neighboring Albania for more than a decade and is both a sign of weakness of the opposition and the government. Finally, the Eurovision ‘scandal’ (the only real scandal or rather sad part of the story is that Esma Redzepova is one of the two singing the song) signals either naivete or willful confrontation the current Macedonian government seems to be good at provoking Greece and Bulgaria. These three dimensions–rising nationalist confrontation, polarization of the main parties that requires external mediation and continued confrontation with Greece–cannot be good news for Macedonia and filming a new video clip is the least of all troubles coming from all of this.Home
Todays Market
Indian Stock Market News February 27, 2019
Sensex Ends 68 Points Lower; Consumer Durable and Power Stocks Witness Selling
Share markets in India continued to trade in the red during closing hours on escalating Indo-Pak tensions and ended their trading session marginally lower. Sectoral indices ended on a mixed note with stocks in the consumer durable sector and power sector witnessing most of the selling pressure.
At the closing bell, the BSE Sensex stood lower by 68 points (down 0.2%) and the NSE Nifty closed down by 29 points (down 0.3%). The BSE Mid Cap index ended the day up 0.4%, while the BSE Small Cap index ended the day up 0.2%.
The rupee was trading at 71.25 against the US$.
Asian stock markets finished on a mixed note. As of the most recent closing prices, the Hang Seng was down by 0.1% and the Shanghai Composite was up by 0.4%. The Nikkei 225 was up 0.5%.
From the commodity space, crude oil was witnessing buying interest today. Gains were seen after a report stated declining crude inventories in the country.
Gains also came as producer club the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) seemed to stick to its supply cuts despite the pressure from US President Donald Trump.
Note that yesterday Donald Trump had called on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to ease its efforts to boost the markets with supply cuts.
Max India share price was also in focus today as the after the company sold its entire 51% stake in Max Bupa Health Insurance Co Ltd (Max Bupa) to private equity firm True North Fund VI LLP for over Rs 5.1 billion.
Max India said the deal has been at a consideration of Rs 5.1 billion, which the company will receive at the time of completion of the proposed transaction.
From the banking space, Allahabad Bank share price, Corporation Bank share price, and Dhanlaxmi Bank share price were in focus today on the back of Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) move to take them out of prompt corrective action (PCA) framework.
The central bank took them out of the PCA framework following improvement in their financial ratios.
Note that last year, in May, Finance minister Piyush Goyal had promised all possible support to the 11 state-run banks that are under the RBI's PCA framework. He had also expressed confidence that public sector banks will overcome legacy issues very soon.
After meeting chief executives of these 11 PSBs, he said that it will be ensured that the central |
make a change for a future without him included. That's what Ali brought to the table. I don't know what it's like to live in every state in this country, but I know freedom. I know the opportunity that our country has given people, and to see the guy in charge now not understanding that is baffling to not only myself but to my friends and to the people that've helped grow this country. But Muhammad Ali's correlation to the war… I don't think me and Donald Trump could ever get to that point."
On the one hand, appraising the greatness of an athlete is an incredibly easy thing to do. There are seasons and statistics and big plays and rings. There are streaks and records and head-to-head matchups and end-of-season accolades. The data, the video clips, the testimonials—it's all there to compare across time. The games don't change as much as other things in society change, and so we can make strong cases, we can make cross-generational arguments, we can say things like: LeBron James is the greatest living athlete. Based on what he's done on the court thus far and what he still could potentially do in years to come.
On the other hand, an athlete's greatness can be defined more expansively. What was their influence? What did they mean? It's almost like the difference between a strict and a broad constructionist. The former looks at only what's there and says, for example: He was a top-three running back based on rushing yards and touchdowns. The latter looks at the expansiveness of the role an athlete plays in their society at a given time and asks: Who were they compared to? Who could they and should they have been? What did they do for their generation? What power did they wield, and to what effect?
LeBron James is, we'd argue, a broad constructionist on the athlete-greatness front. There is LeBron James the basketball player, and he's front and center, he's still number one. But there's a deep understanding of the way this life of his is going to work for decades to come—that one day (maybe not as soon as for some other players, but still) basketball will run out, and it will be on to Phase II. Which is why he spends his off-season cramming his days laying groundwork for what comes next, expanding the universe of LeBron Inc.
“It’s my responsibility. I believe that I was put here for a higher cause. We have people that have been in the higher positions that chose to do it and chose not to do it.”
Over the course of a couple of weeks, I was with him as he premiered a documentary with Drake at the Toronto Film Festival, addressed crème de la crème world leaders in Midtown Manhattan, walked in a fashion show in Hell's Kitchen, and soldiered through a five-hour magazine photo shoot with ninja-military precision in L.A. (He didn't request a single thing during the shoot, not water, not food; he had one fruit snack that I offered him from my pack. It was grape.) I watched up close the ways he transformed expertly from audience to audience, modulating his clothes, and his voice, and his posture, and the way he used his hands (sometimes gesturing wildly, sometimes holding them quietly in a diamond shape at his belt buckle), and even the way he talked about the game he's galactically famous for. (I watched him oversimplify basketball to a roomful of film producers, who he safely assumed might be basketball illiterate, even describing a slam dunk as "one of our best plays in my sport.") He code-switched effortlessly, all depending on who was sitting across the proverbial business table from him.
He's deadly serious about his universe of extra-basketball enterprises. And that fact right there is just one of the several arguments for his greatness. He knows the critical importance of Phase II for taking the fame, the exposure, and the influence that he has garnered and cultivated in basketball, and amplifying it to any number of ends. He knows that LeBron without Phase II is…Wilt? Russell? That is, a legacy of greatness on the court for all time, but muted by a relatively quiet life after the game. A quiet life after the game is not for LeBron James.
Which is why, over the years, he's spent such energy and shrewdness assembling the people around him—a Dream Team of old friends and new partners and experts in this field and that, who strategically operate within every emerging arena for him. The team is critical. The team will go a long way to priming the potential greatness of LeBron James in Phase II.
"I have people around me, for the most part, that've been around me for a long time," he told me. "So when you've been around people for a long time, there's no sugarcoating, there's no trying to put you higher than what you should be, there's no yes-men or -women, there's no gas. It's just straight-up, raw, uncut, unfiltered knowledge, truth, passion."
No matter how grand an athlete's ambitions outside the arena, their influence is limited if they're not exceptionally dominant in it. Despite the best ideas or the most benevolent intentions, their potential influence correlates with their talent. It just does. They can't do what LeBron James wants to do in the world if they haven't already made their case on the court. Which is, of course, why the greatness of this athlete in particular obviously starts there.
Despite LeBron's having won just—"just"—four MVP awards, no player has been more consistently dominant and impactful over the past decade and a half in the NBA. And yet it's hard to see when the downturn will come. Somehow at 32 and on the verge of Season 15, he's in better shape than he was during his rookie year. ("I feel amazing," he told me while getting a hand massage.) Veteran LeBron has double the muscle and seemingly none of the body fat of Rookie LeBron. He looks like an action figure—an unrealistic one at that. But you don't charge up and down the court like a freight train, guarded by every team's best and most physical defender game in and game out, 39 minutes a night, without showing a little wear and tear somewhere.
As far as I could tell, he has only two physical tells that confirm his mortality. The first? His feet. Every ballplayer has busted-up, twisted feet. But the King's are exceptionally wrung out. They look like they went 12 rounds with the bear from The Revenant.
The other? Two scars on the back of his head you can only see up close.
How'd you get those scars on the back of your head?
"One, I got elbowed."
In a basketball game?
"In practice, when I was in Miami."
Really?! By who? I bet they were nervous.
"Yeah, they were! I won't say who it was, though." He laughs. "My own teammate elbowed me.… Sixteen [stitches] across the back."
The other scar?
"During the Finals I fell into a camera, against Golden State. The first time we played them."
Did you have any stitches then?
"No, I actually—this was just glue. It was going to be staples, but I told them, 'Don't fucking staple my head.' And they put in the glue, and it didn't heal right. We kept this one under wraps, though."
Why?
"Because we don't talk about injuries. I don't talk about injuries."
The fact that LeBron hasn't been seriously injured isn't just something that explains his dominance—it's becoming almost like a mythic quality surrounding him, a suggestion of infallibility that's useful to propagate for the intimidation factor alone. It's a fact that is key to unlocking the whole recipe—the unmatched talent, yes; the unfettered intensity, sure; but more than anything, that physical consistency, the ability to just play, to stay in the game. The most high-profile player in sports can have his head busted open—during the NBA Finals, no less—and he keeps it a secret because glue will be sufficient.
When it comes to on-court greatness, LeBron beats MJ—and every other athlete—for these factors and more, and because he has the legitimate potential to play the game of basketball at the highest level longer than anyone else. Or, as he put it when I asked how he thought he could become greater than MJ in most people's eyes: "If I was the most consistent and was at the top of the food chain more than anybody in NBA history." He's been to seven straight NBA Finals and could seemingly play at that level for another 10 seasons—25 total. That's astonishing. And no one has been "the greatest" for decades.
Would you play when you're washed up? If you love doing it, but you weren't…
"I know I won't be able to play at this level forever, but to be washed and play… I don't know if I can play washed."
Maybe you'll play against little Bronny when he gets to the league?
"I don't know if I could play washed, but I damn sure would love to stick around if my oldest son can have an opportunity to play against me. That'd be, that'd be the icing on the cake right there."
Yeah, but you can't let him embarrass you out there, though.
"I'll foul the shit out of him!" He laughs. "I'd give him all six fouls. I'd foul the shit out of Bronny, man."
Yeah, like every time he tries to shoot.
"On sight: Flagrant 2!"
The Four Seasons conference room in New York was filled with producers, cameramen, and the obligatory anxiety that comes with waiting to receive a very famous person. There were basically two guys in charge in the room, one in a decent suit and one in a bad suit. Bad Suit worked for the Bloomberg Global Business Forum and explained what LeBron James was doing there: They needed "a world leader of equal stature" to the attendees of their upcoming summit—statesmen and businessmen like Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and Jack Ma (Asia's richest man). It was one of those highly exclusive gatherings where all the world's problems would either be solved or spawned. In the conference room, there were ten or so people setting up to record the greeting, a pre-taped call to action to be broadcast at the opening of the summit. "How many world leaders are actually known around the world?" Bad Suit said. "We needed him."
When LeBron enters a room, it feels like the floor tilts down in his direction. And this afternoon was no different. His voice carried. His hand, extraterrestrial, extended with seasoned celebrity coyness. Our necks craned up. The King smiled down, a smile as wide as his wingspan. His Lanvin shirt looked painted on. He had a pair of Nike Air Zoom Generation sneakers on his feet. He was about to address the leaders of the Free World in a pair of Nikes.
Decent Suit ushered LeBron to his seat in front of a teleprompter and gave him directions he didn't need. "You're representing all of us," he said. Meaning: people who want more from their elected and unelected leaders. LeBron politely insisted, "I got it."
After the prompter scrolled the speech a few times, LeBron gave it—a speech he was seemingly reading for the first time—a try and nailed it on the first attempt. He never hesitated or second-guessed a single word. Bad Suit's eyes filled with the same hope Morpheus's did when he found out that Neo was in fact the One. Someone in the back gasped, like out of a movie. And then, to just about every head of state and titan of industry worth a damn, 32-year-old LeBron James said, "We know the world needs us to step up."
Us.
A moment like that is the most significant reason why LeBron James is the greatest living athlete. Greatness has an all-encompassing burden. It's a beauty and brains type of mandate. Floyd Mayweather could go undefeated for 50 more fights, but he'd never be the greatest living athlete. Because he's selfish. And tacky. And consequently, small. You have to transcend sport to be the greatest—beyond sneakers and drinks that replenish electrolytes and video-game covers and money teams.
“I think, um, they can love what LeBron James does. Do they know what LeBron James completely represents? I don’t think so.”
It's the Ali Test. It's a people's-champ-ness one needs. It's the ability to turn fans into followers and followers into consequential action. To be able to legitimately have an effect on the way people live in the world, as corny as it sounds. And LeBron, more than any other living athlete on earth, has that in him. The fact that he's putting over a thousand kids through college is commendable. But when assessing his imprint and the potential of his reach, it seems relatively small. Like a 30-point game. He's reaching for something bigger. Something that most athletes eschew and that LeBron himself wasn't always inclined to do. It's not like he was out there his rookie season stumping for candidates. But things have changed. It's a different world now. Which is why I figured I'd test out the upper limit of his ambition.
Would you ever want to be president?
"Of the United States?" He pauses. "Nah."
That didn't seem like a confident answer.
"I say no because of always having to be on someone else's time. From the outside looking in, it seems like the president always has to be there—gotta be there. You really don't have much'me time.' I enjoy my'me time.' The positive that I see from being the president… Well, not with the president we have right now, because there's no positive with him, but the positive that I've seen is being able to inspire. Your word has command to it. If you're speaking with a knowledgeable, caring, loving, passionate voice, then you can give the people of America and all over the world hope."
Why is being known for speaking up on social issues so important to you?
"I don't do it to get praise or to be in an article. I do it because it's my responsibility. It's my responsibility."
Is it anyone in your position's responsibility? Or is it your responsibility?
"Nah, it's my responsibility. I believe that I was put here for a higher cause. We have people, not only today but over the course of time, that have been in the higher positions that chose to do it and chose not to do it."
But do you think it's wrong not to speak up if you have the platform?
"I don't think it's right or wrong. If it's in you, and if it's authentic, then do it. If it's some fake shit, then the people, the kids, they're going to notice it. They know."
W. E. B. Du Bois talks about how a black person will always feel his "two-ness" in America. You're a very extreme example of that. On the one hand, you're the savior of Ohio. It's nearly impossible to find someone in Ohio who doesn't worship you. But it also has its share of racism. Is that difficult when something happens in your backyard?
"It's heavy when a situation occurs either with myself or with someone in a different city, i.e., Trayvon, Mike Brown. I have to go home and talk to my 13- and 10-year-old sons, even my 2-year-old daughter, about what it means to grow up being an African-American in America. Because no matter how great you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do, if you are an African-American man or African-American woman, you will always be that."
The two-ness.
"True colors will show, and it showed for me during the playoffs, where my house in Brentwood, California, one of the fucking best neighborhoods in America, was vandalized with, you know, the N-word. And that shit puts it all back into perspective. So do I use my energy toward that? Or do I now shed a light on how I can use this negative to turn into a positive, because so many people are looking for what I'm going to say. I had a conversation with my kids. I let them know this is what it is, this is how it's going to be. When it's time for y'all to fly, you'll have to understand that. When y'all go out in public and y'all start driving or y'all start moving around, be respectful to cops, as much as you can. When you get pulled over, call your mom or dad, put it on speakerphone, and put your phone underneath the seat. But be respectful the whole time."
Can a state that elected Donald Trump also love LeBron James? Is that actually possible?
"That's a great question. I think, um, they can love what LeBron James does. Do they know what LeBron James completely represents? I don't think so. So those people may love the way I play the game of basketball, because they might have some grandkids, you know, they might have a son or a daughter or a niece that no matter what they're talking about, the kids are like, 'LeBron is LeBron. And I don't give a damn what you talking about. I love him.' So they don't have a choice liking me. But at the end of the day, these people are gonna resort back to who they are. So do I have a definite answer to that? My state definitely voted for Donald Trump, the state that I grew up in. And I think I can sit here and say that I have a lot of fans in that state, too. It's unfortunate."
The way LeBron speaks on race threads a very fine needle. It's healing and inclusive while also being extremely real. He's the anti-conformist athlete. From tweets and Instagram posts about police brutality to the way he's taken control of his career—off the court and on the court. The way he chose to leave Cleveland and then chose to come back. The way he broke the norms of free agency in the process. He's liberated every NBA player from now to eternity. But at the time, in the summer of 2010, he was bludgeoned for it—by media, by fans, and, perhaps most controversially, by Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, who published an open letter to the city of Cleveland, effectively calling LeBron a narcissist and a traitor. It had nothing to do with business or sport, for that matter. Some argued that it read like he thought he owned more than just the team—like he owned LeBron.
Did you feel like Dan Gilbert's letter was racial?
"Um, I did. I did. It was another conversation I had to have with my kids. It was unfortunate, because I believed in my heart that I had gave that city and that owner, at that point in time, everything that I had. Unfortunately, I felt like, at that point in time, as an organization, we could not bring in enough talent to help us get to what my vision was. A lot of people say they want to win, but they really don't know how hard it takes, or a lot of people don't have the vision. So, you know, I don't really like to go back on that letter, but it pops in my head a few times here, a few times there. I mean, it's just human nature. I think that had a lot to do with race at that time, too, and that was another opportunity for me to kind of just sit back and say, 'Okay, well, how can we get better? How can we get better? How can I get better?' And if it happens again, then you're able to have an even more positive outlook on it. It wasn't the notion of I wanted to do it my way. It was the notion of I'm gonna play this game, and I'm gonna prepare myself so damn hard that when I decide to do something off the court, I want to be able to do it because I've paid my dues."
What does LeBron James owe the city of Cleveland?
"LeBron James owes nobody anything. Nobody. When my mother told me I don't owe her anything, from that point in time, I don't owe anybody anything. But what I will give to the city of Cleveland is passion, commitment, and inspiration. As long as I put that jersey on, that's what I represent. That's why I'm there—to inspire that city. But I don't owe anybody anything."
Mark Anthony Green is GQ's style editor.Losing donors and enrollment, West Liberty University may be a harbinger of things to come for universities that double down on knee-jerk liberalism.
Why would a cash-strapped liberal arts college in West Virginia turn its nose up at $1 million in grants? University officials wouldn’t say it explicitly, but the reason couldn’t be more obvious: the money came from classically liberal and libertarian foundations. Even in a fiscal crisis, that simply would not do.
Last academic year, faculty and staff at West Liberty University (WLU) went on the ideological warpath to oust its center-right president simply because he was politically right of center. The public fallout of their acrimonious demands plunged the university into an enrollment and budgetary shortfall as the staff and faculty aired their disdain in public. Turned off by vitriolic statements about their overburdened life, parents sent their kids to other schools and major donors began to withhold funds.
As a result, WLU is shuttering one of its oldest buildings because it can’t afford to keep the lights on and saying some classrooms will remain in grave disrepair because the university can no longer afford the upkeep.
One would think that a victory in ousting the president would satisfy the ideological conformity of the academic community. It didn’t. They wanted more retributive justice.
Let’s Drop Ideological Diversity, Even If It Costs Us
In September, administrators informed me the college was eliminating the entire political science major, and, as a result, my services were no longer needed. When I inquired how they arrived at such a decision, they fumbled an answer, citing a lack of majors in the program. However, several other programs on campus have fewer students.
The sole purpose of the grants was to expose students to the ideas of free markets, liberty, and equality rightly understood.
When I offered to help offset some of the departmental costs from the nearly $1 million in grants I secured, the administration balked. So, there must have been another reason they wanted to terminate my contract. My position on campus did not fit their ideological biases. As a result, I had to go.
I taught one of the few classes on campus that was dedicated to the classical liberal arts. It was, in part, funded by the generous grants from BB&T, Koch, and the Institute of Humane Studies at George Mason University. It also funded grants and scholarships for promising students to offset the cost of books and tuition. The sole purpose of the grants was to expose students to the ideas of free markets, liberty, and equality rightly understood.
None of the students were required to agree with the virtues of the free market. Many even wrote research papers criticizing that idea, and did so eloquently. Even though the class included broad readings from Nietzsche and Marx, along with Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the American Founders, it was not good enough for the provost, who told another member of the faculty that he “wished there was different ideology represented on campus” than the one I proffered.
What was the provost so incensed by? That students might merely consider diverse ideas. Even though the campus is riddled with professors who are left of center, he wanted to suppress speech and keep students from the exposure to the ideas of freedom and liberty. Indeed, one professor told me I needed to “shut my mouth” if I wanted to “keep my job.” WLU seemingly felt threatened by an alternative voice on campus.
Ideological Intolerance Repels Students
Unlike political science, however, WLU’s administration and faculty deem some classes acceptable. One such class, “Batman Versus Superman,” is being advertised on campus as a serious offering connected to a comic books major (which has zero students in the program), while another class, called “Rock and Roll Appreciation,” even counts as a fulfillment of a student’s core required classes. With classes like these and others similarly outrageous, just what kind of education are these students really getting? Are students really served by eliminating an entire major dedicated to the cultivation of good citizens and the understanding of our political system?
Parents should be questioning whether to send their sons and daughters to institutions that are long on indoctrination and short on the ideas of freedom and liberty.
These are deeply unserious and vapid times in higher education. Unfortunately, the ideological intolerance at WLU is no different than that we see on many other campuses in the nation. The safe space for free inquiry is rapidly being driven underground. What kind of nation are we that cannot tolerate differing opinions? In light of the events at Yale, Missouri, and Claremont-McKenna, liberal education is also under attack from within by zealots.
What is happening at WLU is a result of a pusillanimous faculty and administrators. Parents should be questioning whether to send their sons and daughters to institutions that are long on indoctrination and short on the ideas of freedom and liberty, the true calling of higher education. WLU wants to tell the students what to think and believe. Welcome to the closing of the American mind.Rhizocephala are derived barnacles that parasitise decapod crustaceans. Their body plan is uniquely reduced in an extreme adaptation to their parasitic lifestyle, and makes their relationship to other barnacles unrecognisable in the adult form. The name Rhizocephala derives from the Greek roots ῥίζα (rhiza, "root") and κεφαλή (cephale, "head"), describing the adult female, which mostly consists of a network of thread-like extensions penetrating the body of the host.[1]
Description and lifecycle [ edit ]
As adults they lack appendages, segmentation, and all internal organs except gonads, a few muscles, and the remains of the nervous system. Other than the minute nauplius stages, there is nothing identifying them as crustaceans or even arthropods in general. The only distinguishable portion of a rhizocephalan body is the externa; the reproductive portion of adult females.
Nauplii released from adult females swim in water for several days without taking any food (the larva has no mouth and no intestine) and transform into cypris larvae (cyprids) after several moults. In some species, for example, Thompsonia, embryos develop directly into cypris larvae before they are released from adult females. A female cypris settles on a host and metamorphoses and injects its internal cell mass into host animal. The cell mass then grows into root-like threads through the host, centering on the digestive system. This network of threads is called the interna. The female then grows a sac-like externa extruding from the abdomen of the host.[2]
The externa remains immature until a male cypris injects its internal cells into a female's externa. Injected male cells migrates into a pair of cypris cell receptacles which was once called the testes. Within the receptacle, male cells transforms into nothing but sperm-producing germ cells. In other words, a male cypris becomes hyper-parasitic to a female which is already parasitic to the host (crab or shrimp). Since the male becomes nothing but spermatogenic (sperm-forming) cells, we may consider that an adult male rhizocephala represents the simplest form of male in the entire animal kingdom. Mature female externa releases eggs into its mantle cavity where eggs are fertilised by sperm from hyper-parasitic male(s). The female produces two types of eggs: small eggs, when fertilised, develop into female cypres, while the large eggs develop into male cypres. In Peltogastella gracilis, each externa produces several batches of larvae before it drops off the host. After all externae disppear, the host moults and a new young virgin externa "buds" from the female interna within the host's body. In Peltogasterella gracilis, many externae develop simultaneously and repeatedly from a single interna. Budding is a sort of cloning of a female individual. New extera receives cells from different male cypres. A female externa commonly has two cypris cell receptacles. In adults, either one or two of two receptacles contain male cypris cells (spermatogenic cells), depending on the chance of a juvenile female externa to meet one or more cypris males. Thus, a Peltogaterella female can "mate" with numerous males during its life time.[citation needed]
The externa is where the host's egg sac would be, and the host's behaviour is chemically altered: it is castrated and does not moult until aged externa(e) drop(s) off. The host treats the externa as if it were its own egg sac.[2] This behaviour even extends to male hosts, which would never have carried eggs, but care for the externa in the same way as females.[2]
Classification [ edit ]
Following the 2001 review by Martin and Davis, the Rhizocephala are ranked as a superorder and divided into two orders which together contain 9 families and two genera which cannot be unequivocally assigned to a family:[3][4]
Order Akentrogonida Häfele, 1911 Genus Pirusaccus Lützen, 1985
Genus Polysaccus Ho & Lutzen, 1993
Family Chthamalophilidae Bocquet-Védrine, 1961
Family Clistosaccidae Boschma, 1928
Family Duplorbidae Høeg & Rybakov, 1992
Family Mycetomorphidae Høeg & Rybakov, 1992
Family Polysaccidae Lützen & Takahashi, 1996
Family Thompsoniidae Høeg & Rybakov, 1992 Order Kentrogonida Delage, 1884 Family Lernaeodiscidae Boschma, 1928
Family Peltogastridae Lilljeborg, 1860
Family Sacculinidae Lilljeborg, 1860
References [ edit ]Kevin was worried. His friend Mike said over Facebook chat that he and his wife and kids were stranded in London after getting mugged. They needed money wired immediately to settle their hotel bill. This was especially worrisome because Mike was supposed to be recuperating in the hospital from head surgery… Then Kevin realized that someone had cracked his friend’s Facebook account and was impersonating him. Here is the transcript of their conversation:
Mike: Hello
Mike: how are you doing today?
Kevin: hey hey
Mike: how are you doing today?
Kevin: all good, thank God…how’s by you
Mike: not good at all
Kevin:?
Mike: yes
Kevin: what’s going on
Mike: we’re stuck in london
Mike: got mugged at the gun point last night
Mike: all cash and credit card phone got stolen away from us
Kevin: oh my goodness
Mike: but thank God will still have our passport with us
Kevin: i didn’t even know you guys were traveling
Mike: i need your help
Kevin: did you go to the police?
Mike: sorry i didn’t inforom you
Mike: yes but there are not helping issue ata ll
Mike: they told us to come back in two weeks later
Kevin: i thought you were confined to a hospital bed? how did you manage to get on a plane?
Mike: yes
Mike: i do
Mike: but my wife
Mike: has us to leave with the kids
Mike: for vacation
Mike: wondering if you can loan me some cash $$
Mike: when we get back today am going to refund back your money to you
Kevin: so you are still in the hospital, or you are in london with them?
Mike: i said am in london with them
Mike: Tracy said she going to pay back the money
Mike: when we get back
Kevin: Mike, seriously???? you never even paid me back the last loan! how i can i possibly give you more now?
Mike: please
Kevin: you remember, you asked me for money for the head surgery
Mike: Tracy will refund all
Mike: back to you immediately we get back home
Kevin: tell you what
Mike: i swear
Kevin: i have a friend in london. he can come get you
Kevin: we’ll sort it out
Kevin: i’m going to call him now, hold on
Kevin: where are you now
Mike: ok call him
Mike: but i don’t think that will help us
Mike: in this situiation
Mike: what we need is some cash
Kevin: he can bring some money for you
Mike: to get on a plane back home
Kevin: i’ll get you tickets. are you coming back to JFK?
Mike: our flight will be leaving in the next 1hour
Mike: yes
Kevin: oh, then i can meet you at the airport
Mike: can you wire us dome fund
Mike: via western union money transfer?
Kevin: you’re at the airport already??
Mike: yes
Mike: please send us the money
Kevin: how much do you need
Mike: we’re going to pick it up here in the airport
Kevin: how much
Mike: $1550
Kevin: yikes
Kevin: oh you know what
Kevin: i have plenty of miles on my account, i can just buy the tickets for you
Mike:??
Kevin: what flight number
Mike: i have to sort out hotel bills also
Mike: money is the issue
Mike: before leaving
Kevin: if your flight is in an hour, and you’re already in the airport, the hotels can wait until you land in a few hours
Mike: let me know how much you can get me at the moment?
Kevin: i’ll meet you at the JFK terminal
Kevin: i’ve already called your dad to let him know the situation
Kevin: he’s freaking out
Kevin: but i told him that you’re safe now
Mike: i still have my lodgings in the hotel
Kevin: he asked if you delivered the special package, or if it was taken from you
Kevin: not sure what he means by that
Kevin: do you want him to call you?
Mike: let let him know i did
Mike: i told you our phones got stolen away from
Mike: us
Kevin: oh right ok
Mike: let me know how much you can get to me at the moment
Kevin: ok, i got you 4 tickets on kuwait airways 101, it’s leaving at 6pm your time
Mike: because we need to get the bill sorted and get back home
Kevin: i put you, Tracy, and the the kids’ names on it
Kevin: so that should take care of the flight
Kevin: let me call the hotel, i’ll sort it out with them
Kevin: what’s their info
Mike: ok
Mike: you can call the hotel manager
Mike: +44[redacted]
Mike: let me know if you’re calling now
Kevin: actually, i’m calling the police. thanks for the phone number, scammer
Mike: you’re welcome
Mike: i will hack into your account if you dont log out between 6minute
Mike: i swear
Kevin: hahah go for it
Mike: ok wait and see your account going on hack processing right now
Mike: with bad sofware
Mike: 5minutes more
If anyone asks you for a Western Union transfer, even if they’re a friend or family member, watch out. These are the number one tool of choice by scammers for taking your cash because they can be picked up anywhere in the world and once they’re picked up, they’re untraceable.Remember frozen iguanas falling from trees during Florida's 2010 record-breaking cold snap? Well, a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science shows that Florida's corals also dropped in numbers due to the cold conditions.
"It was a major setback," said Diego Lirman, associate professor at the UM Rosenstiel School and lead author of the study. "Centuries-old coral colonies were lost in a matter of days."
The chilly January temperatures caused the most catastrophic loss of corals within the Florida Reef Tract, which spans 160 miles (260 kilometers) from Miami to the Dry Tortugas and is the only living barrier reef in the continental U.S.
Members of the Florida Reef Resilience Program, a group composed of Florida scientists and resource managers, conducted a month-long survey of 76 reefs sites from Martin County to Key West, both during and shortly after the unusually cold weather.
The research team compared the mortality rates of corals from the cold event to warm-water events, such as the highly publicized bleaching event in 2005, and concluded that the cold-water event cause even more widespread morality than previous warm-water events. The results were published in the August 2011 issue of the journal PLoS One.
The study found coral tissue mortality reached over 40-percent for several important reef-building species and that large colonies in shallow and near-shore reefs were hardest hit. This is in contrast to a less than one-percent tissue mortality caused by warm-water events since 2005. Coral species that had previously proven tolerant to higher-than-normal ocean temperatures were most affected by the cold-water event.
"This was undoubtedly the single worst event on record for Florida corals," said Lirman.
Ice-cold Arctic air swept into Florida in early January 2010, plummeting air temperatures to an all-time low of 30°F (1°C) and dropping ocean temperatures to a chilly 51°F (11°C).
"The 2010 cold-water anomaly not only caused widespread coral mortality but also reversed prior resistance and resilience patterns that will take decades to recover," the study's authors conclude.
Florida's reefs are located in a marginal environment at the northernmost limit for coral development. Corals have adapted to a specific temperature range and are typically not found in areas where water temperatures drop below 60°F (16°C).
Changes in climate patterns as well as others impacts, such as coastal development, pollution, overfishing and disease have put added stress on |
Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
So-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions, meanwhile, which have been slammed as "a parallel legal system for corporations," could make "regulations in sensitive public service sectors such as education, water, health, social welfare, and pensions prone to all kinds of investor attacks," CEO cautions.
And "[g]iving in to corporate demands for unfettered access to government procurement could restrict governments’ ability to support local and not-for-profit providers and foster the outsourcing of public sector jobs to private firms, where staff are often forced to do the same work with worse pay and working conditions," the group adds.
Opposition to the TTIP, which would create a trade and investment zone encompassing 800 million people and nearly half of global economic output, is growing. A protest against the pact drew an estimated 250,000 demonstrators to Berlin earlier this month, while a recent poll indicated nearly half of Germans oppose the deal, compared to 25 percent against it last year. Due to the intense secrecy surrounding negotiations, WikiLeaks in August offered a €100,000 ($113,230 USD) reward for the full text.
A separate report released Sunday by the UK-based social justice organization Global Justice Now showed that the controversial pact is already pushing European governments to loosen key food safety standards.
"What is at stake in trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA is our right to vital services, and more, it is about our ability to steer services of all kinds to the benefit of society at large," CEO declared this month. "If left to their own course, trade negotiations will eventually make it impossible to implement decisions for the common good."
According to Europe Online, the two sides are trying to strike a preliminary deal by the end of this year to avoid being impacted by the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But as Olof Erixon, director of trade policy at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, told Politico in September, "Getting a skeleton by this autumn is hopelessly unrealistic."
This week's talks in Miami are expected to last through Friday.Not to be confused with Lockheed P-38 Lightning
The English Electric Lightning is a fighter aircraft that served as an interceptor during the 1960s, the 1970s and the late 1980s. It remains the only UK-designed-and-built fighter capable of Mach 2. The Lightning was designed, developed, and manufactured by English Electric, which was subsequently absorbed by the newly-formed British Aircraft Corporation. Later the type was marketed as the BAC Lightning. It was operated by the Royal Air Force (RAF), the Kuwait Air Force (KAF) and the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF).
A unique feature of the Lightning's design is the vertical, staggered configuration of its two Rolls-Royce Avon turbojet engines within the fuselage. The Lightning was initially designed and developed as an interceptor to defend the V bomber airfields[2] from attack by anticipated future nuclear-armed supersonic Soviet bombers such as what emerged as the Tupolev Tu-22, but it was subsequently also required to intercept other bomber aircraft such as the Tupolev Tu-16 and the Tupolev Tu-95. The Lightning has exceptional rate of climb, ceiling, and speed; pilots have described flying it as "being saddled to a skyrocket".[1] This performance and the initially limited fuel supply[3] made the Lightning a "fuel-critical" aircraft, meaning that its missions are dictated to a high degree by its limited range. Later developments provided greater range and speed along with aerial reconnaissance and ground-attack capability.
Following retirement by the RAF in the late 1980s, many of the remaining aircraft became museum exhibits. Until 2009, three Lightnings were kept flying at "Thunder City" in Cape Town, South Africa. In September 2008, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers conferred on the Lightning its "Engineering Heritage Award" at a ceremony at BAE Systems' site at Warton Aerodrome.[4]
Development [ edit ]
Origins [ edit ]
The two P.1 research aircraft
The specification for the aircraft followed the cancellation of the Air Ministry's 1942 E.24/43 supersonic research aircraft specification which had resulted in the Miles M.52 programme.[5] W.E.W. "Teddy" Petter, formerly chief designer at Westland Aircraft, was a keen early proponent of Britain's need to develop a supersonic fighter aircraft. In 1947, Petter approached the Ministry of Supply (MoS) with his proposal, and in response Specification ER.103 was issued for a single research aircraft, which was to be capable of flight at Mach 1.5 (1,593 km/h) and 50,000 feet (15,000 m).[6]
Petter initiated a design proposal with F W "Freddie" Page leading the design and Ray Creasey responsible for the aerodynamics. By July 1948 their proposal incorporated the stacked engine configuration and a high-mounted tailplane but was designed for Mach 1.5. As a consequence it had a conventional 40° swept wing This proposal was submitted in the November and in January 1949 the project was designated P.1 by English Electric. On 29 March 1949 MoS granted approval for English Electric to start the detailed design, develop wind tunnel models and build a full-size mockup. The design that had developed during 1948 evolved further during 1949. To achieve Mach 2 the wing sweep was increased to 60° with the ailerons moved to the wingtips. In late 1949 low-speed wind tunnel tests showed that a vortex was generated by the wing which caused a large downwash on the tailplane; this issue was solved by lowering its height below the wing. Following the resignation of Petter, Page took over as design team leader for the P.1.[13]
In 1949, the Ministry of Supply had issued Specification F23/49, which expanded upon the scope of ER103 to include fighter-level manoeuvring. On 1 April 1950, English Electric received a contract for two flying airframes, as well as one static airframe, designated P.1.[13]
The Royal Aircraft Establishment was sceptical of Petter's swept wing concepts. To test the design of both the wing, the tailplane and to assess handling, Short Brothers were issued a contract to produce the Short SB5 in mid-1950.[nb 1][14] This was a low-speed research aircraft and was designed so that different wing sweep angles could be assumed by the single aircraft. An assortment of tailplanes and wings were supplied and could be installed in order for their flight performance to be evaluated. However, following the first flight of the SB.5 on 2 December 1952, the trials demonstrated the choice of a tailplane and a 60 degree wingsweep and proved the design principles to be effective.[15]
P1A
From 1953 onwards, the first three prototype aircraft were hand-built at Samlesbury. These aircraft had been assigned the aircraft serials WG760, WG763, and WG765 (the static airframe)[citation needed]. The prototypes were powered by un-reheated Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire turbojets, as the selected Rolls-Royce Avon engines which would power subsequent production aircraft had fallen behind schedule due to their own development problems.[16] Due to the limited internal space of the fuselage the fuel capacity was relatively small, giving the prototypes an extremely limited endurance, and the narrow tyres housed in the thin wings would rapidly wear out.[17] Outwardly, the prototypes looked very much like the production series, but they were distinguished by the rounded-triangular intakes, short fins and lack of operational equipment.[1] On 9 June 1952, it had been decided that there would be a second phase of prototypes built to develop the aircraft towards achieving Mach 2.0 (2,450 km/h); these were designated P.1B while the initial three prototypes were retroactively reclassified as P.1A.[18]
P.1B was a significant improvement on P.1A. While it was similar in aerodynamics, structure and control systems, it incorporated extensive alterations to the forward fuselage, reheated Rolls Royce Avon R24R engines, a conical centre body inlet cone, variable nozzle reheat and provision for weapons systems integrated with the ADC and AI.23 radar.[20] Three P1B prototypes were built, assigned serials XA847, XA853 and XA856[21]
In May 1954, WG760 and its support equipment were moved to RAF Boscombe Down for pre-flight ground taxi trials; on the morning of 4 August 1954, WG760, piloted by Roland Beamont, flew for the first time from Boscombe Down.[22] One week later, WG760 officially achieved supersonic flight for the first time, having exceeded the speed of sound during its third flight.[20] During its first flight, WG760 had unknowingly exceeded Mach 1 (1,225 km/h), but due to position error the Mach meter only showed a maximum of Mach 0.95 (1,164 km/h). The occurrence was noticed during flight data analysis a few days later.[23] While WG760 had proven the P.1 design to be viable, it was limited to Mach 1.51 (1,850 km/h) due to directional stability limits. In May 1956, the P.1 received the "Lightning" name, which was said to have been partially selected to reflect the aircraft's supersonic capabilities.[24]
On 4 April 1957 Beamont made the first flight of the P.1B (XA847) exceeding Mach 1 during this flight. On 25 November he reached Mach 2, the first time in a British aircraft.[1] During the early flight trials of the P.1B speeds in excess of 1,000 mph were achieved daily. During this period the Fairey FD2 delta held the world speed record (1,132 mph achieved on 10 March 1956 and held till December 1957). While the P.1B was potentially faster than the FD2, it lacked the fuel capacity to provide one run in each direction at maximum speed to claim the record in accordance with international rules.
In 1958 two test pilots from the USAF Air Force Flight Test Center, Andy Anderson and Deke Slayton, were given the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the P1B. Slayton, who was subsequently selected as one of the Mercury astronauts, commented:
The P.1 was a terrific plane, with the easy handling of the F-86 and the performance of an F-104. Its only drawback was that it had no range at all... Looking back, however, I'd have to say that the P.1 was my favourite all-time plane.[29]
Production [ edit ]
The first operational Lightning, designated Lightning F.1, was designed as an interceptor to defend the V Force airfields in conjunction with the V Force airfield's own "last ditch" Bristol Bloodhound missile defences from enemy nuclear-armed bomber attack long enough for the also nuclear-armed V Force bombers to take-off and get clear of their airfields which, along with the dispersal airfields, would be the highest priority targets in the UK for enemy nuclear weapons. To best perform this intercept mission, emphasis was placed on rate-of-climb, acceleration, and speed, rather than range – originally a radius of operation of 150 miles (240 km) from the V bomber airfields was specified – and combat endurance. It was equipped with two 30 mm ADEN cannon in front of the cockpit windscreen and an interchangeable fuselage weapons pack containing either an additional two ADEN cannon, 48 two-inch (51 mm) unguided air-to-air rockets, or two de Havilland Firestreak air-to-air missiles;[30] a heavy loadout optimised for damaging large aircraft. The Ferranti AI.23 onboard radar provided missile guidance and ranging, as well as search and track functions.[31]
The next two Lightning variants, the Lightning F.1A and F.2, were steady but relatively minor refinements of the design; the next variant, the Lightning F.3, was a major departure. The F.3 had higher thrust Rolls-Royce Avon 301R engines, a larger squared-off fin and strengthened inlet cone allowing a service clearance to Mach 2.0 (2,450 km/h) (the F.1, F.1A and F.2 were limited to Mach 1.7 (2,083 km/h)).[32] The A.I.23B radar and Red Top missile offered a forward hemisphere attack capability and deletion of the nose cannon. The new engines and fin made the F.3 the highest performance Lightning yet, but with an even higher fuel consumption and resulting shorter range. The next variant, the Lightning F.6, was already in development, but there was a need for an interim solution to partially address the F.3's shortcomings, the F.3A.
Lightning F.3 in flight, 1983
The F.3A introduced two improvements: a new, non-jettisonable, 610-imperial-gallon (2,800 L) ventral fuel tank,[33] and a new, kinked, conically cambered wing leading edge, incorporating a slightly larger leading edge fuel tank, raising the total usable internal fuel to 716 imperial gallons (3,260 L). The conically cambered wing improved manoeuvrability, especially at higher altitudes, and the ventral tank nearly doubled available fuel. The increased fuel was welcome, but the lack of cannon armament was felt to be a deficiency. It was thought that cannons were desirable to fire warning shots in the intercept mission.[34]
The Lightning F.6 was the ultimate Lightning version to see British service. Originally it was nearly identical to the F.3A with the exception that it could carry two 260-imperial-gallon (1,200 L) ferry tanks on pylons over the wings. These tanks were jettisonable in an emergency, and gave the F.6 a substantially improved deployment capability. There remained one glaring shortcoming: the lack of cannon. This was finally rectified in the form of a modified ventral tank with two ADEN cannons mounted in the front. The addition of the cannons and their ammunition decreased the tank's fuel capacity from 610 to 535 imperial gallons (2,770 to 2,430 L), but the cannon made the F.6 a "real fighter" again.[33]
The final British Lightning was the Lightning F.2A. This was an F.2 upgraded with the cambered wing, the squared fin, and the 610 imperial gallons (2,800 L) ventral tank. The F.2A retained the A.I.23 and Firestreak missile, the nose cannon, and the earlier Avon 211R engines.[35] Although the F.2A lacked the thrust of the later Lightnings, it had the longest tactical range of all Lightning variants, and was used for low-altitude interception over West Germany.
Export and further developments [ edit ]
The Lightning F.53, otherwise known as the Export Lightning, developed as a private venture by BAC. While the Lightning had originated as an interception aircraft, this version was to have a multirole capability for quickly interchanging between interception, reconnaissance, and ground-attack duties.[36] The F.53 was based on the F.6 airframe and avionics, including the large ventral fuel tank, cambered wing and overwing pylons for drop tanks of the F.6, but incorporated an additional pair of hardpoints under the outer wing. These hardpoints could be fitted with pylons for air-to-ground weaponry, including two 1,000 lb (450 kg) bombs or four SNEB rocket pods each carrying 18 68 mm rockets. A gun pack carrying two ADEN cannons and 120 rounds each could replace the forward part of the ventral fuel tank.[37][nb 2] Alternative, interchangeable packs in the forward fuselage carried two Firestreak missiles, two Red Top missiles, twin retractable launchers for 44× 2-inch (50 mm) rockets, or a reconnaissance pod fitted with five 70 mm Type 360 Vinten cameras.[39]
BAC also proposed clearing the overwing hardpoints for carriage of weapons as well as drop tanks, with additional Matra JL-100 combined rocket and fuel pods (each containing 18 SNEB 68 mm (2.7 in) rockets and 50 imperial gallons (227 L) of fuel) or 1,000 pounds (450 kg) bombs being possible options. This could give a maximum ground attack weapons load for a developed export Lightning of six 1,000 pounds (450 kg) bombs or 44 × 2 in (51 mm) rockets and 144 × 68 mm rockets.[40][41] The Lightning T.55 was the export two-seat variant; unlike the RAF two-seaters, the T.55 was equipped for combat duties. The T.55 had a very similar fuselage to the T.5, while also using the wing and large ventral tank of the F.6.[42] The Export Lightning had all of the capability of the RAF's own Lightnings such as exceptional climb rate and agile manoeuvering. The Export Lightning also retained the difficulty of maintenance, and serviceability rates suffered. The F.53 was generally well regarded by its pilots, and its adaptation to multiple roles showed the skill of its designers.[43]
In 1963, BAC Warton was working on the preliminary design of a two-seat Lightning development with a variable-geometry wing, based on the Lightning T.5. In addition to the variable-sweep wing, which was to sweepback between 25 degrees and 60 degrees, the proposed design featured an extended ventral pack for greater fuel capacity, an enlarged dorsal fin fairing, an arrestor hook, and a revised inward-retracting undercarriage. The aircraft was designed to be compatible with the Royal Navy's existing aircraft carriers carrier-based aircraft, the VG Lightning concept was revised into a land-based interceptor intended for the RAF the following year.[44] Various alternative engines to the Avon were suggested, such as the newer Rolls-Royce Spey engine. It is likely that the VG Lightning would have adopted a solid nose (by moving the air inlet to the sides or to upper fuselage) to install a larger, more capable radar.[45]
Design [ edit ]
Overview [ edit ]
The Lightning had several distinctive design features, the primary being the twin engine arrangement, notched delta wing, and low-mounted tailplane. The vertically stacked and longitudinally staggered engines were the solution devised by Petter to meet the conflicting requirements of minimizing frontal area, providing undisturbed engine airflow across a wide speed range, and packaging two engines to provide sufficient thrust to meet performance goals. The unusual over/under configuration allowed for the thrust of two engines, with the drag equivalent to only 1.5 engines mounted side-by-side, a reduction in drag of 25% over more conventional twin engine installations.[46] The engines were fed by a single nose inlet (with inlet cone), with the flow split vertically aft of the cockpit, and the nozzles tightly stacked, effectively tucking one engine behind the cockpit. The result was a low frontal area, an efficient inlet, and excellent single-engine handling with no problems of asymmetrical thrust. Because the engines were close together, an uncontained failure of one engine was likely to damage the other. If desired, an engine could be shut down in flight and the remaining engine run at a more efficient power setting which increased range or endurance;[47][48] although this was rarely done operationally because there would be no hydraulic power if the remaining engine failed.[49]
Lightning F.6 XS904 after a high-speed taxi run at 2012 Cold War Jets Day, Bruntingthorpe
Production aircraft were powered by various models of the Rolls-Royce Avon engine. This power-plant was initially rated as capable of generating 11,250 lbf (50.0 kN) of dry thrust, but when employing the four-stage afterburner this increased to a maximum thrust of 14,430 lbf (64.2 kN). Later models of the Avon would feature, in addition to increased thrust, a full-variable reheat arrangement.[50] A special heat-reflecting paint containing gold was used to protect the aircraft's structure from the hot engine casing which could reach temperatures of 600 °C. Under optimum conditions, a well-equipped maintenance facility would take four hours to perform an engine change so specialised ground test rigs were developed to speed up maintenance and remove the need to perform a full ground run of the engine after some maintenance tasks.[51] The stacked engine configuration complicated maintenance work, and the leakage of fluid from the upper engine was a recurring fire hazard.[52] The fire risk was reduced, but not eliminated, following remedial work during development.[53] For removal the lower No.1 engine was removed from below the aircraft, after removal of the ventral tank and lower fuselage access panels, by lowering the engine down, while the upper No.2 engine was lifted out from above via removable sections in the fuselage top.
The fuselage was tightly packed, leaving no room for fuel tankage or main landing gear. While the notched delta wing lacked the volume of a standard delta wing, each wing contained a fairly conventional three-section main fuel tank and leading-edge tank, holding 312 imp gal (1,420 L);[nb 3] the wing flaps also each contained a 33 imp gal (150 L) fuel tank and an additional 5 imp gal (23 L) was contained in a fuel recuperator, bringing the aircraft's total internal fuel capacity to 700 imp gal (3,200 L). The main landing gear was sandwiched outboard of the main tanks and aft of the leading edge tanks, with the flap fuel tanks behind.[31] The long main gear legs retracted towards the wingtip, necessitating an exceptionally thin main tyre inflated to the high pressure of 330–350 psi (23–24 bar; 2,300–2,400 kPa).[54] On landing the No. 1 engine was usually shut down when taxiing to save brake wear, as keeping both engines running at idle power was still sufficient to propel the Lightning to 80 mph if brakes were not used.[55] Dunlop Maxaret anti-skid brakes were fitted.
The Lightning featured a conformal ventral store to house either a fuel tank or a rocket engine. The rocket engine, a Napier Double Scorpion motor, also contained a reserve of 200 imp gal (910 L) of high-test peroxide (HTP) to drive the rocket's turbopump and act as an oxidizer; fuel would have been drawn from the aircraft internal tankage. The rocket engine was intended at an early stage in the Lightning's development to boost performance should non-afterburning (reheated) engines be fitted. The subsequent basic performance with reheated Avons was deemed sufficient, and the rocket engine option was cancelled in 1958.[56] The ventral store was routinely used as an extra fuel tank, holding 247 imp gal (1,120 L) of usable fuel.[31] On later variants of the Lightning, a ventral weapons pack could be installed to equip the aircraft alternatively with different armaments, including missiles, rockets, and cannons.[57]
Avionics and systems [ edit ]
Underside of a Lightning F.3 with undercarriage deployed, 23 June 1979
Early versions of the Lightning were equipped with the Ferranti-developed AI.23 monopulse radar, which was contained right at the front of the fuselage within an inlet cone at the centre of the engine intake. Radar information was displayed on an early head-up display and managed by onboard computers.[58] The AI.23, an immediate predecessor of the AI.24 Foxhunter, supported several operational modes, which included autonomous search, automatic target tracking, and ranging for all weapons; the pilot attack sight provided gyroscopically-derived lead angle and backup stadiametric ranging for gun firing.[31] The radar and gunsight were collectively designated the AIRPASS: Airborne Interception Radar and Pilot Attack Sight System. The radar would be successively upgraded with the introduction of more capable Lightning variants, such as to provide guidance for the Red Top missile.[59]
The cockpit of the Lightning was designed to meet the RAF's OR946 specification for tactical air navigation technology, and thus featured an integrated flight instrument display arrangement, an Elliott Bros (London) Ltd[60] auto-pilot, a master reference gyroscopic reader, an auto-attack system, and an instrument landing system.[61] Despite initial scepticism of the aircraft's centralised detection and warning system, the system proved its merits during the development program and was subsequently redeveloped for greater reliability.[62] Communications included UHF and VHF radios and a datalink.[63] Unlike the previous generation of aircraft which used gaseous oxygen for lifesupport, the Lightning would employ liquid oxygen-based apparatus for the pilot; cockpit pressurisation and conditioning would be maintained through tappings from the engine compressors.[64]
Electricity was provided via a bleed air-driven turbine housed in the rear fuselage, which drove an AC alternator and DC generator. This approach was unusual, since most aircraft used driveshaft-driven generators/alternators for electrical energy. A 28V DC battery provided emergency backup power. Aviation author Kev Darling stated of the Lightning: "Never before had a fighter been so dependent upon electronics".[65] Each engine was equipped with a pair of hydraulic pumps, one of which powered the flight-control systems and the other power for the undercarriage, flaps, and airbrakes. Switchable hydraulic circuits were used for redundancy in the event of a leak or other failure. A combination of Dunlop Maxaret[49] anti-skid brakes on the main wheels and an Irvin Air Chute[66] braking parachute slowed the aircraft during landing. A tailhook was also fitted.[67] Accumulators on the wheel brakes performed as backups to the hydraulics, providing minimal braking.[68] Above a certain airspeed a stopped engine would 'windmill', that is, continue to be rotated by air flowing through it in a similar manner to a ram air turbine, sufficient to generate adequate hydraulic power for the powered controls during flight.[60]
56 Sqn Lightning receives Firestreaks at Akrotiri, 1963.
Towards the end of its service, the Lightning was increasingly outclassed by newer fighters, mainly due to avionics and armament obsolescence. The radar had a limited range and no track while scanning capability, and it could detect targets only in a narrow (40°) arc. While an automatic collision course attack system was developed and successfully demonstrated by English Electric, it was not adopted due to cost concerns.[69][70] Plans were mooted to supplement or replace the obsolete Red Top and Firestreak missiles with modern AIM-9L Sidewinder missiles to help rectify some of the obsolescence, but these ambitions were not realised due to lack of funding.[69][71] An alternative to the modernization of existing aircraft would have been the development of more advanced variants; a proposed Variable-sweep wing Lightning would have likely involved the adoption of a new powerplant and radar and was believed by BAC to significantly increase performance, but ultimately was not pursued.[45]
Climb Performance [ edit ]
"Lightning, was designed...as an intercepter fighter. As such, it has probably the fastest rate-of-climb of any combat aircraft" – Flight International, 21 March 1968[72]
The Lightning possessed a remarkable climb rate. It was famous for its ability to rapidly rotate from takeoff to climb almost vertically from the runway, though this did not yield the best time-to-altitude. The Lightning's trademark tail-stand manoeuvre exchanged airspeed for altitude; it could slow to near-stall speeds before commencing level flight. The Lightning's optimum climb profile required the use of afterburners during takeoff. Immediately after takeoff, the nose would be lowered for rapid acceleration to 430 knots (800 km/h) IAS before initiating a climb, stabilising at 450 knots (830 km/h). This would yield a constant climb rate of approximately 20,000 ft/min (100 m/s).[54][nb 4] Around 13,000 ft (4,000 m) the Lightning would reach Mach 0.87 (1,009 km/h) and maintain this speed until reaching the tropopause, 36,000 ft (11,000 m) on a standard day.[nb 5] If climbing further, pilots would accelerate to supersonic speed at the tropopause before resuming the climb.[33][54] A Lightning flying at optimum climb profile would reach 36,000 ft (11,000 m) in under three minutes.[54]
Lightning in flight at the Ysterplaat Airshow, Cape Town, September 2006
The official ceiling of the Lightning was kept secret. Low security RAF documents often stated in excess of 60,000 ft (18,000 m). In September 1962, Fighter Command organised interception trials on Lockheed U-2As at heights of around 60,000–65,000 ft (18,000–20,000 m), which were temporarily based at RAF Upper Heyford to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.[73][74][75] Climb techniques and flight profiles were developed to put the Lightning into a suitable attack position. To avoid risking the U-2, the Lightning was not permitted any closer than 5,000 ft (1,500 m) and could not fly in front of the U-2. For the intercepts, four Lightning F1As conducted 18 solo sorties. The sorties proved that, under GCI, successful intercepts could be made at up to 65,000 ft (20,000 m). Due to sensitivity, details of these flights were deliberately avoided in the pilot log books.[76]
In 1984, during a NATO exercise, Flt Lt Mike Hale intercepted a U-2 at a height which they had previously considered safe (thought to be 66,000 feet (20,000 m)). Records show that Hale also climbed to 88,000 ft (27,000 m) in his Lightning F.3 XR749. This was not sustained level flight but a ballistic climb, in which the pilot takes the aircraft to top speed and then puts the aircraft into a climb, exchanging speed for altitude. Hale also participated in time-to-height and acceleration trials against Lockheed F-104 Starfighters from Aalborg. He reports that the Lightnings won all races easily with the exception of the low-level supersonic acceleration, which was a "dead heat".[77] Lightning pilot and Chief Examiner Brian Carroll reported taking a Lightning F.53 up to 87,300 feet (26,600 m) over Saudi Arabia at which level "Earth curvature was visible and the sky was quite dark", noting that control-wise "[it was] on a knife edge".[78]
Brian Carroll compared the Lightning and the F-15C Eagle, having flown both aircraft, stating that: "Acceleration in both was impressive, you have all seen the Lightning leap away once brakes are released, the Eagle was almost as good, and climb speed was rapidly achieved. Takeoff roll is between 2,000 and 3,000 ft [610 and 910 m], depending upon military or maximum afterburner-powered takeoff. The Lightning was quicker off the ground, reaching 50 ft [15 m] height in a horizontal distance of 1,630 ft [500 m]". Chief test pilot for the Lightning Roland Beamont, who also flew most of the "Century Series" US aircraft, stated his opinion that nothing at that time had the inherent stability, control and docile handling characteristics of the Lightning throughout the full flight envelope. The turn performance and buffet boundaries of the Lightning were well in advance of anything known to him.[79]
Aircraft Performance [ edit ]
Early Lightning models, the F.1, F.1A, and F.2, had a rated top speed of Mach 1.7 (1,815 km/h) at 36,000 feet (11,000 m) in an ICAO standard atmosphere, and 650 knots (1,200 km/h) IAS at lower altitudes.[31][80] Later models, the F.2A, F.3, F.3A, F.6, and F.53, had a rated top speed of Mach 2.0 (2,136 km/h) at 36,000 feet (11,000 m), and speeds up to 700 knots (1,300 km/h) indicated air speed for "operational necessity only".[32][33][35][81] A Lightning fitted with Avon 200-series engines, a ventral tank and two Firestreak missiles typically ran out of excess thrust at Mach 1.9 (2,328 km/h) on a Standard Day;[82] while a Lightning powered by the Avon 300-series engines, a ventral tank and two Red Top missiles ran out of excess thrust at Mach 2.0.[54] Directional stability decreased as speed increased, there were potentially hazardous consequences in the form of vertical fin failure if yaw was not correctly counteracted by rudder use.[nb 6] Imposed Mach limits during missile launches protected stability;[nb 7] later Lightning variants had a larger vertical fin, giving a greater stability margin at high speed.[84]
Supersonic speeds also threatened inlet stability. The inlet's central shock cone served as a compression surface, diverting air into the annular inlet. As the Lightning accelerated through Mach 1, the shock cone generated an oblique shock positioned forward of the intake lip. Known as a subcritical inlet condition, this was stable, but produced inefficient spillage drag. Around the Design Mach speed, the oblique shock was positioned just forward of the inlet lip and efficiently compressed the air without spillage. When travelling beyond the Design Mach, the oblique shock would become supercritical, and supersonic airflow would enter the inlet duct, which could only handle subsonic air. In this condition, the engine generated drastically less thrust and may result in surges or compressor stalls, these could cause flameouts or damage.
Thermal and structural limits were also present. Air is heated considerably when compressed by the passage of an aircraft at supersonic speeds. The airframe absorbs heat from the surrounding air, the inlet shock cone at the front of the aircraft becoming the hottest part. The shock cone was composed of fibreglass, necessary because the shock cone also served as a radar radome; a metal shock cone would interfere with the AI 23's radar emissions. The shock cone would be eventually weakened due to the fatigue caused by the thermal cycles involved in regularly performing high-speed flights. At 36,000 feet (11,000 m) and Mach 1.7 (1,815 km/h), the heating conditions on the shock cone would be similar to those at sea level and 650 knots (1,200 km/h) indicated airspeed,[nb 8] but if the speed was increased to Mach 2.0 (2,136 km/h) at 36,000 feet (11,000 m), the shock cone would be exposed to higher temperatures[nb 9] than those at Mach 1.7. The shock cone was strengthened on the later Lightning F.2A, F.3, F.6, and F.53 models, thus allowing routine operations at up to Mach 2.0.[85]
The small-fin variants could exceed Mach 1.7,[nb 10] but the stability limits and shock cone thermal/strength limits made such speeds risky. The large-fin variants, especially those equipped with Avon 300-series engines could safely reach Mach 2, and given the right atmospheric conditions, might even achieve a few more tenths of a Mach. All Lightning variants had the excess thrust to slightly exceed 700 knots (1,300 km/h) indicated airspeed under certain conditions,[54][82][87] and the service limit of 650 knots (1,200 km/h) was occasionally ignored. With the strengthened shock cone, the Lightning could safely approach its thrust limit, but fuel consumption at very high airspeeds was excessive and became a major limiting factor.[nb 11]
Handling characteristics [ edit ]
The Lightning was fully aerobatic and was capable of rates of roll far in excess of that which could be normally tolerated by a pilot.[88]
Operational history [ edit ]
Royal Air Force [ edit ]
A Royal Air Force Lightning F.1A at Yeovilton, 8 September 1973
The first aircraft to enter service with the RAF, three pre-production P.1Bs, arrived at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk on 23 December 1959, joining the Air Fighting Development Squadron (AFDS) of the Central Fighter Establishment, where they were used to clear the Lightning for entry into service.[89][90] The production Lightning F.1 entered service with the AFDS in May 1960, allowing the unit to take part in the air defence exercise "Yeoman" later that month. The Lightning F.1 entered frontline squadron service with 74 Squadron under the command of Squadron Leader John "Johnny" Howe at Coltishall from 11 July 1960.[91] The aircraft's radar and missiles proved to be effective and pilots reported that the Lightning was easy to fly. However, in the first few months of operation the aircraft's serviceability was extremely poor. This was due to the complexity of the aircraft systems and shortages of spares and ground support equipment. Even when the Lightning was not grounded by technical faults, the RAF initially struggled to get more than 20 flying hours per aircraft per month compared with the 40 flying hours that English Electric believed could be achieved with proper support.[89][92] In spite of these concerns, within six months of the Lightning entering service, 74 Squadron was able to achieve 100 flying hours per aircraft.[93]
In addition to its training and operational roles, 74 Squadron was appointed as the official Fighter Command aerobatic team for 1961, flying at air shows throughout the United Kingdom and Europe.[94] Deliveries of the slightly improved Lightning F.1A, with improved avionics and provision for an air-to-air refuelling probe, allowed two more squadrons, 56 and 111 Squadron, both based at RAF Wattisham to convert to the Lightning in 1960–1961.[89] The Lightning F.1 would only be ordered in limited numbers and serve for a short time; nonetheless, it was viewed as a significant step forwards in Britain's air defence capabilities. Following their replacement from frontline duties by the introduction of successively improved variants of the Lightning, the remaining F.1 aircraft were employed by the Lightning Conversion Squadron.[95]
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autonomy – that is key to the vitality of the country's economy. This emphasis on individualism and free enterprise is also what makes the Swedish model so attractive to conservatives like Reinfeldt – it even makes the large role afforded to the state palatable, especially as the rhetorical focus shifts from the social welfare state to the individual investment society.
Of course, what works for the Swedish centre right might not sit as well with British Conservatives. Cameron surely agrees on the goal of combining social security with free enterprise. But when it comes to embracing Swedish-style statist individualism at the expense of family values and communitarian "big society" ideals – there might be a limit.
Indeed, when I debated with Phillip Blond last year, pitting the Swedish model against his big society idea, I suggested that what makes Sweden work would be his worst nightmare. A large state and rampant individualism are antithetical to his civil society idealism. But it's also the case that, while we know that Sweden actually works, the big society remains a distant dream.
• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfreeTonnes of perfectly good food are thrown away in the UK every year. Why, asks Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
I've witnessed some pretty grim scenes in the food business down the years - appalling conditions in the poultry industry, crazy EU fishing laws, all kinds of greed and folly.
Root vegetables may be a touch harder to feel for than chickens or fish. But watching 20 tonnes of freshly dug parsnips consigned to the rubbish heap in a Norfolk farmyard - purely because they didn't look pretty enough - is still one of the most shocking things I've ever seen.
That's not just a few sackfuls of parsnips, it's not a skip-load. It's a colossal mountain of them - enough to fill nearly 300 shopping trolleys. And, more importantly perhaps, to feed 100,000 people with a generous portion of roast parsnips.
That was just one week's wastage. So multiply by the 40 or so weeks of parsnip season (September-May) to get the full annual figure - four million parsnip portions that could, but won't, get eaten.
Image caption The Hammonds expect to make a loss
As a chef, I can tell you there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. In fact, they were beautiful. I would have been delighted to cook with them. They may not have been perfectly straight, or utterly without blemish, or conformed to a robot's laser vision of a perfect parsnip. But they were all just great to me.
Yet the supermarket client found them wanting. They "failed" the "cosmetic standards". They weren't wonky, or forked, or bruised or even "ugly". They just departed, sometimes by a matter of millimetres, from some bizarre set of specifications that defines, with apparent omniscience, what it is that we, the customers, demand our parsnips to be. Not that anyone's asked us.
Depending on the growing conditions, this wastage is between 30 and 40% of Tattersett Farm's crop of prime roots. No surprise then, that this is not just an appalling waste of food. It's an economic disaster for the producers. The Hammond family, who have been growing parsnips since the 1970s, have witnessed an "arms race" of cosmetic standards between the supermarkets in recent years, as they fall over themselves to have the prettiest produce on display.
Meanwhile they expect to make a loss this year. No wonder that, the Hammonds were talking - through barely suppressed tears - about jacking it all in.
Find out more
Image copyright Alice Henley
You can watch Hugh's War on Waste on BBC One, on Monday 2 November at 21:00, or catch up afterwards on iPlayer.
But this is not exceptional. This kind of near-criminal waste of good fresh produce is, unfortunately, very much the norm. Approximately one-third of the food we produce in the UK is never eaten. Take a minute to think about that - millions of tonnes of good food, and all the resources that go into producing it, squandered. Bonkers, isn't it?
Such profligacy is not just immoral, it's unnecessary. When I took some of the Hammonds' "reject" parsnips and offered them to High Street shoppers, they were only too happy to take them. People couldn't believe all this great food was being dumped. Supermarkets may claim that consumers will only accept ramrod-straight carrots and flawless apples. But I simply don't buy it.
And neither does waste campaigner Tristram Stuart, whose organisation Feedback has been challenging the supermarkets' cosmetic standards, and decrying the waste they cause. "We have proof that people are only too happy to buy this stuff," he says.
Image copyright ALAMY Image caption An enormous quantity of vegetables are rejected by supermarkets on cosmetic grounds
"Because, when it suits them, the supermarkets start selling it. In years of poor harvest, the cosmetic standards are relaxed, and the farmers are asked to bag up the ever-so-slightly bendy or blemished produce that would normally be rejected. Of course nobody even notices."
It feels like a bad joke at our expense. The horrendous waste caused by retailers has to stop. And people should ask their supermarkets to make that happen.
However, we can't ask the big guns to rein it in unless we're prepared to do our bit too. And we have to face the fact that almost 50% of food wastage in the UK is domestic - the stuff we buy but don't eat. And surely we have the same responsibility as big companies not to discard perfectly edible food.
I don't believe we're deliberately wasteful. Seeing vast quantities of food needlessly destroyed would make most of us extremely uncomfortable. The problem is that we don't see it. The average UK household wastes £700 worth of food every year. But of course, it's not all at once - it's a few slices of bread here, a bag of salad there, a couple of brown bananas every week.
How much do we waste?
Image copyright ALAMY
Almost 50% of wasted food in the UK comes from the home
Households throw out seven million tonnes of food and drink each year, including 680,000 tonnes of bakery, at a cost of £1.1bn
Domestic food waste costs the average household £470 a year, up to £700 for a family with children - a total of £12.5bn a year
Source: BBC and Love Food Hate Waste
More from the BBC: How to make a meal out of "waste" food
It's partly down to busy lifestyles. Our big weekly shop, piled high with bogofs and multi-packs, almost "factors in" the inevitability of waste. And we've become slaves to the "use-by" date, happy to let the supermarkets' robot package printers tell us when to throw food away.
Any sign of the natural progression of food - a blemish on our fruit, a dried-out corner of cheddar, a floppy leaf - is taken as confirmation that it's time to bin it. And of course the retailers won't mind at all if we throw something out and have to go and buy a replacement.
But do we really think a little brown spot on a grape is going to kill us? That a yoghurt that was perfectly good for our supper will have transmogrified at the stroke of midnight into a breakfast biohazard? When did we stop trusting our own instincts? Our eyes, noses, finger tips, and above all our common sense, are still the best tools to tell us whether something is good to eat or not.
It's time to deploy large amounts of that common sense to wrestle back some control over the food chain. To shop a bit smarter, and cook a bit savvier. To waste less food, by being thrifty with our leftovers, and using pots, pans and plates - not the bin - as the clearing system for our fridges.
Then we can turn to our supermarkets and say, with newfound confidence: "Look, we recognise that the food you sell us is a precious resource, and the product of many other precious resources. We expect you to do the same. So stop throwing so much of it away."
And then we may choose to give our custom not to the supermarket with the straightest parsnips on display, but the straightest policy on not wasting food.
The Magazine on supermarkets
Image copyright Thinkstock
The ghost Tesco stores (February 2015)
The Waitrose snobbery/property price index (October 2013)
How the first out-of-town supermarket changed the UK (September 2013)
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.(Jerusalem) – Businesses should stop operating in, financing, servicing, or trading with Israeli settlements in order to comply with their human rights responsibilities, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Those activities contribute to and benefit from an inherently unlawful and abusive system that violates the rights of Palestinians. Occupation, Inc. How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights Download the full report in English
Download the full report in English Download the full report in Hebrew
Download the full report in Hebrew Download the full report in Arabic
The 162-page report, “Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights,” documents how settlement businesses facilitate the growth and operations of settlements. These businesses depend on and contribute to the Israeli authorities’ unlawful confiscation of Palestinian land and other resources. They also benefit from these violations, as well as Israel’s discriminatory policies that provide privileges to settlements at the expense of Palestinians, such as access to land and water, government subsidies, and permits for developing land.
Expand Barkan, located in the occupied West Bank, is an Israeli residential settlement and industrial zone that houses around 120 factories that export around 80 percent of their goods abroad. In the background is the Palestinian village of Qarawat Bani Hassan. © 2004 David Silverman
“Settlement businesses unavoidably contribute to Israeli policies that dispossess and harshly discriminate against Palestinians, while profiting from Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and other resources,” said Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights division. “The only way for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities is to stop working with and in Israeli settlements.”
More than a half million Israeli settlers live in 237 settlements throughout the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including in East Jerusalem. Successive Israeli governments have facilitated this process, but businesses also play a critical role in establishing and expanding settlements, and enabling them to function.
Settlement, Inc. Businesses should stop operating in, financing, servicing, or trading with Israeli settlements in order to comply with their human rights responsibilities.
Under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, companies should respect human rights and identify and mitigate any adverse human rights impact their operations may cause. But because of the nature of settlements, which are inherently illegal under the Geneva Conventions, companies cannot mitigate their contribution to Israel’s violations so long as they operate in settlements or engage in settlement-related commercial activity, Human Rights Watch said. “Settlement businesses unavoidably contribute to Israeli policies that dispossess and harshly discriminate against Palestinians, while profiting from Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and other resources. The only way for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities is to stop working with and in Israeli settlements.
Businesses engage in a variety of activities that support settlements. Some settlement businesses are directly engaged in managing the practical demands of settlements. Human Rights Watch investigated Israeli bank financing of settlement construction; a global real estate franchise that has a branch in settlements and whose Israeli franchisees market settlement properties; and a waste management company that collects and processes settler garbage in a landfill in the Jordan Valley that exclusively services settlements and Israel.
Other businesses are located in settlements or settlement industrial zones, often drawn by cheap Palestinian labor, low rents, or favorable tax rates. Human Rights Watch investigated a textile manufacturer in a settlement industrial zone that supplies linens to a major American retailer. It relocated to Israel in October 2015. About 20 settlement industrial zones house about 1,000 factories, and Israeli settlers oversee the cultivation of around 9,300 hectares of Palestinian land. Settlement manufacturers and agricultural producers export much of these goods, often wrongly labeling them as made in Israel.
Both types of settlement businesses facilitate Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into the territory it occupies, and the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court, states that such a transfer, directly or indirectly, is a war crime.
Human Rights Watch takes no position on a consumer boycott of settlement companies or on the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Rather, Human Rights Watch is calling for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities.
Other countries should ensure that any import of settlement goods into their territory is consistent with their duty under international humanitarian law not to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories, Human Rights Watch said. This includes prohibiting such goods from being labeled as made in Israel, excluding them from preferential tariff treatment for Israeli products, and refraining from recognizing any certification – such as organic – of settlement goods by Israeli government authorities.
Settlement businesses also operate on and contribute to the Israeli military’s confiscation of large amounts of land in the West Bank, which it transfers to settlements. That violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on an occupying power using the resources of the territory it occupies for its own benefit. Some of the land is privately owned by Palestinians, violating an additional international humanitarian law prohibition, and the Israeli military severely restricts many more Palestinian landowners from accessing their farmland in the vicinity of settlements.
“Businesses should account for the reality that using Palestinian land, water, minerals, and resources in their settlement operations is unlawful and comes at a great cost to Palestinians,” Ganesan said. “But the tide is turning as more and more businesses are waking up to the reality that it is wrong for them to profit from inherently illegal settlements.”
The Israeli military’s unlawful transfer of Palestinian land to settlements and settlement-related restrictions are aspects of a broader system of discrimination that benefits settlement businesses while devastating the Palestinian economy, Human Rights Watch has found. Human Rights Watch documented the vastly discriminatory settlement system, and the ways in which it gravely harms Palestinians and forcibly displaces them from their land in a 2010 report, “Separate and Unequal.”
Israel all but bars Palestinians from building or extracting natural resources in Area C, the part of the West Bank under its administrative control. Between 2000 and 2012, the Israeli military administration rejected 94 percent of Palestinian construction permit requests, and in 2014, it issued only one such permit. Human Rights Watch investigated one of 11 Israeli-administrated quarries in this area, owned by a European conglomerate. Israel has not approved a new quarry license for a Palestinian company there since 1994, according to the Palestinian Union of Stone and Marble, an independent organization representing more than 500 Palestinian companies.
“Every dollar of stone that settlement businesses extract and sell from the West Bank is a dollar taken from Palestinians,” Ganesan said. “The bottom line is no settlement business should be operating and profiting from land and resources illegally taken from the Palestinian people.”
The World Bank estimated in 2013 that Israeli restrictions in Area C cost the Palestinian economy $3.4 billion annually, approximately equal to 33 percent of Palestine’s GDP. Settlement businesses contribute to and benefit from unlawful and discriminatory policies that leave many Palestinians with no alternative but to work in Israel or settlements.
This system affords Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements few labor protections. Israeli government officials have said they conduct virtually no oversight over labor conditions for Palestinian workers in settlements due to these workers’ ambiguous legal status under Israeli law. This leaves Palestinian workers vulnerable to abuse. In 2007, Israel’s Supreme Court held that the two-track legal system in the West Bank, which applies Israeli civil law to settlers but military law to Palestinians, discriminates against Palestinian workers, but the government has yet to implement the decision. Military law provides some labor protections, such as minimum wage, but since 2006, the Israeli civilian government has been responsible for enforcement.
“Settlement businesses help entrench discriminatory Israeli policies that favor settlers over Palestinians in Area C, even though the settlers should not be there in the first place,” Ganesan said. “Businesses that claim they are helping Palestinians by offering trapped Palestinians minimum-wage jobs with few labor rights protections add insult to injury.”
Human Rights Watch also has issued a question-and-answer document about its research.Named after a South American cactus known for its hallucinogenic properties, “Achuma” is part old Harley and part motocrosser, a Shovelhead-powered streetfighter that’s got a style all its own. There’s even a built-in skidplate for inner-city curb jumping! “Yeah, I don’t look too hard at what everybody else is doing,” builder Satya Kraus says about his styling influences.
The 35-year-old was born and still lives in the shadows of Northern California’s mighty redwoods. A fairly ordinary early career path led to a computer company gig, but working with his hands, making things he could actually hold and feel called out, and in 2004 Satya chucked it all to build choppers. Ink, awards and bike commissions soon followed, but a rigid frame’s limitations bothered him.
Kraus grew up riding dirtbikes and appreciated the spine-friendly benefits of a working rear suspension. “I wanted something with a racier look and feel, a real ‘roadable’ machine,” he says.
A collection of old engineering books substituted for formal training, helped by curiosity, trial-and-error, learning from elders and a good dose of common sense. “As far as fabrication and welding and machining and all that stuff, that’s all self-taught. I never went to school for it,” he says.
Chief in Kraus’ build philosophy is light weight. “I think people tend to overbuild things, to use a lot of metal because they don’t know how much or how little it really takes,” he explains. “They’re adding needless weight, and then suspension, speed and quickness suffer.”
Paint doesn’t tip the scales very heavily, but you won’t find a drop of it on Achuma. It is a full-metal motorcycle. “Me and paint don’t mix,” Kraus states. “I never learned to paint; besides, it’s the first thing that goes. Paint never looks good once it gets hammered on, so I’ve developed a style that doesn’t have that issue.”
Not even the frame is painted. Rather it’s been plasma-arc sprayed with a thin coat of real bronze, a nice complement to bike’s shinier componentry. “There’s just something to bronze,” says Kraus. “When you actually get close up, get your hands on it, touch it and feel the difference between paint and a real-metal finish, that’s what really gets you…when you see the perfect imperfection of it.”
The forks are Kraus’ take on a traditional springer, brought up to date with a cleaned-up design and a Foes Racing air shock. The latter was originally intended for downhill bicycle racing where heavy-duty mountain bikes plummet down trails at up to 60 mph, getting huge air in the process. Here, it’s more than up to the task and is set up to yield 3 inches of travel. The twin-shock swingarm, braced and running a pair of Foes dampers, gives about 5.8 inches.
To power this machine, Satya went with an S&S Shovelhead 93-inch high-compression motor. At about 90 hp, he feels it provides plenty of power for the weight and also gives a nice look, especially after the three-man crew at Kraus Motor Co. takes it apart, shapes some of the fins, smoothes down casting lines, and polishes the cases and covers.
Safe to say the bike’s owner, a 30-something member of England’s banking community who prefers to remain anonymous, is happy with his purchase.
Kraus reports there’s a touch of hooligan beneath the man’s tailored three-piece suits, an inner brat brought out when Achuma blasts along the proper avenues of London’s financial district. He’s even planning on taking it out to trackdays. Says Satya, “He’s using this bike the way it was intended and this to me is the best honor.”
Photography by Mike Chase. For more on Satya Kraus’ work, head over to the Kraus Motor Co. website.On Thursday morning pedestrians strolling on East Houston Street in New York City were treated to the sight of American Apparel window mannequins in sheer lingerie sporting a full bush of pubic hair. Is this art? Is it fashion? None of the above. It's a marketing tactic by American Apparel to bring in the Valentine’s Day shopper.
The Observer reports that the display was meant to re-imagine the meaning of the holiday. American Apparel District Visual Manager Dee Myles told the paper:
[the display] brings rawness and newness to a holiday thought of as a romantic Hallmark holiday … by exploiting the lust of Valentine’s Day.
An american Apparel rep told ELLE.com that the store display is a celebration of natural beauty:
American Apparel is a company that celebrates natural beauty, and the Lower East Side Valentine's Day window continues that celebration. We created it to invite passerbys to explore the idea of what is'sexy' and consider their comfort with the natural female form.
Women should not be ashamed of the body and (ahhhem) hair we are given. And, yes, a real conversation needs to be had about what is sexy, beautiful, and feminine. But this smells less like a grand statement about feminism in modern society and more like a publicity stunt, especially when the messenger is notorious for their checkered past.
Between the Period Power t-shirt, the ridiculous Halloween costumes, sexual harassment allegations against Charney, questionable hiring policies, and previous ad controversies (nope, this isn't the first time they have used pubic hair to gain attention), American Apparel is not in the best position to wax philosophic on female body image acceptance.
Image: American ApparelUsing open source UI components for iOS can save lot’s of time. Further, it can give good ideas to improve the UX (user experience) by using proven methods.
Menu interface: Controller Libraries
CarbonKit – Tab Navigation & Refresh
First we’re going to present you CarbonKit – an OpenSource iOS UI library by our iOS developer Ermal. It’s a neat tab-navigation, often seen at implementations of Googles Material Design in Android apps.
Besides the navigation, the library also includes this neat swipe refresh.
Guillotine Transitioning Animation Menu
This Swift menu by Yalantis is gorgoues to look at and use.
FoldingTabBar.iOS
Awesome stuff, very smooth.
RESideMenu
If you’re looking for something more, take a look at this iOS7/iOS8 menu. There are many good combinations of colours, icons and backgrounds which come in my mind how one could put this menu into use.
Persei – a unique approach
If you have a app which can put this beautiful menu by Yalantis or a variation of it into use, definitely take it into your consideration. The big buttons are at least hard to miss. It’s works though only for iOS 8.x, Swift 1.1 or 1.2.
Dropdown navigation controller
This dropdown is inspired by iOS7 Dropbox and Vine apps.
RP Sliding Menu
If you’re into big pictures, like a display of mobile ecommerce categories, or a travel app, this might be something for you.
MS Dynamics Drawer View Controller
Long name, looks simple, but still many features. It has four different ways of transition. Worth a look.
Mutual Mobile Drawer Controller
If you don’t know this Controller yet, there isn’t much to see in the first sight. But there’s a lot more to behind. It’s one of the most used navigation controllers with over 3.000+ stars and 700+ forks. Thing is, it has several animations and other customizations you can choose from.
JV Menu Popover
If you want to build one which goes across the whole screen, this might be for you.
DLHamburguerMenu
Very simple. Works for iOS 7+
MELSorting
I can’t remind the name of one notes app which uses this kind of design with various colour layouts. But it is something many can put into use. Just try a couple of different colour palettes.
Simple transparent Side Menu
This menu is written in Swift, and can be implemented in various app designs to make it look beautiful.
Various other iOS Controller Libraries
Tableview – MGSwipeTableCell
This neat library to create a UITableViewCell with swipeable buttons can come in handy for various mobile app projects. It includes several different transitions from which you can choose your favourite.
DK Night Version
If you have an app which relies heavy on reading, then you should think about adding a night version to your mobile app.
Alert library
If you plan to make use of alerts in your next app project, take a look at NZAlertView.
Sweet Alert iOS
There’s also this way of alerts. Definitely passes the beauty and usability test.
JT Material Transition
JT can be used in various ways.
For more, visit: https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios
To learn more about interfaces, read the guide by apple – designing for iOS.The European bitterling (Rhodeus amarus) is a temperate freshwater fish belonging to the Acheilognathinae subfamily of the Cyprinidae family. It originates in Europe, ranging from the Rhone River basin in France to the Neva River in Russia. It was originally described as Cyprinus amarus by Marcus Elieser Bloch in 1782, and has been referred to in scientific literature as Rhodeus sericeus amarus.[2] It is known simply as "the bitterling" in its native range, where it is the only species of its genus Rhodeus, and sometimes in the scientific literature, also, but this is technically wrong, being a leftover from the times when the European bitterling was united with its Siberian relative, the Amur bitterling, in R. sericeus. Properly, "bitterling" can refer to any species of Acheilognathus or Rhodeus.
The fish reaches a size of up to 10 cm (4 in). It is found among plants over sandy and muddy bottoms in shallow waters. It feeds mainly on plants, and to a lesser extent, upon worms, crustaceans, and insect larvae.[2]
This species of fish was once used for human pregnancy tests. Female specimens were injected with the urine of the woman to be tested. If the woman was pregnant, the hormones in the urine would cause the fish's ovipositors to protrude.[2]
The fish spawns in clear, slow-running or still water, often with a muddy bottom. The female deposits her eggs inside freshwater mussels. The male sheds his sperm into the inhalent current of the respiring mussel and thereby fertilizes the eggs. The young hatch and remain protected within the mussel for about a month, eventually leaving the mussel as actively swimming larvae.[2] Both sexes reach sexual maturity in 1 year, at a length of 30 to 35 mm (1.2 to 1.4 in).[3]Online evidence may be used to lock up freed paramilitaries in Northern Ireland BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Intercept evidence could be used to recall former paramilitary prisoners to jail in Northern Ireland, the UK's terrorism watchdog has said. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/online-evidence-may-be-used-to-lock-up-freed-paramilitaries-in-northern-ireland-31353436.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/article31353435.ece/fd96f/AUTOCROP/h342/2015-07-06_new_10926362_I1.JPG
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Intercept evidence could be used to recall former paramilitary prisoners to jail in Northern Ireland, the UK's terrorism watchdog has said.
IRA and loyalist inmates were released early during the peace process but sentences can be reinstated by the Government if further offences occur.
Ministers in Britain want new laws to help police and agencies monitor online threats, and terrorism powers reviewer David Anderson QC recommended additional measures to protect the public be considered.
The evidence would include the interception of emails, internet conversations and phone calls.
The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) said the Government would be considering his report carefully.
Mr Anderson said: "It is not the function of this review to second-guess or to reinforce the eight reviews which have, since 1993, failed to recommend that intercepted material be rendered admissible as evidence in court.
"I do however recommend that consideration should be given to extending the already substantial list of exceptions from this rule to include the Parole Commissioners and Sentence Review Commissioners, both in Northern Ireland.
"There would be a possible benefit in terms of public safety: these bodies consider prisoner licence cases and have the ability to consider classified material in closed proceedings on the issue of whether persons convicted of serious offences remain a threat to the public.
"Allowing intercept to be admitted as evidence before them could enable the recall to prison of ex-prisoners on licence in respect of whom the evidence of continuing threat to the community comes from intercepted communications."
Paramilitary prisoners were released early under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which largely ended the 30-year conflict. However, there have been 24 recalls of individuals back to prison, ordered by Northern Ireland secretaries.
The secretary of state can suspend - recall an individual back to prison - the licence of anyone released under the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998 on the basis of information which indicates they are in breach of the conditions of the licence.
If a licence is suspended it will be for the independent Sentence Review Commissioners (SRC) to review the case and determine whether to revoke or reinstate the it.
High-profile offenders to be returned to jail include notorious loyalist killer Torrens Knight, who was jailed for the 1993 Greysteel massacre.
He was released in 2000, but jailed again in 2009 for assault.
Mr Anderson has said new laws were needed to cover security services' powers to monitor online activity.
UFF killer Torrens Knight was given 12 life sentences for the Greysteel massacre and the murder of four workmen in Castlerock. He was released under the Good Friday Agreement in 2000, but jailed in 2009 for assaulting two sisters in a Coleraine bar.
Belfast TelegraphThat's a lot to deal with, and we haven't even mentioned the worst part: quarterback Russell Wilson has endured multiple leg injuries himself.
Stud defensive lineman Michael Bennett did not play against the Pats, missing his third straight game after undergoing knee surgery. Safety Kam Chancellor did play, and he had missed the previous four games dealing with a lingering groin injury. Thomas Rawls, who was expected to transition into the starting running back spot after Marshawn Lynch's retirement, fractured his leg in September and hasn't appeared in a game since Week 2. His replacement, Christine Michael, fought a hamstring injury all week and barely played against the Pats.
After taking down the New England Patriots on Sunday night, the Seattle Seahawks sit at 6-2 and occupy first place in the NFC West. Normally, that statement wouldn't be a surprise. The Seahawks are really good at football, and have been for the past four seasons under head coach Pete Carroll. But considering the avalanche of injuries the 'Hawks have been hit with this season, 6-2 feels a little like a miracle.
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After taking down the New England Patriots on Sunday night, the Seattle Seahawks sit at 6-2 and occupy first place in the NFC West. Normally, that statement wouldn't be a surprise. The Seahawks are really good at football, and have been for the past four seasons under head coach Pete Carroll. But considering the avalanche of injuries the 'Hawks have been hit with this season, 6-2 feels a little like a miracle.
Stud defensive lineman Michael Bennett did not play against the Pats, missing his third straight game after undergoing knee surgery. Safety Kam Chancellor did play, and he had missed the previous four games dealing with a lingering groin injury. Thomas Rawls, who was expected to transition into the starting running back spot after Marshawn Lynch's retirement, fractured his leg in September and hasn't appeared in a game since Week 2. His replacement, Christine Michael, fought a hamstring injury all week and barely played against the Pats.
That's a lot to deal with, and we haven't even mentioned the worst part: quarterback Russell Wilson has endured multiple leg injuries himself.
Wilson was dealing with pain after the first week of the season when he suffered a right ankle sprain after getting stepped on by Miami Dolphins defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh during a sack. That didn't stop Wilson from playing the following week, but in Week 3, he sprained the MCL in his right knee when he was brought down awkwardly by San Francisco 49ers linebacker Eli Harold.
RELATED: How Did Russell Wilson Get So Freaking Jacked All Of the Sudden?
Still, Wilson refused to sit out a game, even though his mobility and overall quarterbacking ability were somewhat compromised. From Week 5 through Week 7, Wilson didn't throw a single touchdown or run for more than 7 yards. But behind the scenes, he was engaging in a furious rehab regimen that didn't even allow him to get much sleep.
After Wilson's Week 1 ankle sprain, his personal rehab specialist, Drew Morcos, moved in with him for an entire week so Wilson could receive around-the-clock treatment to get his ankle ready for Week 2. Again after Week 3, Morcos was back at Wilson's house to help the quarterback recover from the MCL sprain.
Their schedule was pretty intense.
Wilson said he would rehab for most of the day, hop in bed around 1 a.m., then wake up at 3 or 4 to ice his leg. For those of you who struggle with math, that's a solid 2-3 hours of sleep a night, all week long.
Hard Work Pays Off!#NoTime2Sleep P.s... See you in LA. — Russell Wilson (@DangeRussWilson) September 12, 2016
"Drew's a movement specialist," Wilson told the MMQB. "So I was pretty much keeping it moving all week. I'm on a bike, or I'm doing one-legged squats. I'd go to bed maybe at 1, then wake up super early to do more icing around 3 or 4."
Wilson and Morcos have been working together for two seasons, so Morcos has a good idea about the type of treatment that works best for Wilson in terms of recovery.
"We do stuff all through the day, through the night just to really help the healing process," Morcos told ESPN. "We only have a week between games. If this was just another person who was able to miss a couple weeks, the night treatments and all that wouldn't be so necessary."
Wilson spent most of his time this off-season working to prolong his career with trainer Ryan Flaherty. Wilson believes that training helped him avoid even worse injuries from both of the aforementioned hits. But his progress with Morcos is evident. In the last two weeks, he's gotten back to his usual self, throwing for a combined 630 yards, six touchdowns (five passing, one rushing) and zero interceptions in two Seahawks wins.
To see Wilson bounce back so soon after multiple debilitating injuries is a testament to his non-stop rehab regimen and his willingness to sacrifice sleep for the good of himself and his team.
Photo Credit: Getty Images // ThinkstockAnas b. Malik reported that some people belonging (to the tribe) of 'Uraina came to Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) at Medina, but they found its climate uncogenial. So Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said to them:
If you so like, you may go to the camels of Sadaqa and drink their milk and urine. They did so and were all right. They then fell upon the shepherds and killed them and turned apostates from Islam and drove off the camels of the Prophet (ﷺ). This news reached Allah's Apostle (ﷺ) and he sent (people) on their track and they were (brought) and handed over to him. He (the Holy Prophet) got their hands cut off, and their feet, and put out their eyes, and threw them on the stony ground until they died.It's sort of the same mind filter through which New Gingrich attacked Bill Clinton for being an immoral adulterer, and Sen. Larry Craig worked to preserve the sanctity of marriage. Are we seeing a pattern yet?
WASHINGTON -- Democrats pounced on the man Republicans chose today to be their spokesman for fiscal restraint: a freshman Arkansas congressman who once filed bankruptcy over unpaid credit card bills.
Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) was the lead signer of a letter endorsed by a pack of GOP freshmen demanding Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pass a budget-cutting spending measure to fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year."Mr. Reid, your record on spending in the Senate is one of failure," wrote the 30 lawmakers, who alsovowed to rally on the Capitol steps until the Senate passed a budget. "You have failed to pass a budget, failed to restrain spending, and failed to put our country on sound fiscal footing," they said.
But Crawford seemed an odd choice to expound on sound fiscal footing."Really?" said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Jesse Ferguson.
"Of all the people for House Republican freshmen to pick as their front man for a stunt about fiscal responsibility, they picked Representative Rick Crawford who couldn't even pay his own credit card bills and went bankrupt because of it," Ferguson said in a statement.
According to press accounts during Crawford's campaign, he declared bankruptcy in 1994 over $12,611.67 in debt - mostly for credit cards.Gandhi is not the first name that vegans might think of as helping to launch the movement, and yet he did, on November 20, 1931, in London to be precise. He didn’t call it ‘vegan’ of course, but it wasn’t long before others came up with the word to describe what he was talking about.
We need to go back a bit – in 1888 the London Vegetarian Society split from the original UK society, based in Manchester, to form a second national group. In 1891 Gandhi was a law student in London and joined their committee for a while, later describing this in some detail in his autobiography.
On leaving India the young Gandhi |
who told The Indian Express that he had responded to Chandra’s notice, and that there was no breach of protocol involved as the “relative” was not “travelling with the Chief Justice”.
According to officials, the waitlisted ticket-holder was part of a group of Justice Sinha’s “relatives” who had visited Bilaspur to attend the swearing-in ceremony of the Chief Justice, previously with Patna High Court, on April 9.
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The notice issued by Chandra noted: “This court had sent you a VIP/Emergency quota form for Vinod Kumar, Ajit Jha + 1, the relatives of the Chief Justice of Bilaspur High Court, for reservation in Patna Express 22843. In furtherance of the matter… I personally telephoned ACM (Assistant Commercial Manager) Rakesh Kumar Singh. Still, one of them was not given a berth even though berths were available with the VIP quota.”
The notice added that even in the tickets that were confirmed, “two were given berths, which were not the lower berths”.
Chandra further noted that the Chief Justice occupies “third slot in protocol list of the state, still you did not provide adequate quota to his relatives despite having sufficient VIP/Emergency quota with you”.
Chandra added in the notice that the “High Court has expressed displeasure and unhappiness in this matter”, and asked the officials to furnish on April 20 at 11 am the “names and addresses of passengers who were given Sleeper berths in Patna Express 22843 on the said date under the VIP quota”.
The notice was copied to the General Manager and Divisional Railway Manager of SECR, and the High Court Registrar General.
SECR’s Kumar, however, denied that there was any breach of procedure.
“There is a warrant of precedence for the VIP quota. It includes the chief justice and judges of the High Court. It also includes their relatives, but only when they are travelling with the chief justice. Friends and acquaintances are not covered. In the present case, we got requisitions of people who were not travelling with the Chief Justice, but we still tried to accommodate them,” he said, adding that his response included the list of all passengers travelling on VIP quota on the train that day.
Court officials confirmed that they had received a reply to the notice from Kumar but added that Chandra was yet to examine it as he was travelling. “If the response is unsatisfactory, we might ask for more details,” an official said.
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When contacted, High Court Registrar General A K Panda said that he had “not received the copy of the notice so far”.A response to “Why #FreshOffTheBoat Is Not Asian America’s Saving Grace”
Jeff Yang Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 4, 2015
I’m going to jump into the hornet’s nest here and respond to a piece that’s been shared with me (or at me, given that I’m the father of Hudson Yang, the show’s lead kid) many, many times now. It’s a reasonable piece, and one that’s worth reading and sharing.
But I also think it’s a prime example of Asian America’s tendency to hedge our bets and play “Yes, but…” with our artists and creatives — while failing to support the kind of alternatives that fuel a truly independent media.
I attend a lot of Asian American film festivals and theater productions. It’s part of what I do, as a working culture writer who’s spent the past quarter of a century [EDIT: Er, yeah, not decade — thanks for the correction and for making me feel super-old, Jeff Chang] covering this community. And it still staggers me how under-resourced our media arts institutions are; how thin the audiences get beyond the big featured screenings and productions; how dependent the organizations are on non-Asians filling out the audiences in rooms that sometimes hold well under a hundred people.
I contrast that with cultural organizations in other communities, which are able to build and expand support from within their own worlds—with “mainstream” stars who make a point of going back and lending their glamor to the places that made their careers possible. With audiences and donors that are overwhelmingly reciprocal — African American, Hispanic, LGBT individuals gathering to preserve and progress signature institutions and emerging individuals who share their stories and backgrounds. Yes, they struggle, as all arts organizations do in this climate. But they don’t struggle alone.
And that brings me back to the article.
Honestly, no single show is anyone’s “saving grace” — not even the actors and producers responsible for it. (Hollywood is cruel, and you’re only as good as your last show.)
But as someone who was partly responsible for taking down the last big chance for us to smash down the primetime network firewall — and who has covered our two decades of wandering in the Hollywood wilderness since — I have to say:
Is there another community that is as self-critical of its creative output without actually supporting a market for better creative output?
I mean, I read quotes like this —
And while I am thrilled to see that mainstream media, for the most part, has accepted Fresh with embracing arms, I’m seeing quite the opposite reaction on Facebook. Many of my peers take problems with various aspects of the show, whether it’s Park and Wu’s accents or how certain themes feel forced (e.g. Asian families not saying ‘I love you’ to each other, being competitive with in-laws, ‘smelly’ Asian food, etc.). There seems to be a general dissatisfaction rooted in misrepresentation.
—and I despair a little.
The bottom line is that if you don’t like how Fresh Off the Boat represents Asians (and it’s not supposed to represent all Asians) then support something that you do like —rather than just spending social media minutes tearing down FOTB, or anything else that has a chance of breaking through the Great Wall of Media Racism surrounding our community. Critique, yes — but present an alternative. Or make one yourself. Standing on the sidelines and lobbing hand grenades while not casting a spotlight on something else, or better yet, actively supporting it, is a good way of ensuring that we have nothing at all. (And then we can all go back to complaining about that.)
No, we shouldn’t put all of our eggs in the FOTB basket. God forbid.
But if you’re critical of FOTB, then please support indie Asian American filmmakers and musicians and YouTube creators. Buy Asian American books. Enable riskier and more diverse programming with the only votes that matter in our media economy: Your wallet and your attention.
And if you have a platform that’s loud enough to shout, and to prompt other Asian Americans to share, then why not use it to promote some of the incredible rising talent around us too? It may not get as many clicks, but it might make a difference in a young artist’s life.
In short: Put eggs in other baskets — don’t just crack the ones we have. Because, to paraphrase Jessica Huang, “Eggs are LIFE. Your future comes from these eggs!”The star of the family film commented on the video leaked from the set, claiming it had been ‘edited and manipulated’ and that he ‘never saw any abuse’
Dennis Quaid has spoken about the controversial leaked video from the set of his new film A Dog’s Purpose, calling it “a scam”.
The footage, which was revealed last week on TMZ, appears to show a terrified dog being forced into water in a scene for the new family drama. Quaid, who plays one of the owners in the film, claimed it doesn’t reflect the truth.
A Dog's Purpose premiere cancelled after video of stunt dog 'in distress' Read more
“I was there,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “I never saw any abuse of any animal. If there had been, I would have walked.” He went on to say: “My experience is that the animals were treated great. There was no animal abuse. That video that someone took and sold for money and held on to for a year and a half until right before the film’s coming out does not tell the whole story. First of all, it’s been edited and manipulated. And I think it’s a scam, to tell you the truth.”
His comments follow those made by the film’s director Lasse Hallström who posted on Facebook that he was unaware of the video and the behavior shown was “unacceptable”.
Since the leak, Peta has called for a boycott of the film, released this Friday, and Universal, the studio behind it, cancelled the premiere. According to Deadline, box office tracking for the film has also started to feel the effect, with an analyst predicting that the word of mouth will impact the opening.
In a statement released yesterday to USA Today, Peta senior vice-president of communications Lisa Lange wrote: “The disturbing footage from the set of A Dog’s Purpose came just days after Peta’s investigation of Birds & Animals Unlimited – the company that supplied dogs for the film – revealed that dogs were kept in barren kennels and forced to sleep outside in the cold, animals were denied adequate food so that they would be hungry while being trained to do tricks, and other animals were denied adequate veterinary care and made to live in filthy conditions.”
In a statement posted to its website, Birds & Animals Unlimited provided its own account of what the behind-the-scenes footage appears to show and claimed that the video was “falsely edited”.
“[The video] portrayed a dog being forced to enter a pool against its will and suggested that the dog was traumatized as a result. No such thing occurred, nor would it ever occur under the supervision of our animal trainers.”
The film focuses on the spirit of a dog who experiences reincarnation, meeting a variety of owners throughout his journey.House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) reportedly mocked amnesty opponents in Congress on Thursday during a lunch event in his home district.
“Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,” Boehner reportedly “whined” at Brown’s Run County Club in Madison Township, according to Cincinnati.com. “We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”
Boehner, who has also said he was “hellbent” on passing amnesty and agreed with President Barack Obama the most on immigration, also reportedly “said he’s been working for 16 or 17 months trying to push Congress to deal with immigration reform.”
After Boehner and the GOP leadership released their “immigration principles,” momentum for immigration legislation stalled when Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) denounced the principles as “amnesty.”Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 5, 2016, 8:32 AM GMT / Updated Sep. 5, 2016, 2:20 PM GMT / Source: Reuters By Alastair Jamieson and Andy Eckardt
President Barack Obama held "businesslike" talks with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of his final G-20 summit Monday, urging progress on a Syria cease-fire and warning against "wild west" hacking wars.
The U.S. president shook hands with his Russian counterpart in front of cameras in Hangzhou, China, before sitting down for 90-minute discussions that Obama later described as "constructive but not conclusive."
"Typically the tone of our meetings is candid, blunt... businesslike — and this was no different," Obama told a press conference after the talks.
The meeting came hours after Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were unsuccessful in attempts to strike a deal for a Syria ceasefire — the second failed effort in two weeks.
Obama acknowledged that the meetings did not yield a breakthrough, telling reporters that "given the gaps of trust that exist, that's a tough negotiation."
"We haven't yet closed the gaps," he said.
In addition to discussing Syria — and Ukraine — Obama said he also raised the issue of cybersecurity with Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama. ALEXEI DRUZHININ/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN / EPA
However, the U.S. president said he would not comment on "specific investigations" — an apparent reference to the recent hack of the Democratic Party, which is now the subject of an FBI probe.
"We've had problems with cyber-intrusion with Russia in the past... and other countries," Obama said, adding that he told Putin he did not to see an escalation of retaliatory cyber warfare like the "wild, wild west."
Moscow's account of the meeting was brief. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it "went well,” according to Reuters, citing Russian news agency RIA.
"Work will continue," he reportedly said.
The G-20 leaders met as North Korea launched three ballistic missiles off its east coast — a defiant reminder of the challenges to global security.
Pyongyang in the past has tested missiles at sensitive moments to draw attention to its military might. But Monday's launch risks embarrassing its main ally Beijing, which has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure a smooth summit in Hangzhou.
After meeting with Putin, Obama on Monday held talks with French President Francois Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to discuss the situation in Ukraine.
Obama said all Western leaders were keen for Russia to implement the Minsk peace agreement, adding that he would not consider reducing sanctions on Moscow until the deal had been put in place.(CNN) A well-known federal judge has resigned Monday after multiple former clerks and junior staffers came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
Judge Alex Kozinski, who for many years served as chief judge on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, will resign immediately, according to a statement released by his attorney.
He apologizes for his actions but also defends his "broad sense of humor."
"I've always had a broad sense of humor and a candid way of speaking to both male and female law clerks alike. In doing so, I may not have been mindful enough of the special challenges and pressures that women face in the workplace. It grieves me to learn that I caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent," Kozinski wrote.
"For this I sincerely apologize," he said.
Read MoreA future French government will probably revisit measures to reduce coal-fired power generation in the country, according to a think tank.
The measures could see the end of French coal in the power mix before 2023. However, the impact of a unilateral carbon tax on emissions remains unclear, analysts said.
“The next government will probably also be concerned to reduce coal and increase nuclear, and their manoeuvrability margins will be higher, so the next government will probably fulfil today’s government promise to close coal plants before 2023,” a spokesman for think tank The Shift Project told ICIS.
The introduction of a carbon tax on French power generation sent shock waves through European power markets when it was first announced on 25 April. The French Cal ’17 Baseload contract was priced €1.90/MWh above the previous ICIS assessment the following day, making it the largest daily increase on the product for more than three years. Even bigger gains were seen on the Cal ’18 and ’19 Baseload contracts, which jumped €2.75/MWh and €2.375/MWh.
Fast forward to 21 October when, after much back and forth the plan was finally abandoned, and the contrast in market impact could scarcely be bigger. The front year gained during the session and the Cal ’18 and ’19 contracts shed no more than €0.15/MWh compared to the previous assessment.
“There was a minor reaction on the day, but nobody wants to be short on the French market now,” one trader said, in reference to recent sharp upwards moves and price volatility.
“The Cal ’18 and ’19 contracts are not typical products for speculators and can be difficult to liquidate,” he added.
‘Impossible to implement’
The contracts have since gained by almost €2.00/MWh, amid concerns that weak nuclear availability could become a longer-term issue.
“France is facing the tightest supply situation in modern history, which made it pretty impossible to implement a carbon price at this point,” Olav Botnen of market analysis company Markedskraft said.
The Cal ’17 Baseload contract has broken through the three-year-high gain on 26 April on no less than three occasions within the last month alone.
One of the key arguments for abandoning the measure was linked to carbon leakage.
The impact would be limited, reducing French emissions by 12 million tonnes while increasing emissions in neighbouring countries by 8 million tonnes, the Shift Project spokesman said, pointing to increased coal- and gas-fired generation in Germany, Italy and Spain.
“The British model has helped to reduce coal-fired generation in the UK, but the country is likely to increase imports from countries where coal-fired generation is used as more interconnectors are built,” Botnen said.
This would include a link to Belgium and increased interconnection with France, which would ultimately mean the UK has greater capacity to access mainland Europe’s coal-fired plants.
“You might think there would be less opportunities for leakage if Germany had joined, but you would need to broaden it further [for example, to Eastern Europe] to make the measure effective,” Sean Gammons from consultancy group NERA said.
“I think the way forward is reform of the ETS. It makes more sense to go for abatement where it is cheapest, rather than try national measures,” Gammons concluded.
The French measure as originally presented was to apply equally to gas- and coal-fired generation, but was later watered down to removing an existing coal tax exemption for power producers. joachim.moxon@icis.comSNEWS:
SuperNova Early Warning System
World-wide, several detectors currently running or nearing completion are sensitive to a core-collapse supernova neutrino signal in the Milky Way. The neutrino burst signal emerges promptly from a supernova's core, whereas it may take hours for the first photons to be visible. Therefore, the detection of the neutrino burst from the next Galactic supernova can provide an early warning for astronomers. Requiring a coincident signal from several detectors will provide the astronomical community with a very high confidence early warning of the supernova's occurrence. In addition, a neutrino burst alert may be able to serve as a trigger for detectors that are not able to trigger on a supernova signal by themselves, allowing extra data to be saved.
The SNEWS project involves an international collaboration of experimenters representing current supernova-neutrino-sensitive detectors. The goal of SNEWS is to provide the astronomical community with a prompt alert of the occurrence of a Galactic core-collapse event. We are also engaged in cooperative inter-experiment work, such as downtime coordination, to optimize global sensitivity to a core-collapse supernova signal.
SNEWS has been running in automated mode since 2005. Currently, seven neutrino experiments are involved: Super-K (Japan), LVD (Italy), Ice Cube (South Pole), KamLAND (Japan), Borexino (Italy) Daya Bay (China), and HALO (Canada). Anyone wishing to receive a prompt SNEWS alert may sign up for the mailing list. No nearby core collapses have occurred since SNEWS started running, but we are ready for the next one.
For more information, see Francis Reddy's article in Astronomy Magazine Online and the technical report in the New Journal of Physics.
Translations of this page: Italian, Spanish, Chinese
SNEWS is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants PHY-1506069 and PHY-1505960.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.12 Sep 2014
UK: The first of three pre-series Class 800 intercity trainsets ordered under the Department for Transport’s Intercity Express Programme has begun low-speed running trials on the test track at Hitachi’s Kasado factory in Japan.
The first of the three bi-mode sets is expected to arrive in Britain early next year for trials on the East Coast Main Line, although Hitachi is discussing the possibility of using the Old Dalby test track.
A set of full-size vehicle mock-ups at industrial premises near Warwick has now been seen by more than 2 000 ‘stakeholders’ as the final part of an iterative process to finalise the design details well before the trains enter commercial service. Put together by DCA Design International, the mock-ups consist of a cab segment and sections of two cars with the interiors fashioned to replicate all the different areas of the TSI-compliant interior.
The cab is based on that of the Class 395 supplied by Hitachi for Southeastern services on High Speed 1, with some changes made following consultation with staff. Provision has also been made for driver-only operation.
The catering area is located at the outer end of one end car behind the cab and equipment area. A separate entrance and vestibule behind the cab is provided for catering staff. Hitachi says four catering levels are possible, but the DfT specification only covers Levels 1 and 4. Level 1 is a full galley, Level 2 would be a mix of a shop and buffet, Level 3 would be a larger shop, and Level 4 is a trolley.
A distinctive feature of the bi-mode trains will be the difference in floor heights between cars with and without diesel engines; the higher floor of cars with underfloor engines requires a transition slope at the end of the car, which may surprise passengers expecting a level passage between cars. A nine-car set will have five coaches with underfloor engines supplied by MTU, and a five-car will have three. The Class 801 electric trainsets will also have one underfloor diesel powerpack to provide emergency power instead of relying on back-up batteries.Cops use indymedia, myspace, and blogs as a source of information to investigate you.
Yes. They do.
Do they follow links and take note of connections?
Yes, of course.
Myspace, blogs, and online networks are like a dream for police investigators. Where they used to have to go out and interview people, check records, walk the street, now they merely have to go online. Investigation from the convenience of their offices.
I took part in a demonstration and was arrested. Afterward, the police contacted my employer to suggest that they check up on me. I got a copy of the police report yesterday and was surprised to find that the police had gone beyond just the basic facts of my arrest.
They had tracked down the website for my band, followed a link to our myspace page, and from there tracked down my personal myspace page. In my profile I had some pretty cheeky anti-authoritarian hyperbole and that was quoted in the report. "Subject says in his myspace profile that he is 'looking for someone to turn over and burn police cars with,'" a dumb comment that had been part of my online profile for many years. There was a print out of my entire myspace profile, band website, etc. All of this info had been passed on to my employer.
Why this should surprise me, I'm not sure. It is something I should totally be aware of by now.
And while I wasn't arrested while burning police cars, nor was there any suspicion along those lines, my employer sure takes such things seriously, especially coupled with a heads-up from the local police. The implication and insinuation that someone is involved in something gnarlier than they are can be easily made. Just because you are non-violent (and even law-abiding) doesn't mean you can't be charged with something violent.
Imagine what might be said about your myspace profile: "Subject lists as their myspace friends 'Support ALF,' the Animal Liberation Front, a group whose members have been convicted of arson and long watched by the FBI as a serious potential terrorist threat." Bullshit and circumstantial connections notwithstanding, the implication is there for a prosecutor to use.
This goes beyond myspace and Indymedia to other online communities, facebook, blogs, tribe.net, friendster, etc. Cops look at these public sites and use the information they find.
And while I don't imagine that local law enforcement has the time or resources to randomly surf online sites in order to make connections, they do investigate people who've come to their attention. Local cops have told me that they read Indymedia daily. And it is certainly not beyond the means of the feds to map out networks of connections and involvement. Online profiles and blogs have definitely been used against people in criminal cases.
So not to make anyone paranoid, but just a word to be cautious and careful. In general, internet security is non-existent. And if you are truly and deeply concerned about it, you should not be using the internet at all. But if you do, some simple principles might keep you safer (or at least make it harder for law enforcement to keep tabs on us):
NEVER discuss illegal things online.
Be careful about cheeky hyperbolic braggadocio (lesson learned!)
Be aware how much one can gather about your connections to others
Don't provide identifying information that makes it easy to make connections (far from fool proof)
Limit who has access to your personal info if possible
There are probably a lot of great resources for keeping yourself and others safer. Goggle for "security culture" and you'll find stuff. Here's a good one I found: CrimethInc Primer on Security Culutre(CNN) -- A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that the MIT team was the first group in the contest to report the latitude and longitude coordinates of all 10 balloons, which were scattered across the United States.
DARPA is the U.S. military's research arm. Saturday's challenge is the latest in a series that the agency has hosted since 2004.
This contest was designed to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.
DARPA said in a written statement that the MIT team discovered the locations of the 8-foot-wide balloons less than nine hours after they launched, around 10 a.m. ET.
It did not say exactly when the task was completed or how many groups had participated.
Johanna Jones, a spokeswoman for DARPA, said the hunt was designed in part to give the military new ideas on ways to operate in a range of situations, from natural disasters to combat.
The agency said it plans to meet with teams to discuss their approaches and strategies used to build networks, collect information, and participate in the contest.
The challenge was announced on October 29 -- 40 years after the first message was sent on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. DARPA said it hopes the contest will lead to advances in the way the military communicates and coordinates activities among multiple geographically separated groups.
On MIT's Web site, a link was posted inviting people to sign up to help find the balloons and urging them to invite their friends. It said the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team "is interested in studying information flow in social networks, so if we win, we're giving all the money away to the people who help us find the balloons!"
It detailed a chain for giving away the money, beginning with $2,000 given to each person who first sent in the coordinates of each balloon.
iReporter on balloon challenge
"We're giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on..." it said.
It was not immediately clear how many people participated for MIT.
CNN's Doug Gross contributed to this report.0 Commissioner: I never asked for all Confederate flags to be removed
HENRY COUNTY, Ga. - A Henry County commissioner says she asked for Confederate flags to be removed from public eye outside a Civil War museum and park, but never asked the museum to shut down.
Nash Farm Battlefield, a park and museum in Henry County, was cleaned out over the weekend after the dispute over the flags.
The group that runs the museum claims they were asked to remove all Confederate Flags from the displays. But since they said they can’t tell the Civil War story without them, they decided to close the museum.
It’s an issue that’s caused controversy across Henry County, with many upset by the decision.
However, Dee Clemmons, the commissioner at the center of the controversy, said things aren’t quite as they seem.
“I never asked them to move. And I never asked them to take all of the memorabilia and the replicas that were inside of the museum out,” she told Channel 2’s Tom Jones.
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Clemmons said the privately owned flag outside is offensive to many of her constituents.
“And so I did request for the flag to be taken off of the pole and placed inside the museum,” she said.
She says confederate flags were in the window, visible to those outside.
“I asked that they not be visible from the outside,” she said.
Curator Bill Dodd says he was told to remove all the rebel flags from the museum, which sits on county property in a county park.
“One of the things that I'm personally tired of is being politically correct,” Dodd said.
Clemmons wants to make it clear that she is not trying to erase the flag from history.
“If the flag belongs anywhere it belongs in a museum,” she said.
The Henry County Board of Commissioners sent the following statement about the controversy:
"Many are aware of an issue which has caused the Friends of Nash Farm to announce that their museum will close on June 1st. This has caused much divisiveness and controversy in our county. As we continue to hear from concerned citizens, please know that we will continue to explore the facts more fully before giving our input on how to proceed to address this issue. We welcome input from concerned citizens, and request that you please express your thoughts in a respectful manner. As we approach Memorial Day, we encourage you to remember, honor and acknowledge those who nobly gave themselves, even unto death, for a purpose they believed was greater than themselves, while serving in our country’s military forces, and we also encourage you to participate in the various Memorial Day remembrances taking place throughout the county this weekend. Please pray for unity and peace for Henry County, our State of Georgia and our United States of America."
© 2019 Cox Media Group.[Editor's note: The Patriots won 34-9]
With only six weeks remaining, NFL teams are beginning to face must-win scenarios if they hope to make the playoffs. In the NFC, barring spectacular runs from the Bears or Rams, the top eight are fighting for only six spots, and reigning champions Seattle Seahawks are running out of time to make a push. In the AFC, the teams are bunched tighter, but there is little doubt that the New England Patriots, Denver Broncos, or Indianapolis Colts will miss out, leaving a group of teams to fight for a Wildcard spot.
The premier game of Week 12 pits the NFC North-leading Detroit Lions (7-3) against the AFC East-leading Patriots (8-2) at 1 p.m. Eastern time Sunday. The Patriots are the hottest team in the AFC over the last seven weeks, just recently notching a prime-time win against the Colts on Sunday Night Football. In that game, the Patriot rush attack dominated, but over their remarkable run it has been stability at the quarterback position that has made the difference.
It didn't look that way, however, at the start of Tom Brady's 15th season. Through four weeks, Brady struggled, averaging 198 yards per game and only 5.77 yards per pass, throwing four touchdowns to two interceptions. Fast-forward to Week 12 and the Brady-led Patriots have won seven in a row and lead the league in offensive pass efficiency, jumping the Broncos this past week. Brady has been remarkable over that time, throwing for 310 yards per game and 8.19 yards per attempt, with 20 touchdowns to only three interceptions. It is usually a bad idea to count out touchdown Tom.
Detroit comes off a loss in Week 11 in which the offense was held in check by a stingy Arizona Cardinals defense. In contrast to recent years, this Detroit team controls the game with their defense and the team leads the league in yards allowed per game at 290.3. They are particularly dominant against the run, allowing only 68.8 yards per game and three yards per carry. Football Outsiders contributes stats that delve deeper and, in analyzing the defensive line led by Ndamukong Suh, they find that the Lions have the highest percent of running plays stuffed at the line, 27 percent, and are among the best at stopping runs at the second level and in the open field.
The match-up to watch will be All-Pro wide receiver Calvin Johnson lined up against Darrelle Revis, the premier one-on-one defender in the league. Johnson was hurt or had been playing hurt for five games this season before returning two weeks ago and catching seven passes for 113 yards. His timing and explosiveness are not back yet, but he is still a handful for any cornerback. Talking about Johnson, Revis told reporters at NBC Sports he’s expecting to be challenged.
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“He’s a man amongst boys out there. You see it all the time. The dude’s 6-foot-6, 230 pounds. And he runs a 4.3. That’s pretty freakish.”
If Johnson and quarterback Matthew Stafford have a rhythm, and the run defense forces the Patriots to be one-dimensional, the Lions could play this game close. Still, given the recent play of Tom Brady, and that the Patriots are dominant at home, fans should expect the Patriots to pull this close one out.The path to victory will be difficult. In the House, if the Democrats can hold on to the seats they already have, they still need to win an additional 24 seats. In the Senate, the prospects are more daunting: The Democrats must defend three times as many seats as the Republicans, 10 in states won by Trump, half of those by double digits.
It will take time, then, to oust the Republicans from their commanding position at the national level. That is why so much Left energy has been focused on down-ballot elections. Victories on the local level can matter. Not only do they boost the morale of electoral and movement activists alike, but in our federal system, localities often have significant policy authority.
An astonishing number of state and local elected offices go uncontested. One study found that, between 1992 and 2010, a third of all state legislative incumbents did not face a challenger in the primary and general elections. Another study found that, in six states, half of all mayoral candidates ran unopposed.
In Virginia, for example, where all statewide offices are held by Democrats and Clinton defeated Trump by five points, the lower House of Delegates has long been dominated by Republicans. Forty of the Republicans’ 66 seats were uncontested by Democratic challengers in 2015. While it still might be a long shot, with the election of Trump and the new energy for electoral politics on the left, in 2018 the GOP could lose the 17 Republican House of Delegates seats that voted for Clinton in 2016.
Such a victory would be unprecedented, but the challenge is being embraced by a new grassroots political action committee, Activate Virginia, founded by Josh Stanfield, a 30-year-old Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and two other activists. The group’s mission is to field and support progressive Democratic candidates in all 100 House of Delegates elections. As of this writing, these aggressive efforts have shrunk the number of upcoming uncontested elections against Republican incumbents from 40 (in 2015) to 10.
Virginia’s example, which points to a key weakness of the Democratic Party, also offers an opportunity to strengthen the influence of the Left. The two major political parties are not parties in the sense of disciplined, unified, hierarchical membership organizations. Rather, they are loose and conflict-ridden confederations of separate leadership groups whose overall structure reflects the complex constitutional and institutional arrangements of the U.S. federal system.
The point, however, is not to belabor the weakness of fractious and institutionally hamstrung political parties, but rather to note that the institutional fragmentation of the Democratic Party makes it susceptible to takeover. As an example of how centrists have exploited this political reality, consider the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985. The so-called Third Way was designed to stymie the progressive, pro-labor party activism stimulated by Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, and other efforts to move the party to the Left. And it succeeded—until the recent Sanders challenge loosened the grip that centrists had on the party for the past 30 years.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Medicare for All in Washington, D.C., on September 13. (Photo by Jim Watson/afp/ Getty Images)
This kind of synergy between electoral and movement politics may be emerging in the area of healthcare. On the one side, Trump and the right-wing majority in Congress have put forward a series of Draconian legislative proposals to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, and especially the provisions that underwrite healthcare for the poor. On the other side, the political furor over these efforts has given a big bump to the Sanders-backed Medicare for All Act, with 16 Democratic senators now signed on. The legislative drama, in turn, is likely to boost the morale and increase the energy of the longer-term movement for a publicly funded healthcare system.
Why Movements Need Electoral Politics
The two major parties also matter because they play a very large role in shaping the life course of movements. This dynamic is often overlooked because the fundamental dynamics of movements and electoral campaigns are different. Movement activists work to raise the issues that divide and anger constituencies, while electoral operatives tend to smooth over the divisions that inhibit the building of the winning majority that elections require. In these respects, movement and electoral dynamics are antagonistic. But that is by no means the whole of it.
Movements also depend on elected leaders who are susceptible to or embrace the challenges that movements generate. They thrive when they get the rhetorical support of the elected leaders who worry about defections from movement-influenced constituencies. Moreover, the policy victories that movements score are ultimately fashioned by elected politicians.
As an example, consider the recent fortunes of the environmental movement. The same year Barack Obama was first elected president, a Canadian firm, TransCanada, had applied for a permit to build a 1,200-mile pipeline across the American Midwest to connect Canadian tar sands oil with Gulf Coast oil refineries. The company and the oil lobby misleadingly claimed that the project would create 140,000 jobs and billions in economic benefits |
SjoW
NaNiwa
BlinG
Stream - http://www.own3d.tv/live/205/QuadV__1
VoDs - http://www.youtube.com/quadvtv
Brackets - http://www.esportsheaven.net/?page=tournament&action=view&tournament_id=763
Commentary - TotalBiscuit (Play by Play) and Apollo (Analysis)
Prizepool - £5,000
Kickoff time - 9:30 GMT, 10:30 CET 5:30 EST 2:30 PST - TotalBiscuit (Play by Play) and Apollo (Analysis)- £5,000- 9:30 GMT, 10:30 CET 5:30 EST 2:30 PST Commentator Host of SHOUTcraft Clan Wars- http://www.mlg.tv/shoutcraft
ZeraToss Profile Joined January 2011 Germany 1044 Posts Last Edited: 2011-04-17 08:30:59 #2 no zerg players, what?
but nice prize pool + goood players
when is this tournament kickin in? "Personality should be irrelevant. This is a computer game tournament, not a dating show." EGIdrA on "introduce yourself and say something about your personality" Idra <3
Tommylew Profile Blog Joined March 2010 Wales 2716 Posts Last Edited: 2011-04-17 08:32:30 #3 On April 17 2011 17:30 ZeraToss wrote:
no zerg players, what?
but nice prize pool + goood players
when is this tournament kickin in?
there was a qualifier and none qualified.
Nani will take this tourney! Shows hes the top Protoss outside Korea!!! there was a qualifier and none qualified.Nani will take this tourney! Shows hes the top Protoss outside Korea!!! Live and Let Die!
merz Profile Blog Joined July 2004 Sweden 2755 Posts #4 On April 17 2011 17:31 Tommylew wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 17 2011 17:30 ZeraToss wrote:
no zerg players, what?
but nice prize pool + goood players
when is this tournament kickin in?
there was a qualifier and none qualified.
Nani will take this tourney! Shows hes the top Protoss outside Korea!!! there was a qualifier and none qualified.Nani will take this tourney! Shows hes the top Protoss outside Korea!!!
Not true, Naugrim qualified but didn't show. Not true, Naugrim qualified but didn't show. Winners never quit, quitters never win.
KiNGxXx Profile Blog Joined August 2010 7928 Posts #5
For those who doesn't know:
There was a group stage yesterday:
Results
That's why Socke and Hasu had a bye in the first round of the final bracket. Thanks for the thread TB.For those who doesn't know:There was a group stage yesterday:That's why Socke and Hasu had a bye in the first round of the final bracket. MKP|Maru|TaeJa|Mvp|Polt|INnoVation|GuMiho|Bomber|GoOdy|TeamTerran
Freekje Profile Joined November 2010 Belgium 32 Posts #6 HasuObs vs select is about to go live.)
Imascotsman Profile Joined October 2010 255 Posts #7 Select is so strong i love his aggressiveness!
rushian Profile Joined December 2010 United Kingdom 568 Posts #8 well played by select there. kept his head well to defend that initial gateway push. got ghosts out nice and early too "Love every protoss unit" - oGsMC
KiNGxXx Profile Blog Joined August 2010 7928 Posts #9
Now: Socke vs Sjow Select is soooo good! Even though I was rooting for Hasu it's always a pleasure to see Select playing!Now: Socke vs Sjow MKP|Maru|TaeJa|Mvp|Polt|INnoVation|GuMiho|Bomber|GoOdy|TeamTerran
ch0c0b0fr34k Profile Joined October 2010 United States 452 Posts #10 On April 17 2011 18:01 KiNGxXx wrote:
Select is soooo good! Even though I was rooting for Hasu it's always a pleasure to see Select playing!
Now: Socke vs Sjow Select is soooo good! Even though I was rooting for Hasu it's always a pleasure to see Select playing!Now: Socke vs Sjow
lol Select has played Hasu so many times in recent tournies. lol Select has played Hasu so many times in recent tournies. Pew pew!
Marr Profile Joined March 2011 United Kingdom 71 Posts #11 Ouch those 1-1 upgraded charge zealots tore through SjoW's army then.
baeric Profile Joined October 2010 Germany 623 Posts #12 Devasting blow!
I cried about the marines in the storms
DailYLeet Profile Joined November 2010 Germany 825 Posts #13 socke is the strongest. "King Goody spoke - you have to treat his words like gold, he is the wisest man, who ever crossed the EU server" - Cloud
{ToT}ColmA Profile Joined November 2007 Japan 2986 Posts #14 nice tournament, more people should watch it =) The only virgins in kpop left are the fans
baeric Profile Joined October 2010 Germany 623 Posts #15 On April 17 2011 18:18 DailYLeet wrote:
socke is the strongest.
Already in Lower Bracket but the strongest their Already in Lower Bracket but the strongest their
TBO Profile Joined September 2009 Germany 1347 Posts #16 On April 17 2011 18:23 {ToT}ColmA wrote:
nice tournament, more people should watch it =)
its not on the TL calendar :/... people really should know how to get there by now. It's just 2 minutes of work. its not on the TL calendar :/... people really should know how to get there by now. It's just 2 minutes of work.
Freekje Profile Joined November 2010 Belgium 32 Posts #17 Bling just took out HasuOb 2-0
ch0c0b0fr34k Profile Joined October 2010 United States 452 Posts #18 Ugh, I can't tell if Bling stands for Bling or Baneling, lol. Pew pew!
zeru Profile Blog Joined September 2010 6445 Posts #19 This stream should be listed
Daysleeper Profile Joined August 2004 Sweden 282 Posts #20 Totalbiscuit works much better with an analyst beside him
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next AllNew research shows that cuckoos have striped or "barred" feathers that resemble local birds of prey, such as sparrowhawks, that may be used to frighten birds into briefly fleeing their nest in order to lay their parasitic eggs.
By using the latest digital image analysis techniques, and accounting for "bird vision" - by converting images to the spectral sensitivity of birds - researchers have been able to show for the first time that the barred patterns on a cuckoo's breast may allow it to impersonate dangerous birds of prey. This might enable cuckoos to frighten other avian hosts into leaving their nests exposed.
The latest findings, published today in the journal Animal Behaviour, expand the cuckoo's arsenal of evolutionary deceptions, which include egg mimicry and chick mimicry that allow it to trick other birds into incubating its eggs.
Importantly, the study shows that a wide variety of cuckoos have adapted different plumage patterns depending on the area they inhabit so that they match a local bird of prey species.
While scientists have intensively researched links in plumage patterns between the common cuckoo and Eurasian sparrowhawk, the new research shows that this type of impersonation of a more dangerous animal - called 'Batesian mimicry' - may be far more widespread in cuckoos. In addition, the dangerous bird of prey that cuckoos resemble goes beyond sparrowhawks to include such raptors as bazas and harrier-hawks - depending on the species prevalent in the cuckoo's neighbourhood.
"There is no benefit in looking like a dangerous species your target is not familiar with," said lead researcher Thanh-Lan Gluckman from Cambridge's Department of Zoology.
"We first established similarity in plumage pattern attributes between cuckoos and raptor species, and then showed that cuckoos look nothing like species from a different geographical area."
The cuckoos also use their crafty 'hawk impression' to allow them to fly 'under the radar', undetected as they scope out potential nests in which to deposit their parasitic eggs.
"The barring on their plumage helps cuckoos conceal themselves while searching for potential nests, then when they approach, the host of the nest may mistake a cuckoo for a raptor coming to get them - giving them unfettered access to lay eggs," Gluckman said.
While previous studies have focused on Batesian mimicry in the common cuckoo and Eurasian sparrowhawk, this is the first time that the plumage patterns of cuckoos have been analysed using digital image analysis techniques. The study suggests that this form of mimicry may be widespread among many cuckoo species, and that they may be mimicking a variety of different types of birds of prey.
The researchers were "surprised" to find no pattern matching between cuckoos and raptors that live in different geographical areas, showing that the visual similarity is highly localised to species in the immediate vicinity.
"These findings underscore the importance of using digital image analysis to objectively quantify plumage patterning in mimicry - it is important not to make assumptions about even simple patterns such as these," added Gluckman.
"We hope this encourages other researchers to examine the function of barred plumage in parasitic cuckoos and raptors the world over."
Another interesting finding is that of the African cuckoo-hawk, a raptor so named because of its visual resemblance to cuckoos. This study objectively shows that the naming was an apt one, given that a local cuckoo matched the African cuckoo-hawk in all of the pattern attributes measured.
One of the earliest observers of the cuckoos' invasive guile was Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who noted some 2,300 years ago that it "lays its eggs in the nest of smaller birds".
###A group of Democratic senators on Tuesday urged federal regulators to investigate whether Donald Trump adviser Carl Icahn had engaged in insider trading and other violations.
A letter from the senators to regulators focused on Icahn’s petroleum refining company, CVR Energy, and its treatment of renewable fuel credits, called Renewable Identification Numbers or RINs. It raises the possibility that Icahn may have taken advantage of his connections to the White House in order to save his company hundreds of millions of dollars in credits.
In December 2016, Trump named Icahn a “special adviser to the president” on regulatory matters, but noted that Icahn was serving “in his individual capacity and will not be serving as a federal employee or a Special Government Employee and will not have any specific duties.”
The letter was signed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Thomas Carper (D-DE), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
The RIN market is designed to benefit companies that add biofuels like ethanol to their fuel products, and require companies like Icahn’s, which doesn’t, to pay for credits.
“Over the course of 2016, including the months immediately prior to and following President Trump’s election, CVR Energy delayed purchases of necessary renewable fuel credits and instead sold millions of them,” the senators wrote.
The letter cited an April 12 Reuters article, which describes CVR’s actions as “a bet that it could buy the credits it would need later at lower prices.”
Reuters described several events that drove down the cost of RINs, in turn potentially benefitting Icahn: the nomination of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator — about whom Icahn said Trump had consulted him — Icahn’s own naming as an adviser to Trump on regulation in December 2016 and news in February that Trump would consider a proposal by Icahn on biofuels regulation.
Reuters reported in February, citing unnamed people familiar with the plan, that the President “intends to revamp the national biofuel program to ease regulations on oil refiners.”
The senators noted that, after the February news broke, RIN prices dropped to a 17-month low, a 70 percent decline from November 2016.
In February, a similar group of senators, minus Carper and Klobuchar and plus Al Franken (D-MN), raised concerns about Icahn in a letter to the EPA and White House Counsel Don McGahn.
“With a sprawling business empire and potentially unlimited portfolio in the Administration to address ‘strangling regulations,’ Mr. Icahn’s role presents an unacceptable risk of further real or potential conflicts of interest absent immediate and thorough steps to address them,” they wrote.
Tuesday’s letter acknowledges that Icahn’s conflicts of interest could extend to any potential investigation of Icahn. It is addressed to Pruitt, as well as the acting chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Jay Clayton, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Mr. Icahn was reported to be heavily involved in interviewing candidates to for [sic] SEC Chairman,” they wrote, “and SEC Chairman Clayton has acknowledged that he met with Mr. Icahn after he was nominated as SEC Chair.”
Read the letter below:By Conor Krupke
Physical silence can be deafening, but communal silence can kill.
As a gay undergraduate at a Christian College, it is probably not surprising that I found myself caught up in a culture of silence around the topic of sexual orientation. It took time to gain the confidence and support, but during my second year at Gordon College, I spoke up and broke that silence.
I was interviewed for a story on the gay underground. At the time, that was a really accurate description of the LGBT+ community at Gordon College; closeted, afraid, silent. Well, mostly.
Our campus has two primary resources available to support the LGBT+ community—an anonymous support group, and an anonymous publication that only actually discusses issues of sexual orientation every four years. While these two resources are a great support for the community, the fact that there are only anonymous supports available sends a clear message to gay students—this is a struggle that you must wrestle through in the dark, alone and ashamed.
I mentioned this in my interview with the student publication.
”Creating a culture of silence is the most dangerous thing a community can do. By not bringing this conversation into the light, we are forcing it to stay in the shadows. We are reinforcing the need for people who wrestle with this issue to wrestle alone in shame.”
Recognizing the damage this silencing had on my community, I decided it was time to speak up. In the weeks leading up to the publication of the interview, I moved through my list of close friends, coming out to them in person so they wouldn’t hear about it through a newspaper or campus gossip. I strengthened my support system, and braced for impact.
The paper was published in late April, and there was almost no reaction. I got a few comments of support from faculty who read the article, but in general, my peers did not respond at all. At that time, most students were out of touch with current events of the college, and the school newspaper had pretty low ratings. I assume that the few who did read the article did not think much of it, or just simply didn’t know how to talk about the topic. Before I knew it, the semester drew to a close, and the “big news” was quickly forgotten.
This was when I learned my first lesson in challenging a culture of silence; if I wanted to break the silence, I had to be loud. Very loud.
The next Fall my friends and I worked with the school to plan and host an entire week of events all focused on topics of sexuality. Chances are if you have any connection to Gordon College, you have heard something about this week. The two campus events on homosexuality—the only two events on this topic for the entire year—drew an incredible amount of controversy and outside attention, most of it negative. One event that was meant to be a friendly dialogue with speakers from different sides of the gay culture war quickly turned into a debate, in what has become the biggest controversy in Gordon’s living history. (If you want to hear more about the week, please read this blog by Ian Isaac, a fellow student at Gordon).
This is where I learned my second lesson; each person, regardless of stance or orientation, has an incredible amount of emotional investment in the topic of homosexuality, and this gives it the unique potential for deep emotional pain at the toss of a hat. Dialogue is fragile, and so are people. This understanding must shape our approach to the conversation if we have any hope for mending the culture war.
The ripple effects from that event are still being felt today. Some leaders responded by cracking down on campus programing on homosexuality, saying we needed to give campus the space to heal. Months of work spent on breaking the silence was actively reversed, and conversations were forced back underground. This, however, did not deter my friends and I from continuing to challenge campus policy and encourage conversation. Starting at the beginning of the spring semester, we met with administrators to discuss possible ways of moving forward. We also took to social media, and continued conversations ourselves through an independent student blog, Student InQUEERy.
At that point in the spring semester I was able to invest more time in my relationships with people on-campus. I found myself surrounded by friends from all sides of the debate on homosexuality who supported and loved me. I was able to talk openly about my experiences and frustrations, and it felt really good. I felt like a whole person as I finally found the freedom to be myself.
I remember there was a point in the middle of semester when my friends and I went out for dinner at a local restaurant. It was a larger group, and I didn’t know everyone. In the middle of our meal, one of the guys who I did not know made a comment about something being gay. In the past, this comment would have eaten me alive. I would have boiled inside, but been too afraid to say anything. But this time was noticeably different; I wasn’t afraid, or even angry. I felt empowered to speak up, but there was no need. My friends at the table quickly spoke up, addressing the comment, and helping the person realize the true weight of his words.
This was maybe my favorite lesson of the year. Coming out is terrifying, but being out is liberating. This doesn’t mean that people can’t hurt you, because they will. But when you are out, you have the ability to create a network of support around you. These, you will find, are your truest friends. These are the ones you will keep in touch with, and the ones who will stand beside you. They will share the burden you never should have carried alone.
Most of my experiences this year that are related to my orientation come in the context of challenging campus policy and finding ways to make campus more comfortable for others. This involved a lot of difficult conversations and vulnerability that I did not want to offer, but that was required. Towards the close of the semester, campus conversation started up again, and new controversies followed close behind.
It has been in this last push to break the silence that I learned my final lesson; one that I wish I never had to learn. When pushing for the humanization of a marginalized social group, there will always be people who voice their support for you and your goals. They encourage you in person, and may even defend you in public. But when it is time to take steps toward those goals, they question your motives and stand in your way. They realize the true cost of change, and they do not stand with you in the storm. Once the storm is over, they may even take credit for your victory.
The best advice I have for this is to remember the reasons for your relentless sacrifice and the future vision that you strive towards. When pushing for social change, the goal is never award or public recognition. In fact, you will probably be forgotten, and your credit will go to others who are undeserving. But if you are successful, your work will be remembered. The people who come after you will reap the benefits. For me, this means the students coming after me face significantly less fear in coming out. There is new precedence for conversation on the topic, and the foundation is laid for great leaps forward. When challenges arise, or when people turn their backs, remember whom you are fighting for and where you are heading.
So to those of you who may be considering coming out or engaging in social change, I say, be bold. Be ready for things to get worse before they get better. Be aware that situations may not improve until after you are gone. But do not let this turn you away from the challenge of change for there is hope, and that hope is you.
———————————For months, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has unleashed a barrage of slights and snipes onto the Houston Rockets, framing the regime of general manager Daryl Morey in the most unflattering of ways. It has been an undermining, calculated campaign. Just understand this, though: No longer does it go unanswered.
In this fierce feud born of bitter competition – from Cuban deriding Dwight Howard's decision to choose Houston, to hiring Rockets executive Gersson Rosas as GM only to have him resign and return to Houston months later, to stealing free agent Chandler Parsons with a maximum contract – Cuban has fully engaged Houston and escalated a rivalry into a burgeoning blood war.
Morey has played a part in feeding the frenzy, too. "I think [Cuban's] pissed that we went after Dirk [Nowitzki] in free agency, however unsuccessful it was," Morey told Yahoo Sports. Yes, Morey respects the tactical purposes behind Cuban's crusade, but rejects his reasoning as flawed – even downright untrue.
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"We've been pretty good, and I think he's doing a smart thing to take on a rival," Morey told Yahoo Sports late Sunday. "He should want to beat up on San Antonio, too, but it's hard to paint the Spurs that way. So he's directed his bully pulpit onto us. Our owner stays above the fray, so I'm outgunned honestly.
"But let's be clear: If the money's equal between the Rockets and Mavericks, I think players are picking Houston. Every time. For Dwight [Howard], I just don't think it was a hard choice between us and Dallas. If you want to win, you're going to want to join our organization. We have a first-team All-NBA player in his prime [James Harden]. They have an enormously talented superstar [Dirk Nowitzki] but he obviously isn't 24 years old.
Mavs owner Mark Cuban helped lure Chandler Parsons away from the Rockets. (USA Today)
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"The choice was pretty obvious between the two teams. Dwight is the smart guy in this."
In Cuban's most recent baiting of the Rockets, he proclaimed that Morey had little regard for player chemistry, relying largely on the merits of math. Morey seethed over the premise and fired back to Yahoo Sports: "I completely reject it."
"Our teams have had great chemistry, and it's something we believe in. Hey, if Mark believed so much in chemistry, he wouldn't have busted up a title team for cap room. He's trying to reunite a lot of those people now, bringing back the center [Tyson Chandler] from that title team. Maybe he's got some chemistry religion recently.
"He's tripled his analytics staff. If he's equating analytics with not caring about chemistry, well, he's tripling down on it. I think he's smart to paint a competitor in a negative light, but none of those statements are lining up. He says that we're the team that you sign with and then we will trade you, when that's what he said he would've done with Dwight.
"We don't care about chemistry, but he busted up a championship team for what he hoped cap room could do."
These franchises have come to loathe each other. On the eve of training camp, the Rockets and Mavericks promise a season of downright disdain. Morey has tremendous respect for Cuban's intellect and accomplishments, readily accepting this: "He has a ring. I don't."
Nevertheless, Morey has grown disillusioned over how unchallenged Cuban's criticisms have been in the public discord. From the fact that Cuban contends Houston shuffles players in and out without regard to loyalty, that the Rockets are forever angling to recruit good players in pursuit of someone better, Morey wondered this: How did it differ from Dallas' model.
"We're no different than other teams," Morey told Yahoo Sports. "We have a core of two players – Dwight Howard and James Harden – who we are going to build around and never trade. San Antonio has had three core guys who they've done an unbelievable job of building around, making a lot of changes around that core. We had Tracy McGrady and Yao [Ming] and we made changes around them. And Mark's had a core of one [Nowitzki], who was there since before he bought the team."
Dwight Howard passed on an offer from the Mavs the summer he signed with the Rockets. (Getty Images)
Morey forever loves to parade his proud old champions and Hall of Famers into his free agent recruiting processes, the Olajuwons and Drexlers, the stars forever loyal to the franchise's history. Cuban is the Mavericks history, and he deserves immense praise for the championship culture created under his watch.
This rivalry has grown nasty, a touch personal and has the feel of old-time Southwest Conference recruiting. The Mavericks and Rockets are going to be terrific this season, Western Conference contenders, and the hard feelings promise to get only edgier.
"We're fighting for the hearts and minds of free agents," Morey said, and finally, the general manager of these Houston Rockets had joined the fray, too. Perhaps he's right – Mark Cuban has him outgunned – but no longer do Dallas' shots go unanswered, no longer do the Rockets stay out of the scrum. This is getting good now. In the shadow of San Antonio, this is Texas' championship chase.
More NBA coverage:France’s chief of state has pledged his support for the American artist Paul McCarthy, after the artist’s 80-foot-tall inflatable sculpture “Tree,” which bares an uncanny resemblance to a butt plug, proved intolerable to prudish Parisians.
“France will always be on the side of artists, just as I am on the side of Paul McCarthy, whose work was sullied, no matter what one’s opinion of the piece may have been,” said François Hollande at last night’s opening of Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, according to Agence France Presse. “We must always respect the work of artists … France is always ready to welcome artists and creatives coming from every country in the world.” Both McCarthy and his artwork were attacked, forcing the piece’s emergency de-installation.
“France is no longer herself when she is folded in on herself, tormented by ignorance and intolerance,” Hollande added hyperbolically. “The country would plunge into decline if it refused to be itself, if it was afraid of the future, afraid of the world.”
The sculpture had been inflated in Paris’s Place Vendôme as part of the public art programming surrounding this week’s art fairs in the French capital. Now, visitors to the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain will have to content themselves with just one giant erotic monument.One February day in 2015, Mark Rutledge walked into his gym in Frankfort, Kentucky, looking for someone who knew how to get Pappy Van Winkle. It would not be easy. Only 7,000 cases of Pappy are filled each year; a bottle from the 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle reserve retails for $249, if you can find one, and Rutledge knew that a couple of his gym buddies worked at the distillery where Pappy was made. Pappy rarely makes it to liquor-store shelves, set aside instead for VIP customers or sold by lottery. A bottle of the latest 23-year-old sells for as much as $4,000 on the resale market. Rutledge, who was a manager at Intel, had recently impressed his friends and co-workers by taking them to a bar in Louisville that offered Pappy at $100 a shot. He was heading to a conference in Texas and wanted to bring some along.
At least he was in the right place: Bourbon doesn’t have to be distilled in Kentucky, but 95 percent of it is, and Frankfort sits along a string of distilleries including Woodford Reserve, Wild Turkey, and Buffalo Trace, which makes nine of the 10 most expensive bourbons, including Pappy Van Winkle.
One of the guys at Rutledge’s gym was a stocky, barrel-chested 45-year-old named Gilbert “Toby” Curtsinger, who worked at Buffalo Trace and told Rutledge he knew of a bottle of 20-year-old Pappy that could be had for $1,000. Rutledge was interested in that and more, should Curtsinger come across any. About a week later, Curtsinger came back with nine bottles of different vintages. Rutledge bought the lot for $3,000, and on March 11, boarded a plane to his conference with most of them in his luggage.
The same morning a detective in Frankfort received an anonymous text message: “You might be interested in whiskey being stolen in full barrels from Wild Turkey.” While 5.7 million barrels of bourbon are currently aging in warehouses throughout Kentucky, they aren’t often found in suburban backyards.
The detectives smelled the bourbon before they saw it. When they lifted a tarp behind a backyard shed, the officers discovered five oak barrels, each spray-painted to conceal identifying marks. The barrels turned out to be filled with premium bourbon distilled by Wild Turkey and had a combined value of about $30,000. The house belonged to Toby Curtsinger, who sat on his patio while detectives searched the house. They found 11 handguns, five rifles, three shotguns, a silencer, a half-dozen types of anabolic steroids, various drugs for erectile dysfunction, and a plastic bag of hypodermic needles. Curtsinger told the police he’d gotten the bourbon from a friend who worked at Wild Turkey. When they asked to see his phone, Curtsinger suggested they ignore any texts about selling Pappy. He assured them they were meant as jokes.
Curtsinger, his wife, Julie, and eight others were indicted on charges of operating a criminal syndicate that trafficked in bourbon and anabolic steroids. Both Curtsingers refused to comment on the case. (This account comes largely from court filings, including voluntary statements, evidence lists, police reports, and text messages.) Among those allegedly involved were truck drivers, cops, and security guards; they went by nicknames like Smoothie and Big Ticket. Three were distillery employees, and several had met playing softball. The Curtsinger Nine was sort of a bourbon country Ocean’s Eleven.
Because Curtsinger worked at Buffalo Trace, people immediately wondered whether those indicted had been responsible for the infamous theft of some 200 bottles of Pappy 17 months earlier (Kentucky’s Case of the Missing Bourbon ran a New York Times headline), but the barrels behind Curtsinger’s home were from Wild Turkey, which hadn’t reported anything missing, suggesting this was an even wider caper.
The police eventually recovered whiskey valued at more than $100,000, but they believed that was only the tip of the iceberg. The investigation rippled throughout greater Frankfort, revealing a web of theft that ensnared husbands and wives, fathers and sons, CrossFit instructors and jealous ex-girlfriends — and lots of locals with stolen whiskey on their shelves. Rutledge turned in his bottles to the police. (He was not charged with any crime.) One man burned his barrel, while another supposedly poured bottle after bottle after bottle down the sink. “Don’t go light a match in the Kentucky River,” one attorney told me. “It might light up on fire.”
When Toby Curtsinger was born, in 1969, bourbon was in the dumps. The postwar gentleman’s drink was giving way to booze that went better with cranberry juice and pink umbrellas. By 1976, vodka had become America’s most popular liquor. Distilleries throughout Kentucky shut down or were sold. Business was so bad that the Van Winkle family resorted to hawking its whiskey reserves in porcelain decanters decorated with cheesy bird drawings.
When Julian Van Winkle III took over the company, in 1981, he was selling so little whiskey that he decided to try an experiment. Most bourbon spends between four and eight years inside a barrel. Van Winkle wanted to see what would happen if he let some of his sit in the barrel for, well, he wasn’t quite sure how long.
Bourbon is, by legal requirement, distilled grain aged in new oak barrels. At least half of the grain must be corn, typically flavored with a kick of barley and rye. But Pappy, like Maker’s Mark and others, also uses wheat, giving its bourbon a smoother taste with “a seemingly endless and evolving cascade that introduces notes of cigar box, sweet tobacco, leather, and dried tangerine.”
That ode to the joys of Pappy came from the Beverage Testing Institute, which, in 1997, after Van Winkle had finally opened his barrels, handed his 20-year-old whiskey a 99 rating — the highest ever given to a bourbon. The timing of that rating couldn’t have been better. The craft beer movement was reviving American tastes for alcohol with flavor, and bourbon presented itself as a sophisticated drink with a sheen of frontier authenticity. Today, distillers speak lovingly of the Mad Men effect. “When I was 21, if I went into a bar and said, ‘101 on the rocks,’ people thought, ‘He’s a roughneck,’ ” says Eddie Russell, who recently joined his father as co–master distiller at Wild Turkey. “Nowadays a 25-year-old walks in and orders bourbon on the rocks? He’s sophisticated.”
No bourbon has become as cherished — and, in some opinions, overhyped — as Pappy. In 2002, to help keep up with demand, the Van Winkles contracted with Buffalo Trace to distill all six Pappy varieties: the 10, 12, 15, 20, and 23-year-old versions, plus a rye whiskey. But the demand still outpaces supply — after all, it takes 23 years to make 23-year-old bourbon. An app and a Twitter feed track Pappy sightings; even empty Pappy bottles can sell for $300. If you want the real thing, your best option just might be to steal some.
Toby Curtsinger grew up not far from Wild Turkey’s distillery in Lawrenceburg, a town of 11,000 south of Frankfort and west of Versailles, which locals pronounce with a pair of hard l’s. He started working at Buffalo Trace after high school, and moved to a house up the road from the distillery. With a shaved head and goatee, Curtsinger could strike an imposing figure, though he was well liked around Frankfort. He was an avid hunter who sent mass text messages urging friends to lobby against firearm restrictions — all the guns in his home had been purchased legally — but turned down hunting trips for his kids’ baseball games and gymnastics meets. Curtsinger’s modest house was decorated with a Welcome Friends sign on the porch, and the backyard had a swing set, a basketball hoop, and a trampoline with protective netting.
Curtsinger spent much of his free time at Capitol View Park, where he played on travel softball teams with names like Slidin’ Dirty and Scared Hitless. He was a considerate teammate, sometimes bringing plastic jugs of whiskey for the team. Kevin Fox, a lawyer who played with Curtsinger, objected to the notion that every dugout had a Gatorade bottle of bourbon — “When you play softball, you drink beer” — but to others the idea didn’t seem odd: One player had visited Buffalo Trace and watched as employees filled jugs with excess whiskey.
Curtsinger’s job at Buffalo Trace was demanding — he often worked seven days a week, 10 hours a day — but distillery jobs are some of Kentucky’s most desirable, with an average salary of $90,000. Yet most of those jobs are in the warehouse, and upward mobility can be difficult. “Guys start there and try to work their way up,” Eddie Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller, told me. “Once guys get here, they don’t really leave.” Over more than 20 years at Buffalo Trace, Curtsinger had worked his way to a senior position on the loading dock, but it wasn’t necessarily clear where he might go from there.
Still, what might drive a man with a wife and two kids, who’s worked some two decades for the same company, to start stealing from his employer? The simple explanation might be that bourbon prices were soaring and that stealing it was pretty easy. Buffalo Trace has 450 employees spread across 440 acres, and more bourbon aging in its 15 warehouses than at any time since the 1970s. On a recent visit, I wandered around unaccompanied, in and out of various buildings, without anyone asking me whether I should be there. One employee told the police he would sometimes walk off the job with a few bottles of Pappy, while another said the cage where bottled Pappy was kept had a faulty hinge that could be removed. A third employee said he’d loaded pallets with random bourbons surrounding a hidden case of Pappy, which he rode off with while another employee fudged the inventory numbers.
(Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post / Getty Images)
Curtsinger started small. According to the investigation, around 2008 he began lifting bottles from display cases at the distillery. As a precaution, he would casually ask co-workers about security cameras around the facility. Curtsinger could be a generous colleague, loaning cash to co-workers |
official to visit Syria since the war erupted in 2011.
Neither Washington nor its allies have indicated they are about to embark on a campaign to retake Raqqa or Mosul city, the other main stronghold of the militants in Iraq.
Raqqa city sits in the centre of the province of the same name, which borders Turkey to the north.
During his visit, Votel met some SDF commanders as well as US troops who are training the force, the US Defence Department said.
The SDF have driven the IS group from wide areas of northern Syria and in February captured the town of al Shadadi, a major logistics hub for the militants that was connected by a network of highways in Hasaka province. Its capture had further isolated Raqqa.
Falluja offensive
The IS group’s territory in Iraq and Syria has shrunk significantly from its peak. The group is also being targeted in a separate campaign by the Syrian military and its allies, including Russia.
At the same time as the offensive near Raqqa was getting underway, Iraqi forces were closing in Tuesday on the city of Falluja, another IS group stronghold, after capturing the nearby town of Garma.
"Federal forces advanced towards the east of Falluja early today from three directions," police Lieutenant General Raed Shakir Jawdat told AFP.
The Hashed al-Shaabi umbrella paramilitary organisation, dominated by Tehran-backed Shiite militias that are heavily involved in the operation, said ground was also gained south of Falluja.
A Fallujah resident reached by telephone told AFP there was heavy shelling on the northern edge of the city Tuesday.
"Daesh (the IS group) is still imposing a curfew, preventing people from coming out on the street," said the man, who gave his name as Abu Mohammed al-Dulaimi.
"The number of Daesh members is decreasing and we have started seeing them walk in the street in groups of two or three. We don't know where the others are," he said.
It was unclear what kind of defence the IS group was prepared to put up in Falluja, a city that looms large in modern jihadist mythology since 2004 battles that saw US forces suffer some of their worst losses since the Vietnam War.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, REUTERS)Lafayette, Louisiana, has a population of around 125,000. That makes it about the 200th largest city in the country; not really big but not really all that small either. It has a unique culture and geography, but the layout and design of the city are very ordinary American. Get outside of the core downtown and surrounding neighborhoods to visit the strip malls, big box stores and residential subdivisions and Lafayette looks like any other city you'll pass through.
I stress its unremarkable nature not to denigrate it in any way -- I love the city and I have a special fondness for the people of Lafayette -- but to help connect you, the reader, to a shared plight. Except for a small handful of North American cities -- literally five or less -- Lafayette provides an insight into why your city has no money.
Problems have solutions. Predicaments have outcomes. What is happening in Lafayette is not a problem; it's a predicament.
Along with my good friends and colleagues Joe Minicozzi and Josh McCarty of Urban 3, I was invited to work with the city of Lafayette to help them get a handle on why they could not keep up with infrastructure maintenance. Through a strange path, the city had found itself with a lawyer turned newspaper reporter -- a really sharp guy named Kevin Blanchard -- as their public works director. Questions that prior directors had found inconvenient to ask were now front and center.
Like most cities, Lafayette had the written reports detailing an enormously large backlog of infrastructure maintenance. At current spending rates, roads were going bad faster than they could be repaired. With aggressive tax increases, the rate of failure could be slowed, but not reversed. The story underground was even worse. Ironically, this news had historically been the rationale for building even more infrastructure (theory: this is a problem that we'll grow our way out of). That didn't make sense to Kevin or to the city's mayor, a guy named Joey Durel.
Joe, Josh and I interviewed all the city's department heads and key staff. We gathered as much data as we could (they had a lot). We analyzed and then mapped out all of the city's revenue streams by parcel. We then did the same for all of the city's expenses. This was the most comprehensive geographic analysis of a city's finances that I've ever seen completed. When we finished, we had a three dimensional map showing what parts of the city generated more revenue than expense (in business terms, this would be called profit) and what parts of the city generated more expense than revenue (again, in business terms, this is considered a loss).
Here's that map. In accounting terms, green equals profit and red equals loss. The higher the block goes, the larger the amount of profit/loss. If you have a sense of the basic layout of North American cities post World War II, you can figure out pretty easily what is going on here.President Trump on Thursday gave himself a perfect rating for his response to the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico.
“I would give myself a 10,” Trump said when asked by reporters how he would score his efforts, on a one to 10 scale.
Trump spoke during a meeting with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, who is in Washington to push the federal government to provide disaster relief for the island.
“We have provided so much, so fast,” Trump said, adding the disaster in Puerto Rico was "worse than Katrina."
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The president’s self-assessment is at odds with the opinions of many in the U.S. territory, who have criticized the administration's response.
Rosselló declined to rate the federal relief efforts, even after Trump turned to him, touched his arm and asked "did we do a great job?" He repeatedly said that the White House has answered “all of our petitions.”
Roughly 80 percent of the island remains without electricity and almost 30 of the island still does not have access to clean water, according to Puerto Rican government figures.
The House last week passed a $36.5 billion aid package for Puerto Rico and other areas hit by natural disasters. The Senate is soon expected to consider the measure.
The governor met with GOP Sen. Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 MORE (Fla.), whose state has a large population of Puerto Ricans, before heading to the White House.
Vice President Pence, Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney John (Mick) Michael MulvaneyOvernight Defense: White House eyes budget maneuver to boost defense spending | Trump heads to Hanoi for second summit with Kim | Former national security officials rebuke Trump on emergency declaration Overnight Health Care — Presented by National Taxpayers Union — Trump, Dems open drug price talks | FDA warns against infusing young people's blood | Facebook under scrutiny over health data | Harris says Medicare for all isn't socialism White House spokeswoman leaving to join PR firm MORE also participated in the meeting.
- Updated at 1:05 p.m.Whichever social network you choose, it’s undeniable that being social is a key part of why you enjoy the Web. Firefox is built to put you in control, including making it easier to share anything you like on the Web’s most popular social networks. Today, we’re announcing that Firefox Share has been integrated into Firefox Hello. We introduced Firefox Share to offer a simple way of sharing Web content across popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Google+ and other social and email services (full list here) to help you share anything on the Web with any or all of your friends.
Firefox Hello, which we’ve been developing in beta with our partner, Telefonica, is the only in-browser video chat tool that doesn’t require an account or extra software downloads. We recently added screen sharing to Firefox Hello to make it easier to share anything you’re looking at in your video call. Now you can also invite friends to a Firefox Hello video call by sharing a link via the social network or email account of your choice, all without leaving your browser tab. That includes a newly added Yahoo Mail integration in Firefox Share that lets Yahoo Mail users share Hello conversation links or other Web content directly from Firefox Share.
For more information:
Release Notes for Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
Release Notes for Android
Download FirefoxFive long years ago, Zoe Lofgren was a hero. The Bay Area representative took a lonely stand against many of her Democratic colleagues, in what became known as the SOPA fight.
SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act — was a top priority of Hollywood and other artists and creators, aimed at stifling the free flow of content on the web. Open internet advocates pushed back against the bill in 2011 and 2012, and a coalition of big platforms, online progressive groups, and tech libertarians rallied to stop it in its tracks, with Lofgren as the lead champion in the House.
The next year, Edward Snowden laid bare the secret surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, carried out in collusion with cable companies and tech platforms, and Lofgren, a key figure on the House Judiciary Committee, once again took the lead. “Lofgren has been the House Judiciary Committee’s staunchest opponent of government surveillance during the post-Snowden era,” said David Segal, head of Demand Progress, who, along with his fellow co-founder the late Aaron Swartz, was deeply involved in the battle over SOPA.
Had Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., then well into his 80s, retired from Congress, Lofgren would have been well-positioned to claim the top-ranking seat on the Judiciary Committee. Yet he ran for re-election. Again. And again. And again.
He stayed so long that Lofgren’s brand of Silicon Valley politics is now past its expiration date, her once virtuous alliance with the forces of progress and innovation curdling into a protection racket for increasingly unpopular monopolies.
Conyers on Sunday announced he is stepping down as the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, launching a battle for his successor that has pitted two Democratic rivals — Lofgren and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. — against each other. On the one hand, his resignation comes in a politically fortuitous way for Lofgren, with Conyers felled not by age but by allegations of sexual harassment. The political logic of replacing him with a woman is obvious. But then there’s Google.
The race for committee chair threatens to become the first fight over monopoly politics after the rollout of House Democrats’ “Better Deal” platform for 2018, which was built on going after concentrated power, particularly in the tech sector. Elected to Congress in 1994, Lofgren represents San Jose and the Bay Area, and is far and away the most stalwart defender of big Silicon Valley firms among House Democrats.
“It certainly may raise questions to have someone from Silicon Valley in a position where one of the key responsibilities is to oversee the conduct of Silicon Valley,” said Jonathan Kanter, a prominent antitrust attorney.
As the politics of the internet has drifted from fostering freedom and openness to reining in the platforms whose monopoly power now threatens that freedom, so too has Lofgren drifted away. And for Democrats uninterested in monopoly politics, there’s Vladimir Putin, whom the party contends tilted the 2016 election while tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube at best looked the other way.
Lofgren has been unbowed in her allegiance. When U.S. antitrust authorities came for Google during the Obama administration, Lofgren was one of the few Democrats to publicly pressure them to back off.
When the European Commission fined Google a record $2.7 billion in June of this year, as the result of an antitrust investigation, Lofgren was the only Democrat to voice outrage. Unforced, she offered a strident defense of the company:
Europe has long lamented their inability to foster innovative businesses that can compete globally with U.S. technology companies. Now, rather than offering consumers a truly competitive marketplace with European companies rivaling their American counterparts, the European Commission is attempting to regulate innovation and competition into existence. This is unfair to European consumers, and unfair to the U.S. companies participating in European markets. The United States should now take a more assertive role in ensuring a level playing field and protecting U.S. companies against overzealous and protectionist policies overseas.
In the immediate wake of the news of Conyers’s decision, an aide to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told the New York Times reporter who broke the story that Nadler would take over in an acting capacity.
Nadler is next in line due to his seniority, but Lofgren, who is just behind Nadler, has been calling colleagues to gin up support to challenge him, according to Democratic members of the committee who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to get in the middle of a fight between two colleagues. If Democrats take over the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, the lawmaker in the acting role would have an inside track to become full committee chair.
The committee will meet for a vote as soon as Wednesday, so Democrats have precious little time to sort things out. Nadler has effectively announced his plan to take the reins, but Lofgren wants a full caucus vote on who should get the seat. (Complicating matters is Conyers’s professed plan to return to the seat after the ethics probe into sexual assault allegations is over, a plan few Democrats want to see implemented and even fewer think is possible.)
Nadler, who was elected in 1992 and represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, has not been outspoken on the issue of antitrust and Big Tech, but he has a record of approaching the industry with skepticism. He has been an ally of creators, a position that shaped his support for SOPA. “The problem of rogue websites is real, immediate, and increasing. It harms companies across the spectrum. And its scope is staggering,” he said at the time, though he never became an official sponsor. “The Stop Online Piracy Act has broad support across the aisle here in the House, across the street in the Senate and across the country.”
When the committee took up its patent reform bill, he backed amendments that were opposed by Google, while Lofgren stood on the opposite side.
As early as 2001, he introduced legislation challenging broadband operators. “This issue really hits home,” he said at the time. “It took my service provider nearly a month to simply transfer my current Internet connection from my old district office to my new one when we moved recently. We had no e-mail or access to the Web during that entire time. I’m a Congressman, imagine what is happening to the average consumer.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., third from right, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., second from left, join with other members of the House Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet Subcommittee in wearing 3D glasses while watching a demonstration of 3D technology on Capitol Hill on July 25, 2013 in Washington, D.C. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Caucus votes for top committee spots are where the power of money in politics flexes its muscles. The way to win the vote of a rank-and-file member is rarely to make a persuasive speech or become a leader on a progressive cause. Rather, votes are won with money — industry money. Senior members of the House use their committee seats to raise cash, which they then dole out to the party’s campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as directly to other members. In the entire 2016 cycle, Nadler gave just $100,000 to the DCCC. Lofgren that cycle contributed $270,000.
Members who become the leading voice of an industry are often able to direct campaign-giving from that industry. On paper, the contribution comes directly from the company’s PAC, but members know who was responsible for making sure the check arrived. In the case of Google in the House, that’s Lofgren.
In September, for instance, she held a “Taco Truck Fiesta” fundraiser at Oracle’s Capitol Hill townhouse. The memo from her campaign inviting members of Congress said that its “purpose is to raise funds for Lofgren for Congress and Mainstream PAC (Congresswoman Lofgren’s Leadership PAC) and also for Congresswoman Lofgren to bundle campaign funds for her Democratic colleagues.”
The letter included a long list of lobbyists who would be at the event — first among them was Google — and went on to boast about how much money Lofgren has raised for her colleagues:
In addition to the funds Congresswoman Lofgren has raised for her own campaign and Leadership PAC through this event, at the time of this briefing she has also bundled $291,500 for her colleagues. This quarter, Congresswoman Lofgren also contributed $75,000 to the DCCC to fulfill her dues goal for the election cycle; Congresswoman Lofgren was one of the first Members – and one of only three as of the time of this briefing — to pay their dues for the cycle in full.
That kind of fundraising ability comes with a cost. Lofgren’s defense of Google in the face of the European Union’s assault was no aberration, as she has supported the technology giant through multiple political headwinds. In 2012, amid reports that the Federal Trade Commission considered an antitrust investigation into Google, Lofgren was one of two Democrats to sign a letter to the agency, asking that the FTC back off. The letter claimed that an FTC inquiry into the firm over questions of whether it had used its dominance as the top search engine to stifle competitors in areas such as shopping and travel was out of its jurisdiction.
“Such a massive expansion of FTC jurisdiction would be unwarranted, unwise, and likely have negative implications for our nation’s economy,” Lofgren wrote, in a letter co-signed by Rep. Anna Eshoo, another California Democrat.
(After the 2014 midterms, Eshoo similarly tried to take out a higher-ranking Democrat to assume the top slot on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Despite having Pelosi’s support, Eshoo lost.)
The FTC ultimately dropped the antitrust probe into Google’s anti-competitive behavior amid furious lobbying by the search engine giant.
On issues as diverse as privacy, intellectual property, tax, and immigration, Lofgren could often be counted on as a loyal vote for Google’s priorities.
In 2009, Lofgren spoke out in favor of Google’s controversial plan to digitize millions of books from libraries without the explicit approval from copyright holders. Sometimes, her allegiance with Silicon Valley aligns her with online progressive advocates, such as Segal’s Demand Progress.
She played an integral role in the landmark 2012 SOPA fight, which pitted Google and other platforms primarily against the Motion Picture Association of America. It would have created new liability standards for search engines found responsible for posting copyrighted content, and its defeat was a major victory for open internet advocates.
Fresh off that win, she appeared, along with Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas on a keynote panel on immigration reform at the 2013 Netroots Nation conference, a gathering of progressive bloggers and activists. (One of the reporters of this story moderated the panel.)
But during tax reform discussions in 2011, Lofgren proposed a special tax holiday for corporations to repatriate foreign earnings — a key priority for Google and other Silicon Valley tech firms. The Lofgren tax bill, which provided a one-time tax holiday for foreign earnings to bring the 35 percent corporate tax rate down to 5.25 percent for one year, was supported by House Republican leadership.
Like many Bay Area Democrats, she has pushed to expedite the approval and increase the number of visas for high-skilled workers, an effort that would allow more foreign engineers and other tech workers into the country and would benefit a wide array of tech firms. But Lofgren has often couched her support for expanded immigration as a direct benefit to Google, which, she argues, has been a boon to the U.S.
“I often say I am glad that Google is in Mountain View rather than Moscow,” Lofgren said, announcing her support for comprehensive immigration reform in 2013 that included provisions supporting high-skilled workers. “Immigrants from industrialist Andrew Carnegie to Google’s Sergey Brin came to our shores, and in the process, created new innovative enterprises and unparalleled prosperity for the United States,” notes a separate page on Lofgren’s congressional website.
Even Lofgren’s opposition to President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries was framed in terms of Google’s response. “I would note that when the travel ban went into effect and people all over the country went to airports to protest, one of those who were there was the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin,” Lofgren told reporters.
And not only has Lofgren routinely ranked among the top recipients of Google campaign cash, her congressional staffers have gone on to work for Google’s trade associations in Washington, D.C.
Erik Stallman, former counsel to Lofgren, previously lobbied on behalf of the Internet Association, a technology trade association that counts Google as a member. David Thomas, her former chief of staff, currently represents the Google-backed Information Technology Industry Council. Thomas did not respond to a comment about Lofgren’s chance to become the next ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee. “Thanks for reaching out. We have no comment on the matter,” said Jose Castaneda, a spokesperson for the ITIC.
Thomas was listed as a co-host of Lofgren’s fundraisers in March and September.
If Lofgren fails to force the issue of succession to a vote of the full caucus, it won’t be her last shot. Following the midterms elections of 2018, Democrats will once again come together to choose who will be the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
It’ll be a moment for Google to find out if its money is still good in Washington.
Update: November 29, 2017
Lofgren has lost this round, as Democratic leadership named Nadler acting ranking-member in a private meeting Tuesday night, according to a Democratic source not authorized to speak publicly about the meeting. If Conyers resigns from Congress, a full caucus vote for the ranking seat will be held. On Wednesday morning, Lofgren announced her intention to run for the position at the next available opportunity.Chef Jimmy Li was the man behind two criminally overlooked, relatively short-lived Chinese restaurants on Spring Mountain Road—Three Villages and 1900 Asian Cuisine. These were tucked-away places that didn’t necessarily go out of their way to appeal to non-Asian eaters, but the food was consistently glorious.
Li is back with a new location (still tucked away, though), a new name in Niu-Gu and a new partner in longtime local wine pro Joe Muscaglione. Located in the Chinatown-area Mountain View Plaza on Jones Boulevard, Niu-Gu has its work cut out, since its restaurant neighbors include China Mama, Chada Thai & Wine and District One, among others, but Li’s cuisine is just as delicious and satisfying as it has always been.
Niu-Gu is far from formal, but the food achieves a level of Chinese-restaurant sophistication usually found only within Strip casinos—and in traditional Chinatown fashion, Niu-Gu offers it for far less money. Beef tongue salad ($7), tender, funky coins of meat layered with crisp cucumber in a powerhouse XO sauce, is a must-order cold appetizer, reminiscent of a pork belly dish to which I became addicted at the former 1900. If you need a more familiar bite to get things going, opt for pan-fried pork dumplings ($5) or lightly steamed oysters in a savory garlic broth topped with scallions ($9).
Chinese menus are typically lacking in dish description, which can make eating at more authentic restaurants like this intimidating. You would never know that triple chili pork ($15) is actually a massive, fiery, garlicky stew, rich morsels of pork tenderloin swimming with red chili pods and slurpable veggies. Sometimes something that reads like an afterthought makes for the most memorable meal.
The slow-roasted beef shortrib ($18) is the signature house dish, but I prefer Niu-Gu’s more exotic, hard-to-find fare, like cumin-laced lamb chops ($16) or sautéed Chinese yam with black fungus ($12), a dish popping with freshness despite its funny name. Sichuan-style mapo doufu ($10) is done traditionally with super-soft tofu awash in chili oil with tender bits of pork, perhaps the best version of this dish I’ve tasted in Las Vegas.
Several specials are always in rotation depending what’s available, like the whole steamed fish of the day, which I enviously watched an entire family devour during my first visit, or a simple side of garlic vegetables—beautifully flavored pea greens—on that same visit. Black peppercorn beef tenderloin fried rice ($11) is a side that eats like a meal unto itself, and ditto for the spicy-sour shrimp fried rice in fish sauce ($11). When Niu-Gu opened a few months back, it was much more noodle-centric, so rest assured the hot and sour pork tenderloin noodle soup ($9) follows through on the flavors promised.
To further complement Li’s food, Muscaglione has installed one of the most intense tea programs in the city, including traditional tableside tea ceremonies. It’s a unique touch, another reason Niu-Gu deserves the attention its predecessors didn’t seem to receive.
Niu-Gu 3400 S. Jones Blvd. #16, 702-570-6363. Daily, 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico.
...
The selection of Kennedy would be a shrewd early move for the new presidential team. Obama advisers said the nomination would please both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
It also would raise the profile of the EPA, which would help endear Obama to liberals who may be disappointed on other issues important to the Democratic left because of budget restrictions.
The EPA enforces clean air and clear water laws. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and son of the late senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, has long championed a cleaner water supply for New York City.
As an officer and attorney for the environmental watch group Riverkeeper, Kennedy has taken on governments and companies for polluting the Hudson River and Long Island Sound.It's time for flying ant day in large parts of the UK, when they embark on their annual mating ritual. So how do the ants know it's their one day a year to mate?
The sun has finally come out, summer has arrived and with it comes the annual swarm of flying ants.
This seasonal appearance occurs when the ants embark on their "nuptial" flight. This mating ritual happens on roughly the same day across the country, with some regions following a day or two afterwards.
For the ants it is the first step in founding new colonies. So how do they know which day it will happen?
Scientists don't fully understand how the ritual works but do know weather is important. Ants pick a day by sensing temperature, humidity and day length, says Dr Mark Downs, of the Society of Biology. Warm, humid conditions are perfect. Heat makes it easier for them to fly and humidity makes the ground softer for mated queens to dig nests. How flights are synchronised between nests is still not fully understood, some suggest once ants begin to fly they give off a chemical smell that others detect.
"Ants are not the strongest fliers and they mate on the wing, so their chances of mating are greatly reduced if they come out in the rain," says Downs. "Humidity and wet weather prior to the flight also means that the ground is soft, which makes it easier for the queens to burrow down and make a nest once they have mated.
The answer Female queen ants sense temperature, humidity and day length
Warm weather enables ants to fly and mate more easily
Humidity can make the soil softer for mated queens to dig a nest
Scientists still don't fully understand how flights are synchronised between nests Explore the world of ants
"Given there's been a lot of rain over the last few weeks and now there's heat, it looks likely that most will come out over the next day or so."
Flights are synchronised between nests because the flying ants need to maximise their chances of meeting ants from other colonies to mate with. Downs says scientists still don't fully understand how this "extraordinary" synchronisation happens, with more research being done.
Queens mate with males during flight, after which the female will lose her wings and attempt to start her own colony by burrowing into the soil. Males die shortly after mating but queens can live for up to 15 years.
"The queens themselves, once they have gone down to burrow, will not eat for six to eight weeks," says Downs. "They will live off the vestige of their wings for energy while they raise their first larvae."
The most common flying ant seen at the moment is the black garden ant, the Lasius niger. The ants seen throughout the year are workers.
The Society of Biology is studying the emergence pattern of mating ants across the UK. It is asking member of the public who see flying ants to make a note of the time, date, location and weather conditions. The details can be submitted online though its website.
"We want to find out just how synchronised the emergence of flying ants is across the UK," says Down.
Biologists from the University of Girona recently published a study based on data from "nuptial" flights of the seed-harvester ant, which may help understand the flights of UK species.
The data was gathered over a six-year period last year on the Iberian peninsula and the scientists were able to identify clusters of "nuptial" flight that appeared to be triggered by the same weather fronts.
The study found the days with the highest number of flights consistently occurred a couple of days or so after rain had stopped and was clear of the peninsula.
Ants play an important role in the ecosystem, among other things they improve soil quality, help pollinate flowers and feed on pests. They are also an important source of food for other animals.When Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he was purchasing The Washington Post last year, one of the big questions was whether he'd put the marketing weight of Amazon behind the paper. Today the answer comes in the form of a free six-month subscription to The Post for anyone who's bought a Kindle Fire tablet in the last few years, access the paper eventually plans to charge for. What's more, Amazon is pushing the app out to existing Kindle owners inside a software update, though the company says people will be able to delete it if they don't want it.
The new Post app takes a page from print publications (though not literally) with both a morning edition and a late edition delivered 12 hours apart, something newsreaders like Yahoo News Digest have adopted. Notably, it doesn't contain a local news page, opting to show a selection of hand-picked stories instead. Details of the app's production, dubbed internally as "Project Rainbow" were reported by Bloomberg Businessweek last month.
Monthly access still doesn't have a price
After the free trial is up, The Post says it plans to charge an additional $1 for another six months. After that, access to stories will cost somewhere between $3 and $5 a month, with a final price having yet to be determined. As a point of comparison, digital access to The New York Times tablet app (which also includes access to its website) runs $5 a week, and The Wall Street Journal charges $28.99 a month for access on tablets, smartphones, and its site.
The app isn't available to owners of Amazon's E ink Kindles like the Paperwhite and the Voyage, only the HD and HDX models of the Kindle Fire. Amazon told The Post that the app should be available for other Android tablets and the iPad early next year.0 SHARES Share Tweet
NASA is looking for some brave souls to become astronauts in bed, and you’ll be compensated handsomely for your service. The catch is you may will shrink during the process.
Men and women that are mentally and physically fit are being sought after by NASA. First off, though, we need to mention that NASA has no intention of sending you into space. What you will be doing, if you’re selected, is lay in a bed for 70 days, which will supposedly simulate the effects of long-duration spaceflight.
The bed will be tilted head-down at a six-degree angle, which means your body fluids will shift to the upper body, causing cardiovascular events that mimic the ones ‘real’ astronauts experience during their journey. The reason you will ‘shrink’ while sitting in bed for 70 days is because the lack of muscle use will cause atrophy—hence, you will lose some bulk.
Using space simulations here on earth will save NASA valuable resources which can be put to better use when it comes time for a real mission. It costs millions of dollars to send a person into space, but it only costs $18,000 to test space-like conditions here on Earth using a guinea pig. That’s right; you can earn somewhere around $18,000 if you choose to and get selected to be a bed astronaut!
We would like to remind you again that this job requires rigorous pre-screening, and only the most elite and fittest couch potatoes will be selected.
Via forbesForgive me if a wry tone eludes me when it comes to today’s proceedings in the Supreme Court. As far as I am concerned the whole thing is absurd—yet another example of how America’s antiquated system of government, and its determined refusal to accept the economic realities of the modern world, is undermining its future.
Early on in this morning’s session, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the court, said that the U.S. government had a “very heavy burden of justification” to show that an individual mandate to purchase health-care insurance was constitutional. Really? Only if Kennedy and his Republican-appointed colleagues are willing to throw out economic logic as well as seventy years of legal precedent, which, judging by their harsh questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., they may well be.
The economics isn’t very complicated. The health-care industry, which makes up about a sixth of the economy, is rife with inefficiency, waste, and coverage gaps. In seeking to remedy some of these problems, the Obama Administration made a deal with the private-insurance industry—the same deal Mitt Romney made when he was governor of Massachusetts. On the one hand, the federal government barred the insurers from discriminating against the sick and the elderly, thereby raising the industry’s costs. On the other hand, the feds obliged uninsured individuals to purchase coverage, thereby expanding the insurers’ revenues. We can argue whether this was the best way to proceed. (At the time the bill was passed, I raised some doubts about how much it would cost.) But it was a straightforward instance of the central government seeking to redress the failures of the private market—something akin to imposing fuel standards on auto manufacturers, providing state pensions, and forcing banks to hold adequate capital reserves.
In a modern, interconnected economy, activist government policies to remedy market failures are essential. Rather than confronting this argument head-on, which would involve publicly defending the actions of the banks, the insurers, and the industrial polluters, the right has settled on a strategy of trying to undermine the government through the courts, where its pro-corporate agenda can be repackaged as a defense of ancient freedoms.
Thus the bogus constitutional challenge to Obamacare, and, in particular, the individual mandate. As my colleague Jeffrey Toobin pointed out in an excellent post this morning, the issue resolves around the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives the federal government the power to “regulate Commerce … among the several States.” Where does this power begin and end? In the famous 1942 case of Wickard v. Filburn, the Court said that the federal government’s authority extends to any activity that “exerts a substantial economic effect” on commerce crossing state lines.
The case involved Roscoe Filburn, an Ohio farmer who wanted to grow more wheat than he had been allotted under quotas introduced during the Great Depression to drive up prices. In deciding against Filburn and in favor of the Department of Agriculture, the justices pointed out that the actions of individual wheat farmers, taken together, affect the price of wheat across many states. That is what gives the federal government the power to limit their actions.
Under the Wickard v. Filburn standard, the individual mandate is clearly constitutional. If ever there was an industry that crosses state lines, it is health care. As the Solicitor General’s office noted in its brief to the Court on the merits of the case, health-care spending “accounts for 17.6 percent of the nation’s economy.” From a legal perspective, that is where the matter should rest.
But, of course, this case isn’t ultimately about the law—it is about politics. The four ultra-conservative justices on the court—Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas—are in the vanguard of a movement to roll back the federal government and undermine its authority to tackle market failures. The movement began in the nineteen-eighties, when the Federalist Society got its start and Ronald Reagan appointed one of its members, Scalia, to the court—and for thirty years it has been gathering strength.
Thus the creation of a new legal theory to sink Obamacare: the idea that while the federal government might well have the authority to regulate economic activity, it doesn’t have the right to regulate inactivity—such as sitting around and refusing to buy health insurance. Now, it is as plain as the spectacles on Antonin Scalia’s nose that opting out of the health-care market is about as realistic as opting out of dying. But necessity is the mother of invention. And, judging by his questions this morning, it is this invention that Kennedy has fastened on.
As I said at the beginning, it’s a bad joke—upon us all.
Illustration by Dana Verkouteren/AP Photo.UPDATE V: Police confirm the incident has been contained and that campus is safe.
Lockdown lifted All Clear Check https://t.co/rUgGhFQmPy for details — UCLA Bruin Alert (@UCLABruinAlert) June 1, 2016
UPDATE IV |
vers to calibrate the rovers’ cameras. Last July, when the New Horizons space probe returned the first close up images up Pluto, the Internet was abuzz with surprise that Pluto appeared reddish-beige, rather than blue, as many had naively imagined. Although astronomers have known for years that Pluto is reddish in color, New Horizons’s color camera Ralph has color filters which do not precisely match up with human vision: blue, green, and two infrared (rather than red). While the images returned are close to what the human eye would perceive, they are not exact.
But if colors are simply labels created by the brain, why limit our scientific instruments to what the human body can achieve? Even if you will never experience invisible colors, take heart: the tools of modern science can shows us the world from radio waves to gamma rays and everything in between.
Like this: Like Loading...New polling says the GOP’s latest ideas on health care are unpopular and that a majority of Americans will hold President Trump and his congressional allies responsible for Obamacare’s problems moving forward, underscoring the tall task before Republicans sticking to a repeal-and-replace strategy.
Hoping to hand Mr. Trump a much-needed win, House Republicans are floating a proposal that lets states opt out of parts of the Affordable Care Act that require insurers to cover “essential” benefits and to charge healthy and sick customers the same amount.
Yet majorities say those protections should be maintained nationwide, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, the first to examine the contours of the emerging compromise plan.
Americans also are cool to the GOP’s repeal-and-replace strategy generally, with 61 percent preferring to “keep and try to improve” it, compared to 37 percent who back the Republican push.
More than 40 percent of people want Mr. Trump to work with Democrats to overhaul health care, compared to about a quarter who think he should team with conservative Republicans.
To that point, a separate poll from WSJ/NBC News out Tuesday shows a 16-point drop in confidence in the GOP when it comes to health care, with 50 percent saying they now have little to no confidence in the Republicans’ ability to improve things.
Republicans on Tuesday said they had no plans to abandon their repeal-and-replace strategy, even if it’s taking longer than they’d hoped, saying the 2010 Affordable Care Act failed to deliver and has resulted in higher premiums and fewer choices on the individual market.
“The House and the Senate continue to work on not just repealing, but repealing and replacing the Obama health care law with health care that works for all Americans,” said Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican. “So it should be no surprise that it takes some time to do that. But what’s critically important is that we get it right.”
Rep. Mark Meadows, North Carolina Republican and chairman of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus, tweeted that “Obamacare repeal and replace will happen — it’s just a matter of when.”
The White House wanted to pass a repeal bill by Saturday, the 100th day of Mr. Trump’s presidency, but House GOP leaders say they’re focused on a stopgap spending bill needed to keep the government open beyond this week.
A senior Democratic aide said negotiators on their side still want the GOP to authorize vital “cost-sharing” reimbursements for insurers in the spending bill, yet Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold them, saying it will force his political rivals to negotiate on a health overhaul.
The payments are still being made for now, but Mr. Trump can stop them by withdrawing the previous administration’s appeal of a court ruling that said the payments must be blessed by Congress to be lawful.
“ObamaCare is in serious trouble. The Dems need big money to keep it going — otherwise it dies far sooner than anyone would have thought,” Mr. Trump tweeted Sunday.
Three in five people say Mr. Trump shouldn’t use negotiating tactics that could disrupt the insurance markets, although it’s an opinion mainly driven mainly by Democrats and independents. Two thirds of Republicans are OK with the White House playing hardball in this way, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Yet 60 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say because Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans control the government, they will be responsible for any problems with Obamacare moving forward.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said 7 million low-income people rely on the payments, so it is Mr. Trump’s duty to reimburse insurers as prescribed by then-President Barack Obama’s signature law.
“In my view, it’s not part of some quid pro quo from them to us. It is the law,” he said. “It ought to be done.”
The Kaiser foundation also crunched the numbers and found that government costs would rise by $2.3 billion if the cost-sharing payments are eliminated. Insurers would hike their premiums to be made whole, forcing taxpayers to keep pace by shelling out more in Obamacare subsidies.
The House GOP is hoping to head off hard decisions on the legal case by replacing Obamacare’s framework with one that repeals its unpopular mandates and replaces its generous premium and cost-sharing subsidies with age-based tax credits, while reining in and capping federal funds for Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor.
Right now the talks center on a proposal negotiated by Rep. Tom MacArthur, New Jersey Republican who chairs the centrist Tuesday Group, and members of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus.
The plan would shift to the states the burden of deciding what services insurers must cover, and would let insurers charge healthy customers less, so long as states set up risk pools to subsidize sicker people priced out of the market.
No state could waive the part of the Affordable Care Act requiring insurers to cover people with preexisting medical conditions, however, preserving the most popular part of the 2010 health law.
It’s unclear whether the proposal can win over enough holdouts to pass. Multiple centrist holdouts said the changes did little to change their minds.
“I see nothing that makes me want to support it,” Rep. Leonard Lance, New Jersey Republican, told CNN.
Two other centrists, Rep. Tom LoBiondo of New Jersey Republican and Rep. Dan Donovan of New York, have said the changes haven’t flipped them into the “yes” column, though others are keeping their powder dry, noting they haven’t even seen legislative text.
The Washington Post-ABC News poll found that three in five U.S. adults want insurers to cover maternity care, prescription drugs and Obamacare’s other “essential” benefits in all states.
It also found that seven in 10 U.S. adults want to bar insurers from denying sick customers or charging them more nationwide, while only a quarter thinks states should decide.
The MacArthur plan says no state could waive the part of Obamacare requiring insurers to cover people with preexisting medical conditions, though analysts say that’s a meaningless protection if sick consumers face skyrocketing costs.
The emerging idea would set up high risk pools to subsidize customers priced out the market. Analysts warn that risk pools have been inadequately funded in the past, however, and appear to be shortchanged in the GOP’s latest plans.
• Sally Persons contributed to this report.
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Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment to detect gravitational waves. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. Scientists involved in the project and the analysis of the data for gravitational-wave astronomy are organised by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration which includes more than 900 scientists worldwide. And it seems the Scientists are using Linux(Ubuntu) for their experiments.
The gravitational wave signal was detected by physicists at LIGO on September 14 last year, and the historic announcement was made at a press conference this morning. Experts are already saying the discovery is a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize
Gravitational waves are so exciting because they were the last major prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity that had to be confirmed, and discovering them will help us understand how the Universe is shaped by mass.
Here is the screenshot from the recent video released by MIT
It’s not really admiring that Linux is being used to experiment Gravitational waves at LIGO. Just a couple of weeks ago we saw that Ubuntu was being used to interpret the data from the Hubble Space Telescope. But the fact that scientists choose Linux systems for their work has to do with the fact that it’s a stable, secure, and reliable operating system, no matter the distro.
Source: Youtube
Current rating: 4
Share on TwitterShare on FacebookHappy Pumpkin Month errybody. And RWBY Day too, sure. To celebrate I’m going to offer y'all this everytime unlimited offer of RWBY Recap for just $49.99! Or free, whichever works. This lovely product not only comes with a free set of steak knives, but features Ruby running circles around her interrogators, Weiss showing off her linguistic abilities, and Ozpin hedging his bets on the end of days. And CFVY! Hallelujah it’s raining CFVY. I hope it’s not fresh ‘cause that might hurt… Anyways. Last week’s showcase - that one came with the free juicer - can be found here, and the rest of our stock at the Recap Masterpost. After you’re done waiting four to six weeks, click the Read More below to get to enjoying your product.
Eight episodes down and out, four undefeated heavyweight champs remain. Any Red Vs Blue fans among y'all? Dat finale, amirite. So cool. Howsabout that X-Ray and Vav teaser, too? Do Jaune and Mercury know?! Can’t wait. Probably going to start airing after the RWBY V2 finale, and there’s three episodes before that, so bit of a ride left on our RWBY hype train before we switch tracks. All the more to recap! Good ol’ recap. Thanks again to all those sticking with me. Best of luck with this one, 'cause the caps get wordy. Aces.
PREVIOUSLY ON RWBY :: Hours into the dance, our favourite blonde disaster learns from Ruby that Weiss came alone, and he sets his murder-happy sights on Neptune. Pyrrha being sadface distracts him, and they have their twelfth chat outside at night at a place of vertically gifted architecture. P-Money reveals that she came alone, because being the popular girl isn’t always like being in the jungle what with all the fun and games, and she leaves Jaune with the knowledge that she wished she was at the dance with him. Neptune shows up and Jaune grills him over standing up Weiss Motherflipping Schnee, and Neptune drops his own honesty bomb: he can’t dance, and didn’t want to risk not looking cool by revealing this fact. Jaune sets him straight and sends him packing, and then lives up to his promise two episode earlier: wearing a dress should Pyrrha show up alone. Yes, it really happens. Team JNPR dance number ensues. Yes, it also really happens. While everyone’s distracted, Mercury and Emerald give Cinder the go-ahead to go beat up somedat guards and hack somedat computers. Ruby, having spotted both Cinder and then the unconscious guards, shows up and gets in a little tussle with Cindy Cind. She escapes when Ironwood arrives for reasons unknown but possibly related to protecting whatever asset Cinder just accessed. And as the clock strikes midnight, Cinder’s little virus or whatever in place… Dun dun dun.
And now, on RWBY, we start on Ozpin regretting his life choices.
On either side, James Oaksteel and Glynda Badwizard are arguing about Cinder’s sneaky sneaky sneak spyness. James is rather put out by the whole thing, understandably.
Very understandably. His ranting and raving - not that kind, it’s not Saturday - is cut short by a new arrival.
Miss Rose here shows up late on account of pushing all the buttons on the elevator - my favourite pasttime - and tries to start off with a bit of levity regarding her bad guy catching record.
Spoiler: if that big word scared you they’ve already won. Dust bless Ruby for trying, though. Ironwoody approaches and throws off everyone who predicted he’d blame her for the incident.
Probably for the best he didn’t. Would’ve made things awkward when Penny brought home her best friend. Hmm, I do wonder if Ironwood does know about Ruby via Penny at all… It’s a rather sweet moment for the general, either way. And segues to Ozpin and Glynda beginning their interrogation.
Ruby didn’t recognise the assailant and never heard her talk neither.
Someone’s ears must be burning…
Ruby has made note on how Cinder fought: she used glass - good ol’ Cinderella references - weapons and stuff. The use of fire-y stuff reminds Glynda of her dustup with a certain mysterious woman way back in the first episode. Man I bet if Cinder goes to any classes taught by Glynda she’d be laughing inside forever.
When Ruby puts together that they’re thinking the masked woman is linked to the White Fangstle and Kentucky Fried Torchwicken, she decides to sneakily give them some intel.
This is a pretty awesome move on Ruby’s part. It’s kinda like Peter Parker providing pictures of Spiderman. Takin’ advantage of the superhero side business and all. Ruby is able to claim that Cinder dropped the location of a White Fang hideout, but we know it’s the one Blake and Sun infiltrated. Hilariously, Glynda picks up on Ruby contradicting herself, but Ozpin allows it.
Ozpin thanks Ruby one last time and tells her to be discrete.
Solid talk.
Of course he’s probably thinking on Dumbledore-y wavelengths at that moment, 'cause he’ll figure Ruby’ll tell her team everything just as Harry would tell Ron and Hermione. Smash cut to the RWBY dorm where WBY awaiteth.
We skip that offscreen explanation and head back to our favourite power trio of authority and sexual tension. Ironwood details his plans to send troops to the southeast hideout and kill everything in his way. Glynda argues against it.
And hehe she almost says dicks. Somebody please think of the children.
Ozpin intervenes on account of not wanting to roll with Ironwood’s solution. Cinder’s plan is like an onion in that it has layers upon layers and may end up with us crying. The plans may spread further than Vale, and so going full military-y could start a panic. Or even be what Cinder’s expecting. Bit of chaos from Ironwood plus a bit of chaos from her equals hilarious times for all. Ozpin wants to wait and see what her next move’ll be.
Yeah the others aren’t havin’ it. In fairness, waiting and seeing doesn’t always seem like the best idea. Like hey I’m standing in the middle of a road and there’s a truck coming for me. Do I move? Pfft. I'mma wait and see. And get hit by it probably.
It’s highly probable Oz’s got a bigger plan going on, but if someone in my recap’s universe is going to be the one to support the darker side of fandom’s thinking, it’s going to be him. For this chapter’s recap only probably 'cause I can’t hold a joke too long unless it involves ringing a bell.
Still hilarious. Actually Ozzy Ozpourne makes a cryptic statement about sending in either flag bearers or scouts to battle first. Speaking of one of those things, let’s go back to Team RWBY.
The moment is lightened by Yang revealing she’s got mail from her and Ruby’s father. Now we sit at the edge of our seats in anticipation: what is in the mail tube? Schematics for weapon upgrades? Helpful intelligence on the location of Yang’s mother? Cookie recipes?! Wait for itttttttttt…
A dog comes out of the tube. Somewhere Ozpin is getting a bad feeling.
His name is Zwei. He’s pretty adorable. Corgi or something. Iunno, I’m not a dog person. Given all the various pics of Monty snuggling with corgis, we should’ve seen it coming. Bit of a random addition at first blush. No doubt has a part in this mini arc, or may even become the permanent group pet. But I can totally see his existence basically boiling down to Monty or someone saying dogs are cool and others going, “Why not?”. Still adorable, so screw it. Team pets can turn out useful sometimes, look at Dresden Files’s Mouse! And Ein from Cowboy Bebop of course, who may’ve served as the name inspiration as Ein is German for “one” and Zwei, who looks same-y enough to Ein breed-wise, is the German word for “two”. Good times. Zwei is voiced by someone making barking noises. Maybe even an actual dog. It’s a mystery!
It’s the same time for everyone in the fandom too. C'mon guys it’s just an anime-y pet. No reason to freak out; I mean we’ve had Jaune for a while and he’s basically like one, haven’t we? Yeah he’s not as potty trained as Zwei is, but still.
Yep, roll like someone in the deep. Yang says her father does stuff like this all the time. Quirky of him. Losing two loves like he did could’ve made him go to dark and depressing places, but I’m happy he’s decided to be the weird whacky dad instead. I bet he tells all sorts of dad jokes.
Weiss isn’t convinced of the dog’s existence in canon having any point, and perhaps more realistically just doesn’t want to deal with a pet dog in their cramped dorm. Unless Zwei has a semblance - some are speculating he has one 'cause it’d make a funny reveal and he does have a soul probably - involving vanishing his own droppings, it’d be messy.
Stare off ensues.
But Zwei’s a convincing little guy. It doesn’t take long for Weiss’s heart to melt quicker than butter - or ice, I don’t know why my mind went for butter - and she wants him to stay forever.
Blake, who’s becoming quite the butt kitty of this season, doesn’t want Zwei near her or her stuff. As an announcement comes over the intercom for first year students to assemble, logistics set in. They can’t leave Zwei alone in the dorm for a week. Yang upends the rest of her tube of its canned food and an opener, while Zwei torments our poor sad kitkat.
Not that Weiss actually said that, but it’s an idea we’ve latched onto. Poor Weiss with her hilariously lonely childhood. I bet even her imaginary friends abandoned her.
Oh, and we also we learn Papa Xiao Long’s name is Taiyang. Overall his name translates to “Supreme Sun Little-Dragon”. Aww and he essentially named his first daughter Junior. His little sunshine. The reason he sent Zwei to his daughters was because he’s leaving his island for a few days. Given that later we learn that the first years on their first mission are shadowing a professional Huntsman, I would laugh if it turned out JNPR got to hang out with Taiyang. Imagine all the stories he’d tell 'em… Blackmail material! But for now the gang heads off for assembly, and Ruby is left with Zwei to ponder over abandoning him for a week so soon after seeing him again…
Cue the sneaky smile. She’s just making like sneaky all over the place.
Yeah, we cut to the amphitheatre and Ruby’s got a big bag. Gee, I have to wonder if Zwei will end up being a complication in the mission mini-arc. My predictions will cover a bit more, but yeah.
Ruby joins everyone else as the speechifying starts up.
Lovely to see our main eight gravitating to each other like a swarm of locusts. Also I wanna note that this is the first episode Sun and Neptune don’t appear in this season. In fact, Sun’s appeared in every episode since his first appearance back in V1. Weird to think, huh. Must have a hell of an agent to get that contract locked in. Ozpin’s cane could learn a thing or two, haven’t seen 'im for a couple of episodes.
Ozpin thanks everyone for coming, school by school. First off, Mistral:
Then Atlas, Shrugged:
Then Vacuo aka Casual Fridays: The School:
The views of Ozpin are not shared by this recapper. Hufflepuff foreva. Pottermore put me in that house and dammit I’m proud to be there. Go badgers. And finally, the home team.
This unity of four kingdoms comes at an anniversary of the great war. Aka the one Jaune’s great grandfather fought in? Seems like. Different from the Faunus liberation stuff? Probably. But it was nearly eighty years back. It involved the oppression of individualism, by destroying ideas of self-expression. My guess is that it was a product of humanity being safe within their kingdoms for too long. Cabin fever, basically. Not every person had to fight for their lives against the Grimm anymore and had to keep themselves occupied somehow. And someone decided to control people from expressing too much, possibly using fear of the Grimm striking back as a motivator to get others to fight for them. And it could’ve even been that the artists and the expressionist types were rallying with the Faunus against oppression, too. Upsetting a status quo that people had fought for generations to achieve and rich old folk in power wanted to keep even if it was morally icky. Man, it would’ve been messy.
I gotta be honest: I didn’t actually expect an in-universe reason for the character naming colour rule. Every character has to have an association with a colour in their name was what Monty, Miles and Kerry are trying to follow. As a fan I just chalked it up as a cool random thing to make the show’s world feel specific and unique, and it worked, so I had no complaints. But that this war led to people naming their children colour-y names? That’s a pretty goddamn neat explanation. But here’s the real kicker: if you read that document I just linked, notice that Monty specifically points out that Ozpin does not follow this rule.
Word of God’s told us here and there that Ozpin is old. Very old, I’m getting. Older than Glynda and Torchwick et cetera. So why not older than literally everyone? Because this war reveal makes for some good possible explanations as to why Ozpin breaks the colour rule. Like he could’ve even fought in the war. Could explain some things about him, like his patience and his worldliness. At that age he’d be pretty knowledgeable. Very Dumbledore-y. And hell, when he said last year that he’s made more mistakes than any man, woman or child, it could be because he’s had like an extra hundred years on any man, woman or child. The other theory is that he breaks the colour rule for reasons such as Ozpin not being his actual name and he chose it to remind himself of what the world could be without his Hunters fighting for humanity’s right for individuality, or his parents could’ve been involved with the oppressors and thus his family were like pariahs and so he had to work hard to overcome that by becoming a perfect defender of humanity…
Ozpin’s speech moves on to being about Huntsmen and Huntresses. Peacekeepers and stuff, the usual.
The mission the first years will be going on has them shadowing an older Hunter. Solid plan.
And so the speech ends. I’d rate it as my second-favourite Ozpin speech, right behind his at Blake earlier this season. This time six seasons from now we’ll have like fifty speeches to rank won’t we.
Team RWBY makes plans to basically get a mission in the southeast and ditch their escort immediately.
They make their way over to the holographic mission boards. There’s missions and stuff on them, go figure.
We get an idea on what kind of work Hunters do, which I love. It’s very RPG sidequest kinda junk. Kill some Grimm in this area! Rescue a kitten from a tree! Collect twelve Ursa pelts! One day the show’s going to be basically a whole season of various mission hijinks, isn’t it. Can’t wait. For now we see the gang try and fail to get assigned to a Grimm hunt by the southeast.
First years are unable to take it, so why put it there in the hall with all the first years going to select their missions? Ozpin you troll lord.
And you gotta love Ruby’s first idea is to mail themselves there. Runs in the family, eh.
Ozpin shows up to explain that the Grimm concentration is too dense for first years. Then he makes a sly dig about how Team RWBY are no doubt headed in that direction anyway.
Sick burn.
And I bet Ruby told her team that she planted that southeast seed like such a boss, too. Way to undermine her authority, Oz.
Ozzy goes on to talk about previous Team RWBY adventures. Last year’s finale, the White Fang hideout, and the giant robot fight - why he said it happened in a dance club instead of under a highway or even just near a dance club we’ll never know.
Beacon’s esteemed headmaster then decides screw it. Let it happen. Bend the rules, hack the computer, let the team go on the mission. And also someone’s ears are burning again.
While Ruby assures that she won’t let him down, Trollzpin makes a little point about how it’s hard mode outside the kingdoms. Nah, not worried. Maybe like one extra minute worth of fight scene to kill the Grimm Of The Day, so in fact it’s a bonus! A lot of folk have been wondering why Ozpin would seriously allow this to happen, but hey, maybe he’s hedging his bets.
Or maybe his semblance is the allowance of plot to progress. If we can roll with Zwei, we can roll with this..
I like to think Oz’s now going off to prepare JNPR as a backup main hero team, just in case. Gotta be smart.
Back outside, the team is heading to meet their Huntsman.
A commotion kicks in and a student pushes through them, because… because… did he just say-?!
He said CFVY! Hallelujah!
Team CFVY. Hilarious-ist way to make a Team Coffee name ever, but it works. They are Coco, Fox, Velvet and Yatsuhashi, and were first glimpsed in the V2 opening. They’ve been teased to high hell because of them being Velvet’s team, and we’ve only known their names thanks to tweets along the way. They look so cool, man. We all want more of these kids. I mean c'mon look at Coco and her beret and her ammo handbag. And a little theme for their names is that they all represent sweets: Coco as in, y'know coco (Mmm Coco Pops), Fox as in Fox Hunter pie, Velvet as in red velvet, and Yatsuhashi as in a Japanese confectionary of the same name. And now that we know they’re upperclassmen? Spinoff potential. And Fox has a little mouth scar, ooh. Moaaaaarrrrrr.
Their return brings a crowd, a little because they’re a week late and mostly because they’re amazing even if we barely know 'em. Blake goes to chat with the member of the team we’ve met before, a fellow Faunus of whom now we all imagine having little book club meetings with Blake or something.
Velvet Scarlatina. Little rabbity princess lookit her. Originally a bit-part player introduced last year as the target of Cardin’s bullying, her general look made people want more, and more we got. Her combat outfit is the end result of a costume design competition Monty ran, after a little colour change, and her weapon is a complete mystery that sits in a mysterious box. She’s described as a mage, so the box has like rabbits in it probably. Velv’s a reference to the Velveteen Rabbit, and her last name’s a common name for Scarlet Fever. Both references are a bit morbid, but there’s also that red velvet thing! Which is bad if you’re allergic… Hmm. Anyways, Velvet’s return is marked by a surprising amount of people not realising she’d had spoken before last year. Or even had a last name. But she’s voiced by community member Caiti Ward, a fellow Australian who helped organise RTOZ meetups back in the day. Cool chick. Frontrunner for my country’s invasion of America, via Roosterteeth… Shouldn’t’ve said that. Dammit. Also, if the rest of Team CFVY turns out to be Australian or even British - accents are close enough - that’d be fun.
So yeah. CFVY’s been away for a week longer than expected. Their mission got pretty super hard mode. Lots of Grimm. Grinded a bit of EXP out of it but decided to come back to play some Triple Triad before the next story mission.
Velv mentions Yatsuhashi was looking out for her, so we can assume they’re partners. Or they’re a cutie cute couple. Or they’re friends. Or just allies that don’t really like each other but they’ll watch each other’s backs. Or they’re related. Or they’re somehow all of the above. Anyway, she assures RWBY that they’ll be fine 'cause they’ll have professional Huntsman with them.
She then leaves our lives just as quickly as she appeared, taking the precious spark of CFVY with her. Aww.
Welp. Until next volume, then! Or whenever. So RWBY, despite getting multiple warnings, aren’t phased.
More ears burning. Dude should get that checked out.
But yeah. RWBY? They’ll be fineeeee.
I mean, they’ve got a genuine Huntsman comin’ along with them.
And now we wonder: who’s it going to be?
A grizzled badass new character? Someone we know of like Taiyang or Qrow?
I had no idea going in who it’d be. Was rooting for someone that we didn’t really know that much. Especially if there’s fight scenes ahead. Oh hey look RWBY’s reacting to finding out who their Huntsman is.
Bodes well. Professor Port?
Close enough. Professor Bartholomew Oobleck. If Sonic the Hedgehog, Speedy Gonzales, Jason Statham’s character from Crank, Quicksilver and The Flash all combined their powers to make a speedy Captain Planet who dunked his head in a vat of green goop, you’d get this guy. We first met Oobleck as the history professor at Beacon, but I know I last saw him at that one Coffeeholics Anonymous meeting. He is a reference to the Dr Seuss story Bartholomew and the Oobleck, the oobleck being the substance that causes some trouble and is also roughly the same shade of green as our Oobleck’s hair. We are unaware of Oobleck’s semblance or weapon, but hoo boy are we about to find out. And, as teased in the V1 DVD commentary: it’s a doozy. Oobleck is voiced by double gold enthusiast Joel Heyman, who also voices Caboose in Red Vs Blue and most recently skipped out on a Vegas trip that the VAs for Junior and Cardin went on, prompting them to name the trip Super Fun Happy Minus Joel Vegas Trip 2014. Those kids.
And so the episode ends with the gang looking horrified. Pfft. If only they knew the hijinks that will ensue…
Good times. So the set-up for the mini-arc to come seems pretty clear. Yay kids go out and deal with some Grimm. Then oh no there’s suddenly too many Grimm! Then yay Oobleck’s weapon is revealed and he demolishes them. Then oh no everyone realises Zwei’s in Ruby’s backpack and ruh roh that’s a complication! Then yay it’ll be cool, Zwei is probably superdog. Then oh no a realistic consequence of the team’s actions will be felt somehow while investigating the White Fang hideout! Then yay we might see Neo again or Team CFVY comes to save the day. Then oh no we might not see JNPR’s own adventures with whoever they’re with, be it Port or Taiyang or whoever. But in the end yay because there’ll be a set-up for the finale two. No earthly idea. Could go big, could go small, could go somewhere in between. Eight to the left of me, four to the right. Stuck in the middle with the rest of y'all.
That’s about it from me. Thanks for joining me on this wonderful ride, as always. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve shrugged and considered gone back to playing some Fire Emblem. We’ve also probably made plans to bounce off the walls 'cause Smash Bros 4 is out at the end of this week. We may also just want to hang out at all places where the wild RWBY things go, such as the always classic Roosterteeth forums (General discussion and the RWBY Vol. 2 thread), the RWBYForums, RWBY Wiki, the r/RWBY subreddit, the RWBY TVTropes page (And hey this recap even has a lil’ page of its own, which is awesome), and the main tumblr tag. Sexy.
Until next week, memory is the key. And the key is sometimes a sword that unlocks people’s deaths. And we need the key to go into the lock and then we’ll have the thing locked inside. And probably the lock too…
Also, Sonic Boom.Tricia Helfer, center, as humanoid Cylon model Number Six in Battlestar Galactica. Courtesy The Sci-Fi Channel
Ten years ago this month, a reimagined version of the ’70s science fiction series Battlestar Galactica began as a three-hour miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel. (This was before the “Syfy” nonsense.) The critically acclaimed show ended up running for four seasons. Many articles and books have already been written about the enduring relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s religious and political themes—at least one of which, the dilemmas associated with a secretive national security state, is just as timely today as it was during the Bush administration.
But another key element of the show—the long-term societal risks associated with the development of intelligent machines—is even more relevant today than it was in 2003.
When Battlestar Galactica began in 2003, the verb “Google” was three years from being added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the underlying technology behind Siri was just starting to be funded by DARPA, and the idea of a computer beating the world champion at Jeopardy! seemed ridiculous, even to most AI experts. In the last decade, though, a lot has changed. Amazon is working on autonomous drones for package delivery; debates concerning driverless cars are mostly about ethics and regulation, not technology; and quick knowledge recall à la Jeopardy! has joined chess as an activity in which humans will likely never again reign supreme.
There is a lot of merit to the common complaint among AI researchers that as soon as AI technology works (GPS navigation algorithms, search engines, speech recognition, etc.), people are no longer willing to consider it “real” AI. Still, I think that overall, history has proved the famous mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing’s 1950 prediction correct (though he may have gotten the timeline wrong): “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
The premise of Battlestar Galactica—that intelligent machines may, someday in the distant future, wipe out their human creators—is still characterized by some AI scientists as laughably implausible. But many serious thinkers aren’t laughing anymore. Due in part to the persistence of researchers at organizations like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, which have been analyzing AI risk scenarios over the past decade, the subject of long-term “existential risk” from AI and how to avoid it is now discussed in polite, if nerdy, company. Most experts remain skeptical, but they increasingly at least acknowledge that the issue is complex. For example, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence assembled a “Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures,” and the findings include:
There was overall skepticism about the prospect of an intelligence explosion as well as of a “coming singularity” and also about the large-scale loss of control of intelligent systems. Nevertheless, there was a shared sense that additional research would be valuable on methods |
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Gray’s College Bookstore, 1915 S. 4th Street, Louisville, KY 40208 (7.4 miles)
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Maple Street Bookshop, 7523/29 Maple Street, New Orleans, LA 70118 (Thanks, Veronica)
Garden District Book Shop, 2727 Prytania Street,
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The Anapolis Bookstore, 68 Maryland Ave, Annapolis, MD 21401 (15.6 miles)
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Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
Trident Booksellers, 338 Newbury St., Boston, MA 02115 (Thanks, Blake Stacey)
Raven Used Books, 263 Newbury St., Boston, MA 02116 (Thanks, Blake Stacey)
Comicopia, 464 Comm. Ave., Kenmore Square, Boston, MA 02215 (Thanks, Blake Stacey)
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The Book Rack, 13 Medford St., Arlington, MA 02474 (6.7 miles)
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Heritage Books, 225 College Highway, Southampton, MA 01073 (6.0 miles)
White Square Books, 86 Cottage Street, Easthampton, MA 01027 (7.7 miles) (Thanks, Bronwen)
Cherry Picked Books, 101 Main Street, Easthampton, MA 01027 (8.3 miles) (Thanks, Bronwen)
Broadside Books, 247 Main Street, Northampton, MA 01060 (12 miles) (Thanks, Bronwen)
Raven Used Books, 4 Old South Street, Northampton, MA 01060 (12 miles) (Thanks, Bronwen)
Booklink, 150 Main Street, Thornes Marketplace, Northampton, MA 01060 (12 miles) (Thanks, Bronwen)
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Books by the Sea, 846 Main Street, Osterville, MA 02655 (3.6 miles)
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Derby Square Bookstore, 215 Essex St, Salem, MA 01970 (5.6 miles) (Thanks, Jeff Cross)
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The Book Shop of Beverly Farms, 40 West St., Beverly Farms, MA 01915 (7.9 miles)
Used Book Superstore, Endicott Plaza, 139 Endicott St., Danvers, MA 01923 (Thanks, Jeff Cross)
Hand It Back Book Smyth, 240 S Main St., Middleton, MA 01949 (Thanks, Jeff Cross)
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Baker Books, 69 State Road (Route 6), Dartmouth, CA 02747 (31.4 miles) (Thanks, @ErinHere)
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Nicola’s Books, 2513 Jackson Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48103 (3.5 miles)
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John K. King Used & Rare Books, 901 W. Lafeyette Blvd., Detroit, MI 48226 (7.8 miles) (Thanks, Gavin Craig, for correction.)
Leopold’s Books, 15 E Kirby St., Detroit, MI, 48202 (Thanks, Peter Markus)
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Alternatives:
Magina Books, 2311 Fort Street, Lincoln Park, Michigan 48146 (4.2 miles)
John R. King Used & Rare Books, 901 W. Lafeyette Blvd., Detroit, MI 48226 (6.3 miles)
The Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park, MI 48237 (12.2 miles)
Leopold’s Books, 15 E Kirby St., Detroit, MI, 48202 (Thanks, Peter Markus)
Green Brain Comics, 13210 Michigan Ave, Dearborn, MI 48126 (Thanks, Dan Merritt)
Borders Bookstore #53
45290 Utica Park Blvd., Uitca, MI 48315
Alternatives:
Motor City Book Drive, 18135 E. Nine Mile Road, Eastpointe, MI 48021 (14.6 miles)
The Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park, MI 48237 (16.7 miles)
Leopold’s Books, 15 E Kirby St., Detroit, MI, 48202 (Thanks, Peter Markus)
Minnesota
Borders Bookstore #569
12059 Elm Creek Blvd., Maple Grove, MN 55369
Alternatives:
Dreamhaven Books, 2301 East 38th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55406 (4.4 miles)
Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 (4.8 miles)
BookSmart, 2914 Hennepin Ave. South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55408 (4.9 miles)
Borders Bookstore #31
1501 Plymouth Road, Minnetonka, MN 55305
Alternatives:
The Bookcase, 607 Lake St E, Wayzata, Minnesota 55391 (3.4 miles)
Excelsior Bay Books, 36 Water Street, Excelsior, MN 55331 (5.9 miles)
Borders Bookstore #189
800 W. 78th Street, Richfield, MN 55423
Alternatives:
True Colors Bookstore, 4755 Chicago Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55407 (2.8 miles)
Wild Rumpus, 2720 West 43rd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55410 (3.6 miles)
Dreamhaven Books, 2301 East 38th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55406 (4.4 miles)
Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 (4.8 miles)
Borders Bookstore #267
1390 W. University Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104
Alternatives:
Micawber’s, 2238 Carter Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55108 (1.5 miles)
Red Balloon Books, 891 Grand Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105 (2.8 miles)
Mayday Books, 301 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55454 (3.0 miles)
Missouri
Borders Bookstore #213
15355-A Machester Road, Ballwin, MO 63011
Alternatives:
The Book House, 9719 Manchester Road, Saint Louis, MO 63119 (14.6 miles)
The Book Shelf 8452 Watson Rd
St. Louis, MO 63119 (15.5 miles)
Left Bank, 399 N. Euclid, St. Louis, MO 63108 (Thanks, Julia Porter)
Subterranean Books, 6275 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63130 (Thanks, Julia Porter)
Pudd’nhead Books, 37 South Old Orchard Ave., St. Louis, MO 63119 (Thanks, Julia Porter)
Borders Bookstore #329
2040 Chesterfield Mall, Chesterfield, MO 63017
Alternatives:
Main Street Books, 307 South Main Street, Saint Charles, MO 63301 (10.4 miles)
The Book House, 9719 Manchester Road, Saint Louis, MO 63119 (13.5 miles)
Borders Bookstore #565
8628 North Boardwalk Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64154
Alternatives:
The Book Barn, 410 Delaware Street, Leavenworth, Kansas 66048 (15.1 miles)
Prospero’s Books, 1800 West 39th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64111 (15.3 miles)
Borders Bookstore #658
5201 North Belt Highway, Suite 127, St. Joseph, MO 64506
Alternatives:
The Book Barn, 410 Delaware Street, Leavenworth, Kansas 66048 (30.9 miles)
Prospero’s Books, 1800 West 39th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64111 (50.0 miles)
Borders Bookstore #492
1320 Mid Rivers Mall, St. Peters, MO 63376
Alternatives:
Main Street Books, 307 South Main Street, Saint Charles, MO 63301 (8.0 miles)
The Book House, 9719 Manchester Road, Saint Louis, MO 63119 (17.4 miles)
Borders Bookstore #529
3300 S. Glenstone Avenue, Springfield, MO 65804
Alternatives:
Missouri State Bookstore, 717 S Florence Ave
Springfield, MO 65807 (0.0 miles)
Book Castle, 2252 South Campbell, Springfield, MO 65807 (2.3 miles)
Montana
Borders Bookstore #548
2855 North 19th Avenue, Suite C, Bozeman, MT 59718
Alternatives:
Country Bookshelf, 28 West Main Street, Bozeman, MT 59715 (5.6 miles)
Grannie Irene’s Attic, 15 E. Main Street, Belgrade, Montana 59714 (14.0 miles)
Nevada
Borders Bookstore #81
2323 S. Decatur Blvd., Las Vegas, NV 89102
Alternatives:
Greyhound’s Books, 539 W Oakey Blvd, Las Vegas, Nevada 89102 (0.0 miles)
Dead Poet, 937 S Rainbow Blvd, Las Vegas, Nevada 89145 (3.5 miles)
Bestseller Books, 4260 W Craig Rd #140, Las Vegas, Nevada 89032 (6.9 miles)
New Hampshire
Borders Bookstore #255
281 Daniel Webster Highway, Nashua, NH 03060
Alternatives:
The Book Cellar, 34 Northwest Boulevard, Unit #10, Nashua, New Hampshire 03063 (5.4 miles)
The Toadstool Bookshop, Lorden Plaza Route 101-A, Milford, New Hampshire 03055 (12.5 miles)
New Jersey
Borders Bookstore #499
1642 Schlosser Street, Fort Lee, NJ 07024
Alternatives:
Womrath’s, 12 Washington Street, Tenafly, NJ 07670 (5.3 miles)
Book Ends, 232 East Ridgewood Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ 07450-3816 (13.7 miles)
Borders Bookstore #302
1515 Route 22 West, Suite 2, Watchung, NJ 07069
Alternatives:
The Town Book Store, 270 East Broad Street, Westfield, NJ 07090 (4.6 miles)
Sages Pages, 300 Main Street, Madison, NJ 07940 (7.6 miles)
The Bookworm, 99 Claremont Road, Bernardsville, NJ 07924 (9.0 miles)
Borders Bookstore #34
Garden State Plaza, Suite 2200, Paramus, NJ 07652
Alternatives:
Book Ends, 232 East Ridgewood Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ 07450-3816 (3.4 miles)
Well Read, 425 Lafayette Ave, Hawthorne, NJ 07506 (4.5 miles)
Borders Bookstore #241
Raceway Mall, 3710 Route 9, Ste. 2318, Freehold, NJ 07728
Alternatives:
Booktowne, 171 Main Street, Manasquan, NJ 08736 (10.3 miles)
Act 2 Books, 90 Wilson Ave, Englishtown, NJ 07726 (10.7 miles)
New Mexico
Borders Bookstore #684
10420 Coors Bypass NW, Suite B, Albuquerque, NM 87114
Alternatives:
Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Boulevard Northwest, Albuquerque, NM 87107 (2.9 miles)
Title Wave Books, 1408 Menaul Blvd. NM, Albuquerque, NM 87112 (9.5 miles)
Alamosa Books, 8810 Holly Ave. NE Ste. D, Albuquerque, NM 87122 (10.4 miles) (Thanks, Richard Vargas)
Borders Bookstore #278
500 Montezuma, Suite 108, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Alternatives:
Collected Works, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501 (0.0 miles)
Otowi Station, 1350 Central Ave, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544 (27.0 miles)
New York
Borders Bookstore #179
68 Veterans Memorial Highway, Commack, NY 11725
Alternatives:
Book Revue, 313 New York Ave., Huntington, NY 11743 (8.0 miles)
Best Bargain Books, 217 Centereach Mall, Centereach, NY 11720 (10.4 miles) (Closed; see alt. locations below; thanks, John Walsh)
Best Bargain Books, 65 Robinson Ave., Patchogue, NY 11772 (Thanks, John Walsh)
Best Bargain Books, 14 East Main Street, Port Jefferson, NY 11777 (Thanks, John Walsh)
Borders Bookstore #507
40 Catherwood Road, Ithaca, NY 14850
Alternatives:
Colophon Books, 205 N Aurora St., Ithaca, NY 14850 (0.2 miles) (Thanks, @eruditegore)
Riverow Bookshop, 187 Front St., Owego, NY 13827 (32.0 miles)
Creekside Books, 35 Fennell St., Skaneateles, NY 13152 (37.4 miles)
Borders Bookstore #566
100 Broadway, New York, NY 10005
Alternatives:
The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren St., New York, NY 10007 (0.7 miles)
McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St., New York, NY 10012 (1.5 miles)
Borders Bookstore #228
576 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Alternatives:
Revolution Books, 146 West 26th St., New York, NY 10001 (0.7 miles)
Idlewild Books, 12 West 19th St., New York, NY 10011 (0.8 miles)
Books of Wonder, 18 West 18th St., New York, NY 10011 (0.9 miles)
Strand Books, 828 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 (1.3 miles)
Borders Bookstore #200
461 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022
Alternatives:
Center for Fiction Books, 17 East 47th St., New York, NY 10017 (0.7 miles)
Rizzoli Books, 31 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019 (1.0 miles)
Borders Bookstore #389
395 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Alternatives:
East Line Books, 1714 Route 9, Clinton Park, NY 12065 (8.4 miles)
Old Saratoga Books, 94 Broad Street, Schuylerville, New York 12871 (11.7 miles)
Borders Bookstore #475
680 White Plains Road, Scarsdale, NY 10583
Alternatives:
Galapagos Books, 22 Main St # A, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 10706 (2.1 miles)
Womrath Bookshop, 76 Pondfield Road, Bronxville, New York 10708 (2.9 miles)
Voracious Reader, 1997 Palmer Ave, Larchmont, NY 10538 (Thanks, Kristi Cook)
Anderson’s Book Shop, 96 Chatsworth Ave #A, Larchmont, NY 10538 (Thanks, Emily)
Borders Bookstore #595
1820 South Road, Suite 110, Wappinger Falls, NY 12590
Alternatives:
Three Arts Bookstore, 3 Collegeview Avenue, Poughkeepsie, New York 12603 (7.4 miles)
Book Cove, 22 Charles Colman Boulevard, Pawling, New York 12564 (15.5 miles)
Borders Bookstore #52
1260 Old County Road, Westbury, NY 11590
Alternatives:
Dolphin Bookshop, 299 Main Street, Port Washington, NY 11050 (8.4 miles)
Forest Value Books, 170 Forest Ave., Glen Cove, NY 11542 (8.6 miles)
North Carolina
Borders Bookstore #333
1541 Beaver Creek Commons Dr., Ste. 220, Apex, NC 27502
Alternatives:
McIntyre’s, 2000 Fearrington Village
Pittsboro, NC 27312 (7.8 miles)
Internationalist Books, 405 W Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC 27516 (13.8 miles)
Borders Bookstore #132
1751 Walnut Street, Cary, NC 27511
Alternatives:
Reader’s Corner, 3201 Hillsborough Street, Raleigh, North Carolina 27607 (6.5 miles)
Quail Ridge Books, 3522 Wade Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27607 (6.5 miles)
Borders Bookstore #490
1807 Fordham Blvd., Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Alternatives:
Flyleaf Books, 752 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd., Chapel Hill, NC 27514 (0.0 miles)
The Regulator Bookshop, 720 9th Street, Durham, NC 27705 (6.0 miles)
The Gothic Bookshop, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708 (6.1 miles)
The Bull’s Head Bookshop, 207 South Road, CB#1530, Daniels Bldg, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (Thanks, Erica Eisdorfer)
Borders Bookstore #134
3605 High Point Road, Greensboro, NC 27407
Alternatives:
Edward McKay Books, 1607 Battleground Ave., Greensboro, NC 27408 (0.6 miles)
Lucky City Book and Wine Bar, 125 S. Scales St., Reidsville, NC 27320 (20.9 miles)
Borders Bookstore #365
404-101 East Six Forks Road, Raleigh, NC 27609
Alternatives:
Edward McKay Books, 3514 Capital Blvd., Raleigh, NC 27604 (2.9 miles)
Quail Ridge Books, 3522 Wade Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27607 (4.1 miles)
Ohio
Borders Bookstore #347
9459 Colerain Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45251
Alternatives:
The Bookshelf, 7754 Camargo Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45243 (13.9 miles)
Passage Books, 126 Front St, New Richmond, Ohio 45157 (27.7 miles)
Borders Bookstore #172
6670 Sawmill Road, Columbus, OH 43235
Alternatives:
Cover to Cover Children’s Books, 3560 N High St., Columbus, Ohio 43214 (5.6 miles)
Karen Wickliff Books, 3527 N. High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43214 (5.6 miles)
Foul Play Mystery Books, 27 East College Avenue, Westerville, Ohio 43081 (7.7 miles)
Acorn Bookshop, 1464 West Fifth Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43212 (8.0 miles)
The Book Loft, 631 South Third Steet, Columbus, OH 43206 (16.1 miles) (Thanks, Dina Merrer)
Borders Bookstore #2:
4545 Kenny Road, Columbus, OH 43220
Alternatives:
Village Bookshop, 2424 W. Dublin Granville Road, Columbus, OH 43235 (1.8 miles)
Cover to Cover Books for Young Readers, 3560 N. High Street, Columbus, OH 43214 (2.7 miles)
Borders Bookstore #116
2700 Miamisburg Centerville Road, Suite 870, Dayton, OH 45459
Alternatives:
Bonnett’s, 502 E. 5th St., Dayton, Ohio 45402 (7.7 miles)
Blue Jacket Books, 60 South Detroit Street, Xenia, Ohio 45385 (12.8 miles)
Borders Bookstore #588
5105 Deerfield Blvd., Mason, OH 45040
Alternatives:
The Bookshelf, 7754 Camargo Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45243 (11.8 miles)
Books ‘N” More, 28 West Main Street, Wilmington, Ohio 45177 (26.0 miles)
Borders Bookstore #601
4927 Grande Shops Ave., Medina, OH 44256
Alternatives:
The Bookseller Inc., 39 Westgate Circle, Akron, OH 44313 (14.4 miles)
Baldwin-Wallace College Bookstore, Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio 44017 (16.0 miles)
Visible Voice Books, 1023 Kenilworth, Cleveland, Ohio 44113 (Thanks, Toni Thayer)
Fireside Book Shop, 29 North Franklin Street, Chagrin Falls, OH 44022 (Thanks, Toni Thayer)
Learned Owl Book Shop, 204 North Main Street, Hudson, OH 44236 (Thanks, Toni Thayer)
Borders Bookstore #358
9565 Mentor Avenue, Mentor, OH 44060
Alternatives:
Half Price Books, 9383 Mentor Ave., Mentor, OH 44060 (0.0 miles)
Joseph-Beth, 24519 Cedar Road, Lyndhurst, OH 44124 (15.6 miles)
Mac’s Backs, 1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 (17.8 miles)
Appletree Books, 12419 Cedar Rd., Cleveland, OH 44106 (22.7 miles) (Thanks, Darby)
Loganberry Books, 13015 Larchmere Blvd., Shaker Heights, OH 44120 (25.6 miles) (Thanks, @SplatsReads)
Visible Voice Books, 1023 Kenilworth, Cleveland, Ohio 44113 (Thanks, Toni Thayer)
Fireside Book Shop, 29 North Franklin Street, Chagrin Falls, OH 44022 (Thanks, Toni Thayer)
Learned Owl Book Shop, 204 North Main Street, Hudson, OH 44236 (Thanks, Toni Thayer)
Village Bookstore, 8140 Main Street, Garrettsville, OH 44231 (35 miles) (Thanks, Ellen Eckhouse)
Oklahoma
Borders Bookstore #151
3209 Northwest Expressway, Oklahoma City, OK 73112
Alternatives:
Full Circle Books, 1900 NW Expressway, Oklahoma City, OK 73118 (0.2 miles)
Borders Bookstore #264
8015 S. Yale, Tulsa, OK 74136
Alternatives:
Steve’s Books, 2612 S Harvard Ave., Tulsa, Oklahoma 74114 (4.3 miles)
Books & Co., 2021 S Lewis Ave., Tulsa, OK 74104 (4.4 miles)
Pennsylvania
Borders Bookstore #455
3515 Gettysburg Road, Camp Hill, PA 17011
Alternatives:
Midtown Scholar, 1302 North Third Street, Harrisburg, PA 17110 (2.8 miles)
York Emporium, 343 West Market Street, York, Pennsylvania 17401 (21.8 miles) (Thanks Chrissy for website link)
Borders Bookstore #377
2088A Interchange Road, Erie, PA 16509
Alternatives:
Erie Books Galore, 5546 Peach Street, Erie, PA 16509-2604 (Thanks, Andrew)
Erie Bookstore, 37 East 13th Street, Erie, PA 16503 (9.1 miles)
The Last Wordsmith Shoppe, 17 East Main Street, North East, PA 16421 (11.4 miles)
Borders Bookstore #487
650 Mall Blvd., King of Prussia, PA 19406
Alternatives:
The Bookworm, 742 Main St., Phoenixville, PA 19460 (4.9 miles)
Wolfgang Books, 237 Bridge Street, Phoenixville, PA 19460 (5.4 miles) (Sadly, about to close: thanks, @Bookavore and Laura)
Wellington Square Bookshop, 549 Wellington Square, Exton, PA 19341 (Thanks Emma)
Chester County Book & Music Company, 975 Paoli Pike, West Chester, PA 19380 (Thanks Martha Bullen)
Borders Bookstore #204
2343 E. Lincoln Highway, Langhorne, PA 19047
Alternatives:
Newtown Books, 2829 South Eagle Road, Newtown, PA 18940 (4.1 miles)
Farley’s, 44 South Main Street, New Hope, PA 18938 (12.9 miles)
Borders Bookstore #143
200 Mall Blvd., Monroeville, PA 15146
Alternatives:
Mystery Lovers Bookshop, 514 Allegheny River Blvd., Pittsburgh, PA 15139 (7.0 miles)
Aspinwall, 20 Brilliant Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15215 (8.8 miles) (Thanks, @Twiittsburgh)
Caliban Books, 410 South Craig Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (14.9 miles) (Thanks, Holly Mohr)
Townsend Booksellers, 4612 Henry St., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (14.9 miles) (Thanks, Holly Mohr)
City Books, 1111 East Carson St., Pittsburgh, PA 15203 (16.8 miles) (Thanks, Holly Mohr)
Awesome Books, 5111 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15224 (Thanks, Andrea)
Borders Bookstore #9
1775 North Highland Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15241
Alternatives:
Bradley’s Book Cellar, 1948 Greentree Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15220 (6.6 miles)
Eljay’s Used Books, 1309 East Carson Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15203 (10.4 miles)
Joseph-Beth, 2705 East Carson Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15203 (10.8 miles) (Thanks, @Twittsburgh)
Borders Bookstore #457
5986 Penn Circles South, Suite 101, Pittsburgh, PA 15206
Alternatives:
Aspinwall, 20 Brilliant Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15215 (1.6 miles)
Mystery Lovers Bookshop, 514 Allegheny River Blvd., Pittsburgh, PA 15139 (2.6 miles)
Borders Bookstore #175
1075 Woodland Road, Reading, PA 19610
Alternatives:
Saucony Books, 41 West Main Street, Kutztown, PA 19530 (15.4 miles)
Aaron’s Books, 43 South Broad Street, Lititz, PA 17543 (22.3 miles)
Borders Bookstore #345
1937 Whitehall Mall, Whitehall, PA 18052
Alternatives:
Blind Willow Book Shop, 412 Chestnut St., Emmaus, PA 18049 (4.3 miles)
Lion Around Books, 302 West Broad Street, Quakertown, PA 18951 (14.0 miles)
Moravian Bookshop, 428 Main Street, Bethlehem, PA 18018 (Thanks, Mary)
Tennessee
Borders Bookstore #536
545 Cool Springs Blvd., Suite 190, Franklin, TN 37067
Alternatives:
Landmark Books, 114 E Main St., Franklin, Tennessee 37064 (2.9 miles)
Mysteries & More, Lenox Village, Nashville, TN 37211 (6.9 miles)
Davis-Kidd, 2121 Green Hills Village Drive, Nashville, TN 37215 (8.3 miles) (Thanks to all for pointing out this closing.)
Rhino Books, 4006 Granny White Pike 37204, Nashville, TN 37209 (11.4 miles) (Thanks, James Harrington)
Bookman/Bookwoman, 1713 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37212 (15.7 miles) (Thanks, James Harrington)
Elder’s Books, 2115 Elliston Pl, Nashville, TN 37203 (17.4 miles) (Thanks, James Harrington)
McKay Used Books, 5708 Charlotte Pike, Nashville, TN 37209-3215 (Thanks, Derek)
Texas
Borders Bookstore #367
4477 S. Lamar, Austin, TX 78745
Alternatives:
Monkeywrench Books, 110 E. North Loop, Austin, Texas 78751 (0.8 miles)
Book Woman, 5501 North Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas 78751 (1.3 miles)
Brave New Books, 1904 Guadalupe Street
Austin, Texas 78705 (2.7 miles)
Bookpeople, 603 N. Lamar, Austin TX 78703 (Thanks, Jason)
12th Street Books, 827 West 12th Street, Austin, TX 78701 (Thanks, frogprof)
Borders Bookstore #103
3309 Espernza Crossing, Austin, TX 78758
Alternatives:
Book Woman, 5501 North Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas 78751 (6.5 miles)
The Book Spot, 1205 Round Rock Ave #119, Round Rock, TX 78681 (6.6 miles)
Monkeywrench Books, 110 E. North Loop, Austin, Texas 78751 (6.9 miles)
Borders Bookstore #247
9500 South IH 35 Service Road, Southpark Meadows, Suite F, Austin, TX 78748
Alternatives:
BookPeople, 603 North Lamar, Austin, TX 78703 (6.4 miles)
Domy Books, 913 E Cesar Chavez, Austin, TX 78702 (7.1 miles)
Borders Bookstore #584
1131 N. Burleson Blvd., Burleson, TX 76028
Alternatives:
The Book Rack, 2304 W Park Row Dr # 15, Arlington, TX 76013 (11.6 miles)
Half Price Books, 5417 S. Hulen St., Fort Worth, TX 76132 (13.3 miles)
Half Price Books, 12616 S. Freeway, Burleson, TX 76028 (Thanks, Kirk)
Borders Bookstore #462
5615 Colleyville Blvd., Suite 100, Colleyvile, TX 76034
Alternatives:
The Book Car |
was operated in the stores where it had a temporary hiding place in a false-bottomed table.[107] Elaborate security proceedings to protect the radio were put in place, including a network of look-outs.[108]
The radio at first ran off torch batteries: these soon ran out and so Beckett constructed a power unit to run off the camp electricity supply.[109] Access to the camp powerhouse was gained by one of the POWs who had been a professional cat burglar before the war.[48]
The radio was first used on the night of 24 February 1943, as radio reception was better in the evening. Some of the news was bewildering to the prisoners: "Who is this General Montgomery? He seems to be the man we ought to have had in charge from the very beginning. A real live wire", wrote Pringle.[110]
The existence of the radio, referred to by many code-names but chiefly as the "Old Lady" and "Mrs Harris",[111] was to be a closely guarded secret, for fear of alerting the Japanese to its existence through loose talk. The commanding officers of the camp and those who had constructed and operated it were known as the "Board of Directors", and were the only ones who knew the precise contents of the radio news received.[112] A way of disseminating information was organised: it was arranged for rumours to be spread which contained a considerable amount of truth.[113] Le Gros Clark, the head of the male internees, directed the dissemination of news amongst the male internees;[114] it was decided not to provide information to the women's compound. News was also passed to the Chinese once a week, carried through the jungle by Pringle. On the first exchange, without being asked, the Chinese thoughtfully provided medical supplies; thereafter they regularly provided much-needed medicines, money, and vegetable seeds.[115] The leaked news rumours had the desired effect and a more cheerful atmosphere was noted in the camp.[116] The women's compound somehow learned of the existence of the radio and the camp mistress, Dorie Adams, asked that they should be provided with news; to counter worries about security she suggested that the Roman Catholic priest who celebrated mass with the R.C. nuns should deliver the news as part of his service, which was always given in Latin.[117]
In early March 1943 the provision of electric power for the lighting in the internees' compounds was halted.[114] This was a serious blow as the radio was run off the power supply. Batteries were unavailable and so the only solution, again the idea of Russell, was to construct a generator. His idea again met with some initial scepticism: "Now I know he has gone mad", wrote Pringle.[118] Pringle’s colleagues were more enthusiastic. Beckett was sure he could build the generator and British RAOC personnel were certain they could supply the necessary components, though they thought it would take three months to make the tools needed.[119] To disguise the noise of the work the enterprise was described as a "watch repairing factory" to the Japanese, who offered the use of various tools and other equipment.[120] In March 1943, after the execution of some prisoners at the Sandakan POW camp for operating a radio, the Japanese stepped up their searches at Batu Lintang.[121] Many items essential for the construction of the generator such as magnets, wire, and scrap iron were not easily available, but the involvement of "Freddie", one of the prisoners who was a self-confessed thief (and most likely the same man who sorted the power supply: records are unclear) meant that material and equipment was soon obtained.[120]
Leonard Beckett showing the radio to Brigadier T. C. Eastick and A. W. Walsh on 11 September 1945
The generator needed to turn at 3,000 revolutions a minute, and so the fittest of the men involved in its construction was chosen to turn the wheel. He was given extra food rations to prepare him for the task.[122] The first trial of the generator was a success, and again, Pringle recorded how news reports told of unknown figures: "Events appeared to have been moving with unseemly haste during our enforced breaks from the news broadcasts. [We] listened to names we had never heard of. General Eisenhower? General Stilwell?" The assembling and disassembling drill took less than thirty seconds, with both the "Old Lady" and "Ginnie" stowed in their hiding places in the hut which was occupied by cookhouse staff during the day.
In June 1944, Le Gros Clark was taken from the camp by the kempeitai for questioning. On his return the same day, he was considerably shaken and recommended that the radio should be destroyed. This message was relayed to the camp master of the British other ranks' compound by Whimster, who was the senior British officer. Beckett and his colleagues were informed of this order, but were left to decide themselves what course of action to take. Realising its importance in keeping up camp morale, they decided to keep the radio, saying that "we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb", according to Pepler.[123] Steps to safeguard the civilian internees were undertaken by cutting off news to their compounds.[124]
That same month the prisoners received news of the invasion of Normandy. Pringle recorded how, once again, the news brought unfamiliar names to the prisoners' attention: "'Blood and Guts Patton'. Now there is a name for a General!... Somehow though, we feel that with a General bearing the name of 'Blood and Guts' there is little danger of the Germans dislodging his army".[125] It was clear that such important news would have a great effect in the camp; at the same time, the rejoicing it would bring would undoubtedly alert the Japanese. It was therefore decided to provide a hint to the other prisoners, rather than the full information. This was again delivered by a priest, this time by the padre officiating at one of the numerous funeral services. He quoted Exodus chapter 15, verses 9 and 10, which refer to pursuing, overtaking and destroying the enemy, and the sea. News of the bombing of London by V-2 rockets was withheld.[126]
The news of the German capitulation on 7 May 1945 was similarly cryptically relayed at a funeral by the padre. This time the verse was Exodus chapter 3, verse 8, concerning the deliverance of the Israelites from the Egyptians to the land of milk and honey; extra piquancy was added by the fact that Suga was present at this service.[127]
End of the war for Batu Lintang [ edit ]
In the Allied plans for the South West Pacific theatre, the responsibility for re-taking the island of Borneo was entrusted to Australian forces. Prior to the Australian landings, strategic bombing and reconnaissance missions were undertaken by the RAAF and USAAF. The first Allied planes, 15 USAAF Lockheed Lightnings were seen over the camp on the morning of 25 March 1945, as they flew on a mission to bomb the Batu Tujoh landing ground.[128] Raids continued sporadically over the next few weeks. A lone Flying Fortress regularly attacked targets in Kuching.[129]
The Borneo campaign was launched on 1 May 1945, with a brigade of the Australian 9th Division landing at Tarakan, on the eastern coast of Dutch Borneo. The American armed forces provided naval and air support to assist the landings, and in some cases the Australians were assisted by the advance landings of the Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD) and their local allies.[130] This was followed by landings in Brunei and Labuan on 10 June.[131] In early July, a raid was made by Mosquito aircraft on oil and petrol dumps near to the camp.[132] Liberation still seemed a remote prospect, however: "As the weeks dragged by, the lone planes of the Allies were a daily occurrence and as we had realised very early that they could do nothing to help us, we hardly took any notice of them".[132]
The atomic bombings in Japan at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 followed by that of Nagasaki on 9 August precipitated the abrupt end of the war. On 15 August 1945, Japan announced its official unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers. The POWs learned of the surrender early in the morning of 15 August, in a broadcast by Radio Chungking received by the secret radio.[133] Pringle made one last journey through the jungle to inform his Chinese friends.[134] The news was immediately broken to the British other ranks' compound, and quickly spread to the other compounds. Celebratory meals were prepared, with precious supplies and livestock used up. The Japanese guards were unaware of their country's surrender, and as the day coincided with an official camp holiday, marking the opening of the camp on 15 August three years previously, they were satisfied that the celebrations were related to the break from the working parties.[135] The women learned shortly afterwards, when the married women had their scheduled meeting with their husbands.[136]
Prisoners waving to the RAAF Beaufighter aircraft which flew over to drop leaflets announcing Japan’s surrender
Under General Order No. 1, issued on 16 August by General Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the Japanese were required to provide information on the location of all camps and were responsible for the safety of prisoners and internees, for providing them with adequate food, shelter, clothes and medical care until their care could pass to the Allied powers, and for handing over each store together with its equipment, stores, arms and ammunition and records to the senior Allied officer in each camp. Since it was known that in many areas prisoners and internees were suffering from starvation and neglect, it was of the first importance that they were contacted and recovered as soon as possible.[137]
Despite the surrender, the Japanese would remain in control of the camp until 11 September. During this period, there were no work parties and the prisoners did not suffer any beatings.[138] "It became apparent during the next few days that the Japanese soldiers knew something had happened but were not sure what it was", wrote Pepler.[139] Extra food was provided by the Japanese shortly afterwards; the camp hospital was furnished with bed chairs and mosquito nets for the first time, and substantial amounts of medicine were issued.[140]
A pamphlet in English titled JAPAN HAS SURRENDERED was dropped over the camp by three Beaufighters on 16 August.[141] From 19–23 August, leaflets were dropped by aircraft all over known areas in which the Japanese were concentrated, giving general war news and news of the progress of the surrender.[142] On August 19 or 20,[143] more leaflets were dropped on the camp. Signed by Major-General George Wootten, General Officer Commanding, 9th Division, they informed the prisoners of the surrender of Japan, and stated "I know that you will realise that on account of your location, it will be difficult to get aid to you immediately, but you can rest assured that we will do everything within our power to release and care for you as soon as possible".[144]
On 24 August, Suga officially announced to the camp that Japan had surrendered.[145] On 29 August letters were dropped on the camp, instructing the Japanese commander to make contact with the Australian commanders. The letter contained a code of panel signals which enabled Suga to indicate that he agreed to the dropping of supplies for the prisoners and that he would meet Australian representatives later.[146] These panels were placed on the roof of one of the buildings and can be seen in the photograph at the start of the article (above).
On the six foot torpedo was printed the word BREAD... [it] spelled BREAD, but it meant, YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN" Agnes Newton Keith, Three Came Home. Preparing to drop a storpedo into the camp, 30 August 1945. "
Stores in long canisters (known by the aircraftmen as "storpedos") were first parachuted into the camp from a RAAF Douglas Dakota on 30 August. A female internee, Hilda Bates, wrote: "At 11.30 a.m. today a sea-plane dropped twenty parachutes with packages attached. One fell outside our hut and was labelled 'bread'. Others contained flour, tinned rabbit, and other meat. The goods were collected by the Japs under the supervision of Australian Officers who distributed them to the groups of internees. All sorts of what we had thought of as luxuries arrived; such as sugar, sweets, milk, bundles of clothing, and even fashion books!".[82] Further supplies were dropped daily;[147] tragedy struck on 7 September when a male civilian internee was hit and killed by a storpedo that had broken free from its parachute.[148]
The official Instrument of Surrender was signed on 2 September ending World War II.
After communicating with the Japanese staff at Kuching, Colonel A. G. Wilson landed on the Sarawak River on 5 September and conferred with the commander of the Japanese forces there, who confirmed there were 2,024 Allied prisoners and internees in the area. The next day, Brigadier Thomas Eastick, commander of Kuching Force—a detachment from the 9th Division—flew to the mouth of the Sarawak River in a Catalina where three Japanese officers, including Suga, came aboard for talks.[31] The task of Kuching Force was to accept the surrender of and impound the Japanese forces in the Kuching area, release and evacuate Allied prisoners and internees, and establish military control.[149] At the meeting, Suga presented Eastick with complete nominal rolls of all compounds in the camp.[150]
On 7 September, Walsh was permitted by the Japanese to fly to the headquarters of the 9th Division on Labuan island, to collect surgical and medical supplies for the camp. He returned with two Australian medical officers, Major A. W. M. Hutson and Lt.-Col. N. H. Morgan.[151] Pepler recorded how "Dr Yamamoto came in for one hell of a time from these two Medical Officers when they saw the state of the majority of our camp. Up-to-date medical care and drugs soon began to show effect upon our sick and many lives were saved by these two officers. Out of the two thousand of us who entered that camp, only seven hundred and fifty survived and of these well over six hundred were chronic sick".[152]
Death orders [ edit ]
Immediately prior to the surrender of Japan, rumours abounded in the camp that the Japanese intended to execute all the prisoners rather than allow them to be freed by the approaching Allied forces;[153] when Dr Yamamoto informed some prisoners that they were to be moved to a new camp they naturally feared the worst, especially when he promised the unlikely idyll of a camp "equipped with the best medical equipment obtainable... there would be no working parties and food would be plentiful... the sick men would be especially well cared for".[154]
Official orders to execute all the prisoners, both POWs and civilian, on 17 or 18 August 1945[155] were found in Suga's quarters after the liberation of the camp. The orders were not carried out, presumably as a result of the unconditional surrender of Japan on 15 August. A "death march", similar to those at Sandakan and elsewhere, was to have been undertaken by those male prisoners physically able to undertake it; other prisoners were to be executed by various methods in the camp:
1 All POWs and male internees to be marched to a camp at milestone 21 and bayoneted there
All POWs and male internees to be marched to a camp at milestone 21 and bayoneted there 2 All sick unable to walk to be treated similarly in the Square at Kuching [in the square at the camp rather than in Kuching town]
All sick unable to walk to be treated similarly in the Square at Kuching [in the square at the camp rather than in Kuching town] 3 All women and children to be burnt in their barracks[156]
Revised orders for the execution on 15 September 1945 of all the internees were also found, this time in the Administration Office at Batu Lintang:
Group 1 Women internees, children and nuns – to be given poisoned rice
Women internees, children and nuns – to be given poisoned rice Group 2 Internee men and Catholic Fathers to be shot and burnt
Internee men and Catholic Fathers to be shot and burnt Group 3 POWs to be marched into the jungle, shot and burnt
POWs to be marched into the jungle, shot and burnt Group 4 Sick and weak left at Batu Lintang main camp to be bayoneted and the entire camp to be destroyed by fire[157]
The camp was liberated on 11 September 1945, four days before the revised proposed execution date of over 2,000 men, women and children.
Liberation of the camp [ edit ]
Eastick addressing part of the parade at the surrender ceremony at the camp, 11 September 1945
On 8–9 September, the Royal Australian Navy corvette HMAS Kapunda, with Eastick and staff officers on board, sailed for Kuching, along with USS Doyle C. Barnes. At 14:35 on 11 September, Eastick accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces in the Kuching area from their commander, Major-General Hiyoe Yamamura, on board HMAS Kapunda.[158] Later that day the Australian occupying force landed.[31]
The 9th Division troops arrived at Batu Lintang camp that afternoon, accompanied by a few American naval officers.[159] There was no resistance from the Japanese troops. The prisoners and internees had been forewarned that there would be no delay in taking the surrender, and quickly gathered at 17:00 in the main square of the camp to witness Eastick accept the sword of Suga.[160] The Japanese finally learned of the existence of the radio in a dramatic fashion:
"The Australian Commander, Major General [sic] Eastick... mounted the rostrum and after accepting the sword of surrender from Suga was about to dismiss him when a shout, rising simultaneously from the throats of the Board of Directors of the 'Old Lady' and 'Ginnie' stopped the proceedings. 'Hold on, we have something to show you.' Carrying the radio and generator Len [Beckett] proudly showed them to the General and turning to Suga, asked, 'Well, what do you think about it Suga?' Now I know the full meaning of the saying 'If looks could kill.' Len would have died a horrible death".[161]
The following day, Suga, together with Captain Nagata and Dr Yamamoto, were flown to the Australian base on Labuan, to await their trials as war criminals. Suga committed suicide there on 16 September. Nagata and Yamamoto were later tried, found guilty and executed.[77]
Photographers and cameramen accompanied the liberating force, and the events, and those of the following days, were well-documented.[162] On liberation, the camp contained 2,024 inmates: 1,392 prisoners (including 882 British, 178 Australian and 45 Indian); and 632 internees.[163] The most ill prisoners were taken to Kuching Civil Hospital, which had been entirely refitted by the Australians since serving as the Japanese military hospital.[164]
On 12 September, a thanksgiving service was held in the camp, led by two Australian chaplains from the liberating force and Bishop Francis S. Hollis of Sarawak, an ex-internee.[165] This was followed by a parade held in honour of Wootten, as commander of the 9th Division.[166] In appreciation of Beckett's work on the radio, fellow ex-prisoners in the camp subscribed over £1,000 for him, a massive sum of money for the time, which Beckett intended to use to set up a wireless business in London, his hometown.[167] Beckett was later awarded the British Empire Medal for his work on the radio.[168]
Ex-internee children inspecting the RAAF Douglas Dakota C-47 on which they were to be transferred to Labuan.
Repatriation commenced on 12 September, and by 14 September, 858 former prisoners had been removed, though pressure of numbers meant that some were still at Batu Lintang a week after liberation. Ex-prisoners were transported by ship (including Wanganella, an Australian hospital ship) and in eight Douglas Dakotas and two Catalinas, to the 9th Division's "Released Prisoners of War and Internees Reception Camp", and the 2/1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) on Labuan, before continuing their journeys homeward.[169]
The captured Japanese soldiers were then held at Batu Lintang camp. There they were visited by J. B. Archer, an ex-internee, who noted "There were about eight thousand of them... it was difficult not to feel aggrieved at the good treatment they were receiving compared to what we had received at their hands. A lunch of fried rice, fish, vegetable and dried fruit was shown to me. This, I was told, was just an ordinary sample."[170]
By June–July 1946, the bodies in the cemetery at Batu Lintang had been exhumed and reburied in the military cemetery on Labuan island.[171] In 1947, a grant was approved for the establishment of a teachers' training college on the site. It exists as such to the present day, the oldest in Malaysia. Of the numerous huts that had housed the prisoners, only 21 were considered fit for use in 1947; after refurbishment the college moved in July 1948 from its temporary home in Kuching to the site at Batu Lintang.[172] The huts have gradually been replaced over the years, although a few remnants of the site's former life remain. These include a single hut (albeit with a galvanised roof rather than the attap (palm leaf) one of the war), the old gate posts, the gate bunker and stump of the Japanese flag pole. There is also a small museum on the site.[173]
Three Came Home, an account of female internee Agnes Newton Keith's time in the camp, was published in 1947. It was later made into a feature film of the same name, with Claudette Colbert playing the part of Agnes, Patric Knowles playing her husband Harry and Sessue Hayakawa in the role of Suga.
The Union Jack which had been draped over the coffins of prisoners of war at the camp, and which had been raised in the camp on the Japanese capitulation, was placed in All Saints Church, Oxford in April 1946, together with two wooden memorial plaques. After the deconsecration of the church and their temporary loss, in 1993 the flag and plaques were housed in Dorchester Abbey.[174]
The Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia holds a large archive of material related to the camp, much of which is accessible on the AWM website[175] in the collections databases. In England, the Imperial War Museum in London also houses material about the camp, as does the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House in Oxford. Many of the personal recollections held at the latter two repositories are reproduced in the 1998 publication by Keat Gin Ooi (see below for full reference).
Batu Lintang in March 2007: gallery [ edit ]
Ammunition bunker.
Remains of the Japanese flagpole at the site of Lt.-Col. Suga's office.
Japanese monument at the main road leading to the camp.
Prisoner of War camp memorial.
Plaque of the Prisoner of War camp memorial.
'Punjabi Barracks', a reconstructed building. Currently the oldest building in the camp grounds.
POWs and internees of note [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Anonymous (1944) "Kuching Internment Camp, July 1943" The Chronicle: A Quarterly Report Of The Borneo Mission Association 28(1), 7 (March 1944)
28(1), 7 (March 1944) Archer, B. E. (1999) A study of civilian internment by the Japanese in the Far East, 1941–45 Essex: B. Archer (University of Essex PhD thesis)
Essex: B. Archer (University of Essex PhD thesis) Archer, Bernice (2004) The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–45, A Patchwork of Internment London: Routledge Curzon ISBN 0-7146-5592-9 (A 2008 reprint with expanded final chapter has been published by Hong Kong University Press)
London: Routledge Curzon ISBN 0-7146-5592-9 (A 2008 reprint with expanded final chapter has been published by Hong Kong University Press) Archer, John Belville (1946) (collected and edited) Lintang Camp: Official Documents from the Records of The Civilian Internment Camp (No 1 Camp) at Lintang, Kuching, Sarawak, During the Years 1942-1943-1944-1945. Published as a pamphlet March 1946
. Published as a pamphlet March 1946 Archer, John Belville (1997) Glimpses of Sarawak Between 1912 & 1946: Autobiographical Extracts & Articles of an Officer of the Rajahs Compiled and edited by Vernon L. Porritt Special Issue of the Department of South-East Asian Studies, University of Hull ISBN 0-85958-906-4
Compiled and edited by Vernon L. Porritt Special Issue of the Department of South-East Asian Studies, University of Hull ISBN 0-85958-906-4 Arvier, Robyn (2001) "Caesar's Ghost!": Maurie Arvier's story of war, captivity and survival Launceston, Tasmania. Arvier was in the Australian officers' camp
Launceston, Tasmania. Arvier was in the Australian officers' camp Arvier, Robyn (collected and edited) (2004) Don’t worry about me: Wartime letters of the 8th Division A.I.F. Launceston, Tasmania: Bokprint. ISBN 0-646-44026-8
Launceston, Tasmania: Bokprint. ISBN 0-646-44026-8 Bell, Frank (1991) Undercover University (revised edition) Cambridge: Elisabeth Bell. ISBN 0-9516984-0-0 (Originally published in 1990, same ISBN). Bell was in the British officers' camp; his wife published his account after his death
(revised edition) Cambridge: Elisabeth Bell. ISBN 0-9516984-0-0 (Originally published in 1990, same ISBN). Bell was in the British officers' camp; his wife published his account after his death Brown, D. A. D. (1946) "Reminiscences of Internment" The Chronicle: A Quarterly Report Of The Borneo Mission Association 29(3), 37 (December 1946)
29(3), 37 (December 1946) Colley, George S. Jr. (1951) Manila, Kuching and return 1941–1945 San Francisco: privately printed (first printing 1946). Colley was in the male civilians' camp; his wife was in the female civilians' camp
San Francisco: privately printed (first printing 1946). Colley was in the male civilians' camp; his wife was in the female civilians' camp Cunningham, Michele K. (2006) Defying the Odds. Surviving Sandakan and Kuching Lothian Books/Hachette Livre ISBN 978-0-7344-0917-1
Lothian Books/Hachette Livre ISBN 978-0-7344-0917-1 Darch, Ernest G. (Airman) (2000) Survival in Japanese POW Camps with Changkol and Basket London: Minerva Press. ISBN 0-7541-1161-X (also published by Stewart Books, Ontario, Canada). Darch was in the British other ranks' camp
London: Minerva Press. ISBN 0-7541-1161-X (also published by Stewart Books, Ontario, Canada). Darch was in the British other ranks' camp Dawson, Christopher (1995) To Sandakan: The Diaries of Charlie Johnstone Prisoner of War 1942–45 St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 1-86373-818-5 Johnstone, an Australian serving in the RAF, was in the British officers' camp
St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 1-86373-818-5 Johnstone, an Australian serving in the RAF, was in the British officers' camp Digby, K. H. (1980) Lawyer in the Wilderness Ithaca, New York: Cornell University (Data Paper 114, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asian Studies) Digby was in the male civilians' camp
Ithaca, New York: Cornell University (Data Paper 114, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asian Studies) Digby was in the male civilians' camp Evans, Stephen R. (1999) Sabah (North Borneo) Under the Rising Sun Government Printed in Malaysia, no publisher details or ISBN. Contains an account by J. R. Baxter, who was in the male civilians' camp
Printed in Malaysia, no publisher details or ISBN. Contains an account by J. R. Baxter, who was in the male civilians' camp Firkins, Peter (1995) Borneo Surgeon: A Reluctant Hero Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press. ISBN 0-85905-211-7. A biography of Dr James P. Taylor, Principal Medical Officer in North Borneo when the Japanese invaded. His wife Celia was in the female civilians' camp
Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press. ISBN 0-85905-211-7. A biography of Dr James P. Taylor, Principal Medical Officer in North Borneo when the Japanese invaded. His wife Celia was in the female civilians' camp Forbes, George K. et al. (1947) Borneo Burlesque: Comic Tragedy/Tragic Comedy Sydney: H. S. Clayton. Edition limited to 338 copies
(1947) Sydney: H. S. Clayton. Edition limited to 338 copies Howes, Peter H. H. (1976) "The Lintang Camp: Reminiscences of an Internee during the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945" Journal of the Malaysian Historical Society (Sarawak Branch) 2, 33–47. Howes was a Church of England priest in Sarawak, and was in the male civilians' camp
2, 33–47. Howes was a Church of England priest in Sarawak, and was in the male civilians' camp Howes, Peter H. H. (1994) In a Fair Ground or Cibus Cassowari London: Excalibur Press. ISBN 1-85634-367-7
London: Excalibur Press. ISBN 1-85634-367-7 Keith, Agnes Newton (1955) Three Came Home London: Michael Joseph (Mermaid Books). Originally published in 1947 by Little Brown and Company, Boston, Mass. Keith was in the female civilians' camp
London: Michael Joseph (Mermaid Books). Originally published in 1947 by Little Brown and Company, Boston, Mass. Keith was in the female civilians' camp Keith, Agnes Newton (1972) Beloved Exiles Boston, Mass: Little Brown and Company Semi-autobiographical novel based on Keith's time in Borneo, including her internment
Boston, Mass: Little Brown and Company Semi-autobiographical novel based on Keith's time in Borneo, including her internment Kell, Derwent (1984) A Doctor's Borneo Brisbane: Boolarong Publications. ISBN 0-908175-80-9. Derwent Kell is the pen name of Dr Marcus C. Clarke, who was in the male civilians' camp
Brisbane: Boolarong Publications. ISBN 0-908175-80-9. Derwent Kell is the pen name of Dr Marcus C. Clarke, who was in the male civilians' camp Kirby, S. Woodburn et al. (1957) The War Against Japan. Volume 1: The Loss of Singapore London: HMSO
(1957) London: HMSO Kirby, S. Woodburn et al. (1969) The War Against Japan. Volume 5: The Surrender of Japan London: HMSO
(1969) London: HMSO Lim, Shau Hua Julitta (1995) From an Army Camp to a Teacher College: A History of Batu Lintang Teachers' College, Kuching, Sarawak ISBN 983-99068-0-1
ISBN 983-99068-0-1 Lim, Shau Hua Julitta (2005) Pussy's in the well: Japanese Occupation of Sarawak 1941 – 1945 Kuching, Sarawak: Research and Resource Centre ISBN 983-41998-2-1 Some accounts, many photographs and some nominal rolls
Kuching, Sarawak: Research and Resource Centre ISBN 983-41998-2-1 Some accounts, many photographs and some nominal rolls Long, Gavin (1963) The Final Campaigns Australia in the War 1939–1945 Series 1 (Army), Volume 7. Canberra: Australian War Memorial (Online in PDF form at [1])
Australia in the War 1939–1945 Series 1 (Army), Volume 7. Canberra: Australian War Memorial (Online in PDF form at [1]) Mackie, John (2007) Captain Jack Surveyor and Engineer: The autobiography of John Mackie Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Institute of Surveyors ISBN 0-9582486-6-4 Mackie was in the British officers' camp
Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Institute of Surveyors ISBN 0-9582486-6-4 Mackie was in the British officers' camp Newman, Carolyn (ed) (2005) Legacies of our Fathers South Melbourne: Lothian Books ISBN 0-7344-0877-3 Accounts of six Australian officers and a female civilian internee
South Melbourne: Lothian Books ISBN 0-7344-0877-3 Accounts of six Australian officers and a female civilian internee O'Connor, Michael P. (1954) The More Fool I Dublin: Michael F. Moynihan Account of O'Connor's time in Malaya, including Batu Lintang. He was in the male civilians' camp
Dublin: Michael F. Moynihan Account of O'Connor's time in Malaya, including Batu Lintang. He was in the male civilians' camp Ooi, Keat Gin (1998) Japanese Empire in the Tropics: Selected Documents and Reports of the Japanese Period in Sarawak, Northwest Borneo, 1941–1945 Ohio University Center for International Studies, Monographs in International Studies, SE Asia Series 101 (2 vols) ISBN 0-89680-199-3 Contains many accounts by British POWs and civilian internees.
Ohio University Center for International Studies, Monographs in International Studies, SE Asia Series 101 (2 vols) ISBN 0-89680-199-3 Contains many accounts by British POWs and civilian internees. Ooi, Keat Gin (2006) "The 'Slapping Monster' and Other Stories: Recollections of the Japanese Occupation (1941–1945) of Borneo through Autobiographies, Biographies, Memoirs, and Other Ego-documents" Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7(3), Winter 2006
7(3), Winter 2006 Purden, Ivor M. (1989) "Japanese P.O.W. Camps in Borneo" in Neville Watterson (1989) Borneo: The Japanese P.O.W. Camps – Mail of the Forces, P.O.W. and Internees (published by W. N. Watterson)
(published by W. N. Watterson) Reece, Bob (1998) Masa Jepun: Sarawak under the Japanese 1941–1945 Kuching, Sarawak: Sarawak Literary Society ISBN 983-9115-06-5
Kuching, Sarawak: Sarawak Literary Society ISBN 983-9115-06-5 St. John-Jones, L. W. (2004) "The Kuching Prisoner-of-War Camp 1944–45: Heroism and Tragedy" Sabah Society Journal 21
21 Smallfield, E. J. (1947) "Internment Under the Japanese" New Zealand Surveyor 19, no 4, April 1947, 301–310. Smallfield was in the male civilians' camp
19, no 4, April 1947, 301–310. Smallfield was in the male civilians' camp Southwell, C. Hudson (1999) Uncharted Waters Calgary, Canada: Astana Publishing ISBN 0-9685440-0-2 Southwell was in the male civilians' camp
Calgary, Canada: Astana Publishing ISBN 0-9685440-0-2 Southwell was in the male civilians' camp Taylor, Brian (2006) "Lintang Camp Memorials" The Sarawak Museum Journal 62(83), 59–62 (December 2006)
62(83), 59–62 (December 2006) Torrens, Alexandra (1998) "Borneo burlesque" Wartime 4 (Summer 1998), 51–55. Wartime is the official magazine of the Australian War Memorial. The article is about a group of officers who made it their mission to uphold the morale of Australian POWs in Batu Lintang
4 (Summer 1998), 51–55. is the official magazine of the Australian War Memorial. The article is about a group of officers who made it their mission to uphold the morale of Australian POWs in Batu L |
Falcons suffered losses to both Philadelphia and New Orleans in Weeks 13 and 14. In Week 15, Ryan returned, despite not yet having fully recovered from his injury, and led Atlanta to a 10–7 upset win against the New York Jets.[97]
In Week 16, the Falcons defeated the Buffalo Bills in a 31–3 win. Ryan threw for 250 yards with three touchdowns, two of them to Roddy White.[98] In the last game of the season, the Falcons defeated the Buccaneers by a score of 20–10. In the win, Ryan had 223 passing yards with two touchdowns and two interceptions.[99]
With a record of 9–7, the Falcons attained back to back winning seasons for the first time in franchise history.[100]
Ryan finished the season throwing for 2,916 yards with 22 touchdowns, 14 interceptions, and a quarterback rating of 80.9. Ryan also rushed for 49 yards and one touchdown.[101]
2010 season [ edit ]
In the 2010 season, Ryan led the Falcons to an NFC best 13–3 record, second in the NFL behind the 14–2 New England Patriots.[102]
Ryan's 2010 season started off slow in a 15–9 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was 27-of-44 for 252 yards and an interception.[103] He bounced back in the next game against the Arizona Cardinals. In the 41–7 victory, he was 21-of-32 for 225 yards and three touchdowns.[104] In Week 7, he had his most efficient game of the season in the 39–32 win over the Cincinnati Bengals. He was 24-of-33 for 299 yards, three touchdowns, and one interception for a season-high 118.1 passer rating.[105] The victory over the Bengals was the start of an eight-game winning streak for Ryan and the Falcons. In Week 10, against the Baltimore Ravens, he passed for 316 yards and three touchdowns in the 26–21 win.[106] After falling to the New Orleans Saints in Week 16, Ryan closed out the regular season with a 31–10 victory over the Carolina Panthers.[107][108]
On the season, Ryan set career highs in touchdowns (28), completion percentage (62.5), and yards (3,705) while tossing 9 interceptions. Ryan set the single season franchise records, as well as career highs, in attempts (571), completions (357), and wins in a season (13).[109] Ryan led the NFL in fourth quarter comebacks for a quarterback in the 2010 season, with six.
In the Divisional Round, the Falcons were defeated by the eventual Super Bowl XLV champions, Green Bay Packers, with the score 48–21.[110]
Ryan was invited to the 2011 Pro Bowl, for the first time of his career.[111] He threw two touchdowns in the Pro Bowl, one to Tony Gonzalez and the other to Larry Fitzgerald.[112] He was named as the 52nd best player in the league on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2011.[113]
2011 season [ edit ]
In the 2011 season, Ryan led the Falcons to a 10–6 record, passing for 4,177 yards, 29 touchdowns, and 12 interceptions.[114]
In the season opener against the Chicago Bears, the Falcons started off slow with a 30–12 loss. Ryan was 31-of-47 for 319 yards and an interception.[115] However, in the next game, the Falcons bounced back with a 35–31 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles. Ryan was 17-of-28 for 195 yards with four touchdowns and two interceptions.[116] In Weeks 10 and 11, he recorded consecutive games with at least 300 passing yards in games against the New Orleans Saints and the Tennessee Titans.[117][118] In Week 14, against the Carolina Panthers, he was 22-of-38 for 320 yards and four touchdowns in the 31–23 victory to his second career NFC Offensive Player of the Week honor.[119][120]
The Falcons' regular season qualified them for the playoffs. However, they were defeated by the eventual Super Bowl XLVI champion New York Giants in the Wild Card Round by a score of 24–2.[121]
2012 season [ edit ]
In 2012, Ryan led the Falcons to their franchise best start of the season, starting 8–0. Ryan set personal records in completions (422), completion percentage (68.6), yards (4,719), and touchdowns (32).[122]
In the 8–0 start, Ryan posted four games with three touchdown passes and three games going over the 300-yard passing mark. The first loss of the season for the Falcons came in Week 10 against the New Orleans Saints. Ryan was 34-of-52 for a then career-high 411 yards and three touchdowns and one interception as the Falcons fell by a score of 31–27.[123] In the next game against the Arizona Cardinals, Ryan threw for 301 yards but had five interceptions. Despite the turnovers, the Falcons were able to win by a score of 23–19.[124] In the penultimate game of the regular season, he was 25-of-32 for 279 yards and four touchdowns in a 31–18 victory over the Detroit Lions to his third career NFC Offensive Player of the Week nod.[125][126]
The Falcons finished the regular season 13–3, with the first seed in the NFC. Ryan, who was 0–3 in the postseason coming into the playoffs, won his first postseason game in the Divisional Round against the Seattle Seahawks, with Ryan orchestrating the final scoring drive that led to Matt Bryant's game-winning field goal. Ryan finished with 250 passing yards, 68.6% completion percentage, 3 touchdowns, and two interceptions.[127] In the NFC Championship against the San Francisco 49ers, Ryan threw for 396 yards and three touchdowns, but also committed two turnovers in crucial portions of the game, and later sprained the AC joint to his non-throwing shoulder as the Falcons lost 28–24.[128] He did not require surgical procedure to repair his shoulder and would have been able to play in the Super Bowl if the Falcons had advanced. He was named to the Pro Bowl for the second time in his career.[129] He was ranked #17 by his fellow players on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2013.[130]
2013 season [ edit ]
On July 25, 2013, Ryan agreed to a five-year contract extension worth $103.75 million with the Falcons.[131] On December 30, Ryan surpassed Steve Bartkowski for the all-time franchise leader in passing yards.[132]
The Falcons had a down year, where they limped to a 4–12 record, due to multiple injuries and losing key players on both sides of the ball.[133] Some of Ryan's highlights in the down season were games against the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Against the Patriots in Week 4, he was 34-of-54 for a then career-high 421 yards with two touchdowns and one interception in the 30–23 loss.[134] Against the Buccaneers in Week 7, he was 20-of-26 for 273 yards and three touchdowns for a 148.4 passer rating in the 31–23 victory to earn NFC Offensive Player of the Week.[135][136] After the victory, the Falcons were 2–4 with all the losses being by a combined 19 points. However, the rest of the season collapsed starting with five consecutive losses, which the team never recovered from.[137]
Overall, on the season, Ryan passed for 4,515 yards with 26 touchdowns and 17 interceptions.[138]
2014 season [ edit ]
Ryan against the Ravens in 2014
Ryan led the Falcons to a 6–10 record in 2014. He threw for 4,694 yards, 28 touchdowns, and 14 interceptions, and had a quarterback rating of 93.9[139]
The season did start off promising. In a 37–34 overtime victory over the New Orleans Saints, Ryan was 31-of-43 for a then career-high 448 yards and three touchdowns to earn NFC Offensive Player of the Week.[140][141] After a 24–10 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, the Falcons defeated the Tampa Bay Buccaneers by a score of 56–14 on Thursday Night Football.[142] In the victory, Ryan was 21-of-24 (a career-high single-game completion percentage of 87.50%) for 286 yards and three touchdowns for a career-high 155.9 passer rating. He earned another NFC Offensive Player of the Week honor for his effort against the Buccaneers.[143][144] The Falcons went on to lose six of their next eight games. After a much-needed 29–18 win over the Arizona Cardinals, the Falcons faced off against the Green Bay Packers[145] and lost 43–37 as Ryan had 375 passing yards, four touchdowns, and one interception.[146] After a loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers and a victory over the New Orleans Saints, the Falcons had a 6–9 record. Despite the struggles of the 2014 season, the Falcons still had a chance to make the playoffs with a Week 17 victory due to the weakness of the entire NFC South division. However, the Falcons missed the playoffs for a second consecutive saeson after losing 34–3 to their divisional rivals, Carolina Panthers, in Week 17.[147] For the third time in his career, he was named to the Pro Bowl.[148] He was ranked as the 77th best player in the league among his peers on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2015.[149]
2015 season [ edit ]
Ryan in 2015
Ryan led the Falcons to an 8–8 record in 2015, good for second in the NFC South, but not enough to reach the playoffs.[150]
The 2015 season was an inconsistent one for Ryan and the Falcons. In the season opener against the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football, he was 23-of-34 for 298 yards with two touchdowns and two interceptions in the 26–24 victory.[151] In the next game against the New York Giants, he was 30-of-46 for 363 yards and a touchdown in the 24–20 victory.[152] The Falcons won the next three games for a 5–0 start. Their first loss came in the sixth game against the New Orleans Saints, where Ryan was 30-of-44 for 295 yards and two touchdowns.[153] After a victory over the Tennessee Titans, the Falcons dropped their next six games to send their season plummeting. In the losing streak, Ryan had a season-high 397 passing yards for two touchdowns and an interception against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on November 1.[154]
Ryan finished the 2015 season with 21 touchdown passes, the second lowest of his career, as well as 16 interceptions, the second highest of his career. Additionally Ryan fumbled a career-high 12 times, losing five of them, which was also a career-high.[155]
2016 season: MVP season [ edit ]
In Week 4 of the 2016 season, Ryan threw for a team-record 503 yards and four touchdowns while teammate Julio Jones caught 12 passes for a team-record 300 yards and a touchdown in a win over the Carolina Panthers.[156] Ryan and Jones were the first quarterback-receiver duo in NFL history to combine for at least 500 passing yards and 300 receiving yards in the same game.[157] In October 2016, he set an NFL record for most consecutive games with at least 200 passing yards with 46 straight games.[158] In Week 9, in the 43–28 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he had 344 passing yards and four touchdowns to earn NFC Offensive Player of the Week.[159] In Week 17, in a 38–32 victory over the New Orleans Saints, he had 331 passing yards and four touchdowns to earn NFC Offensive Player of the Week.[160][161] Ryan improved greatly from the previous season. He threw for a career-high 4,944 yards on just 373 completions and 534 attempts, second in the league, and a career-high 38 touchdowns and a career-low seven interceptions, also second in the league. Ryan's 9.3 yards per attempt and 5.0 air yards per attempt ranked No. 1 among NFL quarterbacks in 2016.[162] He threw touchdown passes to 13 different receivers, an NFL record. He threw a touchdown pass in all 16 games for the first time in his career and was the only quarterback to do so for the 2016 season. On the season, he threw a pass to an NFL-record 13 different receivers.[163] Ryan was selected to his fourth Pro Bowl and was named First-team All Pro.[164] Following the regular season, he was recognized as the NFL Most Valuable Player by the Pro Football Writers Association.[165] Ryan was named the NFL Offensive Player of the Year and the NFL Most Valuable Player for the 2016 season.[166][167] He earned the Bert Bell Award for the 2016 season.[168] He was ranked tenth by his peers on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2017.[169]
As the #2-seed in the NFC Playoffs, Ryan led the 11–5 Falcons to a 36–20 victory over the #3-seed Seattle Seahawks in the Divisional Round.[170] Ryan passed for over 300 yards and had three touchdowns.[171] In the NFC Championship, Ryan led the Falcons to a 44–21 victory over the Green Bay Packers. Ryan threw for 392 yards for four touchdowns and no interceptions. He also ran for a fifth touchdown, just the fourth player to do so in a post-season game,[172] as the Falcons earned a trip to Super Bowl LI.[173] During the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots, Ryan finished with 284 passing yards, two touchdowns, and a lost fumble. Although the Falcons led 28–3, it became the subject of one of the most historic downfalls in sports history as the Falcons lost the Super Bowl 28–34 in overtime.[174][175]
2017 season [ edit ]
On September 10, 2017, in the season opening 23–17 victory over the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field, Ryan connected with tight end Austin Hooper for an 88-yard touchdown, which was the second-longest touchdown pass of Ryan's career. In the game, Ryan was 21-of-30 for 321 yards and the one touchdown.[176][177] In Week 2, Ryan and the Falcons had their first home game at the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Against the Green Bay Packers on NBC Sunday Night Football, Ryan was 19-of-28 for 252 yards and a touchdown, which was to running back Tevin Coleman and the first touchdown ever thrown in the new stadium.[178] In Week 10, during a 27–7 win over the Dallas Cowboys, Ryan became the fastest quarterback to throw for over 40,000 passing yards. This was done in 151 games breaking Drew Brees' record which was done in 152 games.[179] In Week 17, after clinching a spot in the playoffs after beating the Carolina Panthers 22–10, Ryan set the record for most passing yards through 10 seasons with 41,796, breaking the record held by Peyton Manning, who had 41,626.[180] Ryan led the Falcons to a victory against the Los Angeles Rams in the Wild Card Round by a score of 26–13.[181] A week later the Falcons were beaten by the Philadelphia Eagles 15–10 in the NFC Divisional Round.[182] Ryan was ranked 29th by his fellow players on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2018.[183]
2018 season [ edit ]
Ryan and his teammates in a game against the Washington Redskins
On May 3, 2018, Ryan signed a five-year, $150 million contract with the Falcons with $100 million guaranteed, making him the first player to average at least $30 million per year.[184] In Week 2, a 31–24 victory over the Carolina Panthers, Ryan recorded two rushing touchdowns for the first time in his professional career. In addition, he had 272 passing yards, two passing touchdowns, and an interception in the win.[185] In Week 3, in a 43–37 loss to the New Orleans Saints, Ryan passed for 374 yards and a career-high five touchdowns.[186] In Week 4, against the Cincinnati Bengals, he had 419 passing yards and three touchdowns in the 37–36 loss.[187] In Week 14, a 40–14 victory over the Arizona Cardinals, Ryan recorded two passing touchdowns as well as a rushing touchdown, giving him a career-high three rushing touchdowns for the season. In addition, this victory gave Ryan 100 regular season wins, and made Ryan and Thomas Dimitroff only the sixth quarterback-general manager duo to record at least 100 wins together.[188][189] In Week 17, a 34–32 victory of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Ryan recorded his first career reception on a five-yard touchdown pass from wide receiver Mohamed Sanu.[190]
Ryan finished the 2018 season with 35 passing touchdowns, three rushing touchdowns, and one receiving touchdown, giving him a career-high 39 total touchdowns on the season. In addition, the seven interceptions thrown by Ryan are tied for his career best.[191][192] Despite a losing 7–9 record, Ryan finished in the top 5 in most quarterback statistics, with the third most passing yards, tied for the third most passing touchdowns, fourth in completion percentage, and fourth in passer rating. Ryan was named a Pro Bowl alternate for the season, although Ryan declined the invitation upon being selected.[193][194][195]
NFL career statistics and accolades [ edit ]
Legend Led the league NFL record AP NFL MVP & OPOTY Bold Career high
Regular season [ edit ]
General Passing Rushing Season Team GP GS W–L Comp Att Pct Yds Y/A Y/G TD Int Rate Sck Att Yds Y/A Y/G TD Fum 2008 ATL 16 16 11–5 265 434 61.1 3,440 7.9 215.0 16 11 87.7 17 55 104 1.9 6.5 1 6 2009 ATL 14 14 9–5 263 451 58.3 2,916 6.5 208.3 22 14 80.9 19 30 49 1.6 3.5 1 5 2010 ATL 16 16 13–3 357 571 62.5 3,705 6.5 231.6 28 9 91.0 23 46 122 2.7 7.6 0 4 2011 ATL 16 16 10–6 347 566 61.3 4,177 7.4 261.1 29 12 92.2 26 37 84 2.3 5.3 2 5 2012 ATL 16 16 13–3 422 615 68.6 4,719 7.7 294.9 32 14 99.1 28 34 141 4.1 8.8 1 3 2013 ATL 16 16 4–12 439 651 67.4 4,515 6.9 282.2 26 17 89.6 44 17 55 3.2 3.4 0 5 2014 ATL 16 16 6–10 415 628 66.1 4,694 7.5 293.4 28 14 93.9 31 29 145 5.0 9.1 0 5 2015 ATL 16 16 8–8 407 614 66.3 4,591 7.5 286.9 21 16 89.0 30 36 63 1.8 3.9 0 12 2016 ATL 16 16 11–5 373 534 69.9 4,944 9.3 309.0 38 7 117.1 37 35 117 3.3 7.3 0 4 2017 ATL 16 16 10–6 342 529 64.7 4,095 7.7 255.9 20 12 91.4 24 32 143 4.5 8.9 0 4 2018 ATL 16 16 7–9 422 608 69.4 4,924 8.1 307.8 35 7 108.1 42 33 125 3.8 7.8 3 10 Career 174 174 102–72 4,052 6,201 65.3 46,720 7.5 268.5 295 133 94.9 321 384 1,148 3.01 6.6 8 63
Playoffs [ edit ]
General Passing Rushing Season Team GP GS W–L Comp Att Pct Yds Y/A Y/G TD Int Rate Sck Att Yds Y/A Y/G TD Fum 2008 ATL 1 1 0–1 26 40 65.0 199 5.0 199.0 2 2 72.8 3 4 6 1.5 6.0 0 1 2010 ATL 1 1 0–1 20 29 69.0 186 6.4 186.0 1 2 69.0 5 1 0 0.0 0.0 0 1 2011 ATL 1 1 0–1 24 41 58.9 199 4.9 199.0 0 0 71.1 2 3 3 1.0 3.0 0 0 2012 ATL 2 2 1–1 54 77 70.1 646 8.4 323.0 6 3 105.2 1 3 9 3.0 4.5 0 1 2016 ATL 3 3 2–1 70 98 71.4 1,014 10.3 338.0 9 0 135.3 8 6 20 3.3 6.7 1 1 2017 ATL 2 2 1–1 43 66 65.2 428 6.5 214.0 2 0 93.5 6 6 5 0.83 5.0 0 0 Career 10 10 4–6 237 351 67.5 2,672 7.6 267.2 20 7 100.8 25 23 43 1.9 4.8 1 6
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Falcons franchise records [ edit ]
Ryan with the Falcons in 2009
Only Falcons quarterback to lead the team to an 8–0 start [204]
Most wins in a regular season by a starting quarterback: 13 (2010 and 2012) [205]
Fewest interceptions in a regular season by starting quarterback — 7 (2016) (16 starts) [205]
Most 4th quarter comeback wins in a single season: 5 (2010) (tied with Steve Bartkowski) [205]
Most career wins: 100
Completions: career (3,630), [205] season (439 in 2013), [206] game (37 on 2015-11-01 TAM), [207] playoffs (194), [208] playoff season (70 in 2016), [209] playoff game (30 on 2013-01-20 SFO), [210] rookie season (265 in 2008) [211]
season (439 in 2013), game (37 on 2015-11-01 TAM), playoffs (194), playoff season (70 in 2016), playoff game (30 on 2013-01-20 SFO), rookie season (265 in 2008) Pass Attempts: career (5,157), [205] season (651 in 2013), [206] playoffs (285), [208] playoff season (98 in 2016), [209] rookie season (434 in 2008) [211]
season (651 in 2013), playoffs (285), playoff season (98 in 2016), rookie season (434 in 2008) Passing Yards: career (38,568), [205] season (4,944 in 2016), [206] game (503 on 2016-10-02 CAR), [207] playoffs (2,244), [208] playoff season (1,014 in 2016), [209] playoff game (396 on 2013-01-20 SFO), [210] rookie season (3,440 in 2008) [211]
season (4,944 in 2016), game (503 on 2016-10-02 CAR), playoffs (2,244), playoff season (1,014 in 2016), playoff game (396 on 2013-01-20 SFO), rookie season (3,440 in 2008) Passing TDs: career (244), [205] season (38 in 2016), [206] playoffs (18), [208] playoff season (9 in 2016), [209] playoff game (4 on 2017-01-22 GNB), [210] rookie season (16 in 2008) [211]
season (38 in 2016), playoffs (18), playoff season (9 in 2016), playoff game (4 on 2017-01-22 GNB), rookie season (16 in 2008) Passer Rating: career (93.7), [205] season (117.1 in 2016), [206] playoffs (102.4), [208] playoff season (135.3 in 2016), [209] playoff game (144.1 on 2017-02-05 NNWE), [210] rookie season (87.7 in 2008), [211] rookie game (138.4 on 2008-11-02 @OAK) [212]
season (117.1 in 2016), playoffs (102.4), playoff season (135.3 in 2016), playoff game (144.1 on 2017-02-05 NNWE), rookie season (87.7 in 2008), rookie game (138.4 on 2008-11-02 @OAK) Sacked: playoffs (19), [208] playoff game (5 on 2017-02-05 NNWE) [210]
playoff game (5 on 2017-02-05 NNWE) Yds/Pass Att: playoffs (7.87), [208] playoff season (10.35 in 2016), [209] playoff game (12.35 on 2017-02-05 NNWE), [210] rookie season (7.93 in 2008) [211]
playoff season (10.35 in 2016), playoff game (12.35 on 2017-02-05 NNWE), rookie season (7.93 in 2008) Pass Yds/Game: career (266), [205] season (309 in 2016), [206] rookie season (215 in 2008) [211]
season (309 in 2016), rookie season (215 in 2008) 300+ yard passing games: career (45), [213] season (8 in 2012 & 2016), [214] playoffs (3), [215] rookie season (2 in 2008) [216]
season (8 in 2012 & 2016), playoffs (3), rookie season (2 in 2008) 4,000+ passing yard seasons: career (7)[217]
Personal life [ edit ]
Ryan, the third of four siblings, was born to Bernice (née Loughery) and Michael Ryan, both Roman Catholics of Irish descent.[218] One of Ryan's uncles, John Loughery, played quarterback at Boston College from 1979–82.[219] Ryan is an avid golfer and has participated in such tournaments as the American Century Celebrity Golf Classic.[220] His cousin, Mike McGlinchey, played college football at Notre Dame and later was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers.[221]
He is part of the Falcons' online reading program, "Read with a Falcon" and grew up a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles.[222]
On November 21, 2017, Ryan announced on social media that he and his wife Sarah were expecting twins.[223] In 2018, Sarah announced the birth of their twins, Marshall and Johnny.[224][225]
On January 9, 2019, Ryan made a cameo appearance on the series premiere of ABC's Schooled, and his high school athletic career is also explored in the series.[226]Today we learned about the " Mystery Coke Machine " in Seattle. It's located on the corner of John St. and 11th Ave. East in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The machine is from the 1970s and still only charges $0.55 for drinks. Local lore is that the machine NEVER runs out and no one knows who owns it or who stocks it!
Everybody's favorite feature of the machine is the "mystery" button. It's so old, it only has about six options, so the "owner" maintains a "mystery" button where soda not offered by another button pops out.
It even has its own Facebook page with over 8,000 fans! The machine "talks" to its fan base via the page, so if you want to know how it's doing, be sure to follow.
Next time we're in Seattle, we'll have to stop by and get a 55-cent drink!CLOSE Judge Leticia Astacio talks about the entire case from her perspective. Astacio said she has gotten too much attention and that being portrayed in the way that she has is devastating. (July 6, 2017) Pool video
Buy Photo Judge Leticia Astacio makes her court appearance with attorneys Bridget Field and Mark Young. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ/@cfortiz_dandc/staff photographer)Buy Photo
An arraignment for Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio slated for Tuesday has been postponed.
Astacio had been scheduled to be arraigned at 12:30 p.m. in Rochester City Court, but the event was taken off the calendar, according to the court's chief clerk, Eugene Crimi.
The arraignment was removed from the docket to accommodate a pretrial conference between Astacio's new defense attorneys and prosecutors. Astacio said in a text message that the two sides were to meet Tuesday afternoon.
The arraignment will take place October 23 at 2 p.m.
She faces a charge of violating her probation by allegedly leaving Monroe County without the permission of her probation officer on Sept. 20. Authorities said she spent the night at del Lago Resort & Casino in Tyre, Seneca County and returned to Monroe County the next day.
Astacio left a phone message for her probation officer with details of the trip, but the message wasn't received until the next day, according to authorities.
Since June, Astacio has been accused of violating her probation on four occasions. The violations stem from her conviction on a misdemeanor charge of driving while intoxicated. She was found guilty following a bench trial in August 2016. The incident occurred in February 2016 on Interstate 490 near Mt. Read Boulevard.
Her latest court appearance was to take place several days after a Spencerport woman was accused of harassing Astacio at Radio Social, a popular night spot in Rochester.
NEWSLETTERS Get the ROC60 newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Rochester in 60 seconds: Get all the news you need to know in less than a minute. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-790-9565. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for ROC60 Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
Monica Skinner, 53, was charged with second-degree harassment, a violation, following the encounter. She pleaded not guilty.
More: Astacio says she was accosted at restaurant
More: DA: Judge Leticia Astacio violated probation again; arraignment scheduled next week
More: Embattled Judge Leticia Astacio fires legal team... again
DANDREATTA@Gannett.com
VFREILE@Gannett.com
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2yVqEA1Two US congressional staffers who travelled to London in July and tried to contact former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele were sent by a longstanding aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee and a close ally of the White House.
The trip has brought back to the surface a continuing struggle for control of the committee’s investigation into Moscow’s role in the 2016 US election. The reliability of a dossier compiled by Steele, containing explosive allegations of extensive secret collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, is a key part of that investigation.
The two staffers turned up unannounced at Steele’s lawyers’ offices while the former MI6 officer was in the building, according to a report by Politico on Friday. But the committee’s leading Democrat, Adam Schiff, said on Sunday neither he nor his Republican counterpart had been informed about the staffers’ London trip.
A congressional official insisted, however, that the staffers were in London on official committee business. He said they had been told to make contact with Steele’s lawyers, rather than Steele himself.
“It was an intelligence committee trip although going to meet with the lawyer was not the sole purpose of the trip. They were also there on other committee business,” the official said, but he added he could not describe what else the committee staffers were doing in London.
“Them being sent to meet with the lawyers was at the behest of the committee staff director,” the official added, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject.
The House intelligence committee’s staff director is Damon Nelson, who worked as deputy chief of staff for Devin Nunes from 2003 until 2014 and then as a senior adviser before moving in 2015 to the staff of the committee which Nunes chairs. Nunes was a member of Trump’s transition team on security and enraged Democrats by maintaining close contact with the president and making a secret visit late at night to the White House in March to view supposedly secret information without telling other committee members.
Nunes stepped aside from the committee’s Russia investigation in April, months before the London trip, after becoming the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics panel into whether he disclosed classified information in a bid to discredit the Obama administration. The Republican congressman Mike Conaway took over Nunes’s duties directing the Russia inquiry. Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, has since praised Conaway’s cooperation into investigating the links between the Trump campaign and Moscow, but has also complained that Nunes has continued to intervene in the investigation, despite his understanding to stay out of it pending the ethics inquiry.
The staffers were sent by an aide to Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee and a close Trump ally. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Schiff’s office declined to comment, and Conaway’s office did not reply to a request for comment. But Schiff said on Sunday that neither of them had been told about the London visit aimed at establishing contacts with a key witness.
“I wasn’t aware of it, and I don’t think Mr Conaway was either,” Schiff told CNN. “But the reality is we do want to meet with Mr Steele, would like him to come before the committee. If he’s not willing to do that, we’d be happy – Mr Conaway and myself – to go to London to sit down with him. He does have, certainly, very relevant information that would assist our investigation.”
Steele’s dossier on Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government was compiled in 2016 for a Washington research company, Fusion GPS, and commissioned by Trump’s election opponents, first Republicans in the primaries, and then Democrats.
It was presented by Republican senator John McCain to the then FBI director, James Comey, in December, and has since been part of a wide-ranging inquiry into possible collusion, now under the control of special counsel Robert Mueller.
A congressional official insisted it would not be unusual for a committee staff director to organise a foreign fact-finding trip on his own authority.
However, Adam Blickstein, a former Democrat spokesman on the House intelligence committee, said he found that unlikely in such a sensitive investigation.
“In this specific scenario, I can’t imagine a staff director sending two staffers on this trip without the chairman knowing about it,” Blickstein said. “That wouldn’t pass the smell test.”
“I find the fact that they presumably spent taxpayer money to undertake such a hyper-partisan and unprofessional effort extremely troubling,” John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer said in an emailed comment. “There are normal ways to do this through our existing institutions, and their relationships with our British partners. This is bad on many levels.
“Republicans that are part of the House investigation should not be undertaking efforts without informing their Democratic colleagues,” Sipher added. “Not only is it unprofessional but it is impolite. Mr Steele was a professional who worked on important and compatible issues with the US. He deserves better than being ambushed by a bunch of hacks.”Two years ago, through PledgeMusic, Headstones fans were asked, “Do you want a new record?” The response was staggering and swift, as funding was achieved within 24 hours. Thank you!
By April of the next year the Headstones had the #1 single with "Longwaytoneverland,” and “Love + Fury” was a top ten album with international distribution in place, now nominated for a Juno Award.
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the moment.
What precautions did you take to prevent STIs and pregnancy? (Check all that apply) None, Condoms
What were your motives for this hookup? Fun, pleasure, horniness, Learning new things, experimenting, Thought it was an important experience to have, To cheer myself up
How intoxicated were you? Small amount of alcohol or drugs, not enough to feel it
What substances did you consume? Alcohol
How intoxicated was your partner? Small amount of alcohol or drugs, not enough to feel it
What substances did your partner(s) consume? Alcohol
How wanted was this hookup for you at the time? Somewhat
Did you consent to this hookup at the time? I gave enthusiastic consent
How wanted was this hookup for your partner at the time? Very
Did your partner(s) consent to this hookup? They gave enthusiastic consent
To whom did you talk about the hookup? How did they react? My roommate who was dealing with the same issue of having a boyfriend back home and she supported me. I eventually told my boyfriend but didn’t tell him I cheated.
How would you best summarize people’s reactions about this hookup? Relatively positive
Did you get emotionally hurt as a result of this hookup? A little bit
Did your partner get emotionally hurt as a result of this hookup? Not at all
Do you regret this hookup? Not at all
What was the BEST thing about this hookup? The sex of course was way more intense than what I was use to. My long term relationship was very vanilla sex and this was the first time a guy got rough with me and pulled my hair and spanked me etc. also it gave me the courage and motivation to change my situation and realize I wanted to be on my own for awhile and not be tied down.
What was the WORST thing about this hookup? The guilt from cheating on my boyfriend and also not using the condom the second time even though it was physically satisfying.
Has this hookup changed the way you think about casual sex, sexuality, or yourself in general? Yes completely, I think all women at some point In their life need to experience playing the field and experiencing different sexual partners to make themselves mature sexually to benefit the right partners down the line later in life when they want to settle.
All things considered, how POSITIVE was this experience? Very positive
All things considered, how NEGATIVE was this experience? A little negative
What are your thoughts on casual sex more generally, the role it has played in your life, and/or its role in society? What would you like to see changed in that regard? As I explained above.
What do you think about the Casual Sex Project? I love the fact there is an online forum for individuals to share their experiences and for others to read about them. It’s eye opening when you realize every day people have similar life experiences without having to worry about the taboo.
You have a hookup story to share? Submit it here!Sherlock returns for its third season this Sunday on Masterpiece on PBS, and fans are anxiously waiting to learn the fate of TV’s most exasperatingly brilliant sleuth. While you’re counting down to the Sherlock premiere, check out some of the best quotes from the first two seasons of the hit British series!
1. “You, being all mysterious with your cheekbones and turning your coat collar up so you look cool.” — John Watson, “The Hounds of Baskerville”
2. “Brainy is the new sexy.” — Irene Adler, “A Scandal in Belgravia”
3. “I always hear ‘punch me in the face’ when you’re speaking, but it’s usually subtext.” — John Watson, “A Scandal in Belgravia”
4. “Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and I think one day—if we’re very, very lucky—he might even be a good one.” — Lestrade, “A Study in Pink”
5. “Listen, what I said before, John, I meant it. I don’t have friends; I’ve just got one.” — Sherlock Holmes, “The Hounds of Baskerville”
(Courtesy of ©Hartswood Films for MASTERPIECE)
6. “I’m not a psychopath, Anderson. I’m a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.” — Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Pink”
7. “We’ve got a serial killer on our hands. Love those, there’s always something to look forward to.” — Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Pink”
8. “Look at you lot. You’re all so vacant. Is it nice not being me? It must be so relaxing.” — Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Pink”
9. “Bitterness is a paralytic. Love is a much more vicious motivator.” — Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Pink”
10. “Oh, you meant ‘spectacularly ignorant’ in a nice way!” — Sherlock Holmes, “The Great Game”
11. “Lestrade? We’ve had a break-in at Baker Street. Send your least irritating officers and an ambulance.” — Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Belgravia”
12. “Your mind: it’s so placid, straightforward, barely used. Mine’s like an engine, racing out of control; a rocket tearing itself to pieces, trapped on the launchpad…I need a case!”— Sherlock Holmes, “The Hounds of Baskerville”
(Courtesy of ©Hartswood Films for MASTERPIECE)
13. “Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain. You need me or you’re nothing—because we’re just alike, you and I. Except you’re boring. You’re on the side of the angels.” — Moriarty, “The Reichenbach Fall”
14. “Honey, you should see me in a crown.” — Moriarty, “The Reichenbach Fall”
15. [On Sherlock Holmes]: “Looked a bit of a weirdo if you ask me. They usually are, these vigilante types.” — Chief Superintendent, “The Reichenbach Fall”
Sherlock season 3 premieres Sunday, Jan. 19 at 10 p.m. on Masterpiece on PBS.It's been a long time coming, but production on the new Wonder Woman movie is finally underway.
Gal Gadot, 30, and Chris Pine, 35, were both spotted filming on the banks of the Thames in Southend, Essex on Sunday.
Israeli actress Gal plays Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, while US actor Chris is set to star as Captain Steve Trevor, a United States Air Force pilot and Wonder Woman's love interest in the film.
Scroll down for video
Finally! Gal Gadot, 30, and Chris Pine, 35, were both spotted filming in the banks of the Thames in Southend, Essex on Sunday
Alongside the two leading stars, Scottish actor Ewen Bremner was also spotted, in addition to 150 extras in full costume.
Seen on location, Gal donned a long, slate-grey coat, which was cinched in at the waist with a tan leather belt.
The styling consisted of brown lace-up boots and a wide-brimmed fedora hat, with a white shirt beneath.
Title role: Israeli actress Gal plays Diana Prince/Wonder Woman in the film, which is out in 2017
Leading man: US actor Chris is set to star as Captain Steve Trevor, a United States Air Force pilot and Wonder Woman's love interest in the film
Trainspotting star: Alongside the two leading stars, Scottish actor Ewen Bremner (2R) was also spotted
Hard day's work: In addition to the leading characters, 150 extras in full costume were seen in Essex
Retro look: Seen on location, Gal donned a long, slate-grey coat, which was cinched in at the waist with a tan leather belt
Full costume: The styling consisted of brown lace-up boots and a wide-brimmed fedora hat, with a white shirt beneath
With temperatures dropping to 12 degrees Celsius in Southend on Sunday, Gal wrapped up warm in a blue padded jacket and a pair of black woolly gloves.
Star Trek actor Chris was also spotted in full costume as the USAF pilot, wearing a brown leather aviator jacket and matching trousers.
The rest of his costume consisted of beige knee-high socks, covering up in a khaki parka coat with fur lining.
Keeping warm: With temperatures dropping to 12 degrees Celsius in Southend on Sunday, Gal wrapped up warm in a blue padded jacket and a pair of black woolly gloves
In the army: Star Trek actor Chris was also spotted in full costume as the USAF pilot, wearing a brown leather aviator jacket and matching trousers
Keeping warm: The rest of his costume consisted of beige knee-high socks, covering up in a khaki parka coat with fur lining
His look was topped off with a navy baker boy hat and leather gloves, carrying a canvas rucksack for the role.
Beneath his baker boy hat, Chris also appeared to go shaven-headed as Steve Trevor.
The timescale for the film has yet to be confirmed, but the costumes and location strongly back reports that it's set in World War I.
Belongings close by: His look was topped off with a navy baker boy hat and leather gloves, carrying a canvas rucksack for the role
Where's his hair? Beneath his baker boy hat, Chris also appeared to go shaven-headed as Steve Trevor
Wartime flick? The timescale for the film has yet to be confirmed, but the costumes and location strongly back reports that it's set in World War I
As previously reported by Heroic Hollywood, the first half of the film will take place during World War I while the second half of the film takes place during modern day.
It appears as though the soldiers in the film have just arrived back to the UK after fighting overseas, with signage claiming: 'French money exchanged here for officers and soldiers in uniform'.
England - principally London - is the movie's main filming base, along with France and Italy.
Giving it away? As previously reported by Heroic Hollywood, the first half of the film will take place during World War I while the second half of the film takes place during modern day
Clue: It appears as though the soldiers in the film have just arrived back to the UK after fighting overseas, with signage claiming: 'French money exchanged here for officers and soldiers in uniform'
UK set: England - principally London - is the movie's main filming base, along with France and Italy
Earlier this month, Warner Bros. released details as to who else will star in the film when it is released in 2017.
These include Robin Wright, Harry Potter's David Thewlis, Danny Huston as well as indie-darling Lena Anaya and The Office star Lucy Davis.
Who they will play in the film is still being kept under wraps.
A while to go: Earlier this month, Warner Bros. released details as to who else will star in the film when it is released in 2017
Rest of the cast: Stars of the film include Robin Wright, Harry Potter's David Thewlis, Danny Huston as well as indie-darling Lena Anaya and The Office star Lucy Davis
Unknown roles: Who they will play in the film is still being kept under wraps
While Nicole Kidman was rumoured to play Wonder Woman's mother Hippolyta, it looks like she may not have come on board with that role seeming to be a good fit for House of Cards star Robin.
The film is being directed by Monster's Patty Jenkins and she will be the first woman to direct a comic book super-hero film.
Originally, the film was meant to be directed by Breaking Bad producer/director Michelle MacLaren but she was reportedly dropped due to creative differences.
Not cast? While Nicole Kidman was rumoured to play Wonder Woman's mother Hippolyta, it looks like she may not have come on board with that role seeming to be a good fit for House of Cards star Robin
Pioneer: The film is being directed by Monster's Patty Jenkins and she will be the first woman to direct a comic book super-hero film
Turned her back: Originally, the film was meant to be directed by Breaking Bad producer/director Michelle MacLaren but she was reportedly dropped due to creative differences
Getting Wonder Woman, even though she is a well-known character, to the big screen has been a long battle.
Believe it or not, Gal's portrayal in 2016's Superman v. Batman alongside Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck will be the character's big screen debut.
She was seen for the first time in the lead female role in the recently-released trailer for the film.
Long time coming: Getting Wonder Woman, even though she is a well-known character, to the big screen has been a long battle
Out next year: Believe it or not, Gal's portrayal in 2016's Superman v. Batman alongside Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck will be the character's big screen debut
First look: She was seen for the first time in the lead female role in the recently-released trailer for the film
Took a while: Since 1996, there have been many attempts to bring the character to the screen with Sandra Bullock even linked to the role
Didn't make it: Another film was proposed in 2005 with Colbie Smulders mentioned before Christina Hendricks was thrown in the mix
A while to go: Wonder Woman is slated for a 23 June 2017 release in the US
No news yet: A UK release date has yet to be confirmed although it's likely to be around the same time as the US
Since 1996, there have been many attempts to bring the character to the screen with Sandra Bullock even linked to the role.
Another film was proposed in 2005 with Colbie Smulders mentioned before Christina Hendricks was thrown in the mix.
Wonder Woman is slated for a 23 June 2017 release in the US. A UK release date has yet to be confirmed.
Important part: It appears that Ewen Bremner (second from right) plays some sort of villain in the film
Busy day: The cast and crew were seen filming in Essex on one of the most miserable days of the year in the UK
Off-shore arrivals: It appears that the cast come off a boat and land in the UK after battling
Still going: Many of the extras - in full costume - were spotted filming around a boat house
Taking over: It looks like the production team took over most of the harbour at SouthendAfter scorching temperatures and drought conditions devastated the nation’s crop production last year, farmers across the Midwestern farm belt are now dealing with the reverse side of Mother Nature – too much rain.
Meteorologists say the region experienced the wettest spring in 40 years, with rainfall in portions of the Midwest 8 inches above normal. From January to June, Illinois – the second largest corn and soy producer – had its wettest six months in history, with 28.7 inches, which is 8.9 inches above average
Soggy farmland has pushed back the planting season, and some farmers have given up planting entirely. Farmers worry that wet soil will prevent corn and soybeans from developing the deep roots, about two to four inches, needed to fully grow. Oversaturated soil prevents roots from getting oxygen, and ideal moisture is located directly below the seed, not in the topsoil.
Much of the nation’s corn crop is sowed by July, however according to the US Department of Agriculture in its June acreage report, released last week, 91 percent of corn has yet to germinate, compared with 100 percent during the extreme drought the same time a year ago. Planted corn acres are estimated at 97.3 million, resulting in a projected harvest of 89.1 million acres, which is only slightly behind March estimates.
The agency reports that in Iowa, the leading corn producer, farmers planted about 200,000 fewer acres than expected due to the heavy rains. Other states that have seen a decrease in planted acreage are Minnesota (300,000 acres), Wisconsin (150,000 acres), and Kansas (100,00 acres).
“It’s been kind of devastating, and it's ruined quite a bit of stuff already,” Jerry Smith, who farms 700 acres of corn, soybeans, and other crops in Somers, Wis., told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Friday. “We'll probably have a week or so where we won't have any sweet corn, because we weren't able to get in and plant it.”
Some states, including Texas, Nebraska, and Michigan, overcompensated for the projected shortfall by planting more acres than typical; Texas led this trend by planning 300,000 acres more than usual.
Soybean harvest is also behind this season.
The National Weather Service says the drenching rain pattern was created by a low-pressure system in the South that pumped warm moisture toward a cold front draped across the North. That resulted in persistent thunderstorms and rain showers throughout the late spring.
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Despite the rainfall in the upper part of the US, farmers in the South and Southwest continue to worry about possible drought. The US Drought Monitor reported Thursday that 60 percent of the South, which includes Texas and Oklahoma, is experiencing some form of drought. Drought is also reaching into Colorado, Utah, and California; in fact, the Monitor reports that more than 76 percent of the West, with the exception of Montana, is suffering from moderate-to-exceptional drought conditions.
The hot and dry conditions expanded in the “moderate to exceptional” categories to 44.1 percent, from 43.8 percent last week. However conditions are faring better than last fall, when two-thirds of the US was in drought, the worst such condition since the 1930s.Viagra (Sildenafil Citrate) and Levitra (Vardenafil Hydrochloride) are acceptable to the FAA for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. Pilots are instructed not to use these medications within 6 hours of performing pilot duties. Cialis (Tadalafil) restricts flying for 36 hours after EACH dose.
The Federal Air Surgeon’s Medical Bulletin • Fall 1998
Dangers of Viagra Use in Pilots
AMEs Should Become Familiar With the Detrimental Side-Effects of Sildenafil
By Donato J. Borrillo, MD, JD
Viagra (sildenafil citrate) has recently received the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seal of approval for the treatment of male erectile dysfunction. The recent popularity of this medication, and its availability to the general aviation pilot, warrants a closer look by the aviation medical examiner (AME). With the pilot in mind, the AME should become familiar with certain detrimental side effects of sildenafil.
To date, no written guidelines exist for the use of sildenafil and flying. Pursuant to the Guidelines for Aviation Medical Examiners, all medication use must be reported. However, the “as needed” use of sildenafil may result in confusion for pilots. It is certainly conceivable, given “as needed” dosing and stigmata, that pilots would not report sildenafil use. For the reasons outlined below, it is the author’s view that a minimum of 6 hours should pass from “as needed” dosing and flying. Furthermore, the continued (daily) use of Sildenafil is incompatible with safe flight.
The AME should understand the mechanism of action for sildenafil. During sexual stimulation, nitric oxide (NO) is released into the corpus cavernosum. Nitric oxide activates the enzyme guanylate cyclase, thereby increasing the levels of cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). The cGMP produces smooth muscle relaxation and the inflow of blood into the corpus cavernosum. sildenafil enhances the effect of NO by inhibiting phosphodiesterase Type 5 (PDE5), which is responsible for degradation of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum.
When sexual stimulation releases NO, the inhibition of PDE5 by sildenafil increases levels of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. This results in smooth muscle relaxation, inflow of blood to the corpus cavernosum, and sustained penile erection. Sildenafil at recommended doses has no effect in the absence of sexual stimulation, and has no direct relaxant effect on isolated human corpus cavernosum.
Given the above mechanism of action, potential side effects include:
changes in color vision
potentiation of nitrate medication
cockpit distraction.
Sildenafil inhibits phosphodiesterae Type 5 (PDE5), however, it also has an affinity and effect on Phosphodiesterase Type 6 (PDE6). phosphodiesterase Type 6 is a retinal enzyme involved in phototransduction. The inhibition of PDE6 results in a mild transient dose related impairment of blue-green color discrimination. Although only 3% of all patients report visual disturbances, this blue-green impairment could be dangerous during Instrument Meteorological Conditions or night flying. The correct identification by the pilot of blue (1) and green (2) is necessary for safe flight. In addition, the use of color video terminal displays has increased in aviation and may present a problem in the color deficient pilot (3).
The AME should also be aware of sildenafil use in the “mile high club” (4). Sildenafil use by a pilot with cardiac disease during sexual intercourse at 5,000 feet, could be deadly. Cardiac disease and nitrate use are risk factors for sudden death during sexual intercourse, not to mention being medically disqualifying. The hypotensive effect of nitrate (Isordil, SLNTG, etc.) is potentiated (5) by sildenafil, consistent with its effect on the NO/cGMP pathway. Recent deaths related to nitrates and sildenafil have made the combination an FDA contraindication.
Finally, the initial dose of sildenafil is 50 mg by mouth 1 hour prior to sexual activity. This dose can be increased to 100 mg, and the drug is rapidly absorbed within 30 to 120 minutes (median 60 minutes). Priapism is not a side effect; however, an early morning flight may be distracting. Full attention to instrument scan and the task at hand may be compromised by the 4-hour half-life of sildenafil. Metabolism of sildenafil by the liver further decreases by 40% at age 65.
For the above reasons, “6 hours from Viagra to throttle” is recommended.
(1) Taxiway
(2) Tower/runway threshold
(3) The continued debate regarding “color blindness” and the aviator is beyond the scope of this paper
(4) An activity not condoned by the FAA, but known to occur
(5) A specific cause and effect has not been shown regarding sudden deathThis photo essay by United Nations University’s Traditional Knowledge Initiative (UNU-TKI) Research Fellow Gleb Raygorodetsky offers a glimpse of the challenges that climate change presents for indigenous and local communities in northern Europe. An Arctic people of northern Finland whose livelihoods depend largely on their environment, the Skolt Sámi are searching for ways to remain resilient in the face of climate change. Recently, Raygorodetsky spent time with the Skolts, as part of a UNU-TKI project supporting a partnership between the Skolt Sámi and the Finnish Snowchange Cooperative focused on developing a climate change adaptation plan.
The land around Rautujärvi Lake, over 400 km above the Arctic Circle near the Norwegian and Russian borders, is home to the Skolt Sámi — reindeer herders and fishermen whose traditional ways are closely intertwined with the northern climate. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
The radiant disk of the Arctic sun hangs in the mid-September sky above northern Finland, like a ritual Sámi drum pinned to the wall inside a lavvu, a traditional Sámi dwelling. The sun’s reflection is floating gently on the still surface of Rautujärvi Lake, located over 400 km above the Arctic Circle near the Norwegian and Russian borders. Come November, according to traditional calendars created and refined over generations by the Sámi people to track seasonal cycles on their land, the sunlight would be bouncing off the ice and snow of Sápmi, as the Sámi call their land. But the flows of air and water over this landscape are no longer in sync with the ancestral calendars, and the sun’s reflection may continue to float on the water for several weeks longer, disrupting Sámi traditional winter travel, fishing, hunting, and reindeer herding activities.
Like every Skolt Sámi, Vladimir Feodoroff is as much an expert at steering his boat on a lake as he is at lassoing reindeer during a seasonal roundup. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
Vladimir Feodoroff is a Skolt Sámi, a very small, but culturally and linguistically distinct group of the Eastern Sámi. The Skolts are considered to be one of the most traditional Sámi reindeer herding and fishermen groups. They still practice the centuries-old customary system of clan-based governance, where the community council sobbar represents the highest body of decision-making, while for over 130,000 Sámi living throughout the northern reaches of Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia, the dominant governance system is the Sámi Parliament.
Historically, the traditional lands of the Skolt Sámi, or Sä’mmlaž, spanned the vast territory, from Lake Inari eastward all the way to Kola Bay, the present-day location of the Russian city of Murmansk. Today, most of the Skolts live in a small pocket of the northern Lapland region of Finland, north of Lake Inari. They were relocated here when their homelands were seized by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics after World War II. The relocated Skolts eventually settled in the village of Sevettijärvi, where they continue to maintain their traditional practices and keep the endangered Skolt language alive. Most of the remaining 700 Skolts live around the Finnish municipality of Inari, some on the Norwegian side of the border, and only few families remain in Russia.
In Finnish Lapland, reindeer no longer roam freely, having to navigate their way throughout the growing network of primary and secondary roads. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
Before World War II, the Skolt families would move with their reindeer on foot, or by skis and sleds, depending on the season, along well-worn migration routes from winter pastures to summer fishing grounds across the boreal region of the Kola Peninsula. Once resettled in Finland, they had to nurture meaningful relationships with a less familiar landscape — a transition zone between the treeless fjels and boreal forest. Here, their movement and reindeer herding practices became constrained by a growing network of roads throughout the region. Following the “snowmobile revolution” of the 1960s, there was also a rapid shift away from more traditional herding practices when families spent most of the year with their reindeer, towards a settled way of life. They came to rely more and more on mechanized transport, such as snowmobiles, small airplanes, and helicopters for gathering dispersed reindeer into herds during corralling season.
Despite these challenges and the dramatic societal shifts brought about by relocation and integration into the European Union’s (EU) economy, reindeer herding has remained at the heart of the Skolt Sámi culture and way of life, including their food, songs, clothes and art. Adapting to rapid change is nothing new to the Skolts, and they draw on this experience as they search for ways to adapt to their latest challenge — climate change.
At his all-season fishing camp in the upper reaches of the Näätämö River — his second home after his house in Sevettijärvi — Jouko Moshnikoff (right) and his friend Teijo Feodoroff are cutting up reindeer ribs for dinner before firing up the sauna (visible in the background, at the river’s edge). Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
For the Skolts, reindeer meat is an important traditional food that is vital to their culture, helping ensure their food sovereignty in a changing landscape and climate. Skolts, like other Sámi groups, do not waste even a single hair of the slaughtered reindeer. The fine-fibered and lean reindeer meat is used for food and as a source of income; clothes are made from reindeer skins; and the antlers are carved into knife handles, various utensils, ornaments and souvenirs for tourists.
After Finland became an EU member in 1995, the Skolt Sámi must follow burdensome EU regulations and standards for meat processing if they want to sell reindeer meat on the EU market. To comply with the new regulations, the Finnish Reindeer Herders’ Association replaced the 200 old field slaughterhouses with 10 EU regulations-compliant abattoirs staffed with mangers and veterinarians who oversee the annual processing of 1,500 tons of reindeer meat destined to the EU market.
The Skolts feel that while the market regulations may be good for commerce, they are not good for the local people and their land. The new system has made looking after their reindeer more expensive for the Skolts, forcing them to change when and where they can gather their herds. According to Pauliina Feodoroff — former President of the Sámi Council and Vladimir Feodoroff’s daughter — the traditional method of killing reindeer inside a corral was pollution-free, but now chemicals must be used daily to disinfect EU-certified abattoirs. Moreover, many traditional practices — such as leaving some spilled blood and rapamaha, or reindeer stomach contents, on the ground to help fertilize and renew the trampled soil inside the corral — are no longer part of the modern system.
The morning sun melts the night frost on blueberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) in the birch forest along the Näätämö River. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
Budding birch leaves are an important spring food for reindeer craving a boost of fresh nutrients after a long winter diet of desiccated lichen. In 1966, the colder microclimate in the river valley saved the birch forest from defoliation along the river during an outbreak of the autumnal moth ( Epirrita autumnata), a cold-intolerant forest pest. In the birch forests on the south-facing hills, however, the winter temperature did not dip below -35 °C, thus allowing the moth to survive.
“I remember going fishing with my mother then,” recalls Illep Jefremoff. “And it was like having a heavy snowfall in the middle of the summer. The fish ate up the moths that fell into the water, but the birch trees dried up and died later.”
A few occasional birch stumps is all that remains of the once lush birch forest that used to support a diverse wildlife community. Two new outbreaks of autumnal moth infestation have been reported in Norway since 2005. The Skolt herders are concerned that as the climate warms, the moth outbreaks will become more frequent and spread widely, wiping out remaining birch forests and destroying an important spring food source for reindeer. The annual migration route of an individual reindeer herd is restricted to the territory of one of 56 reindeer cooperatives in Finland, limiting herders’ ability to move their reindeer away from affected areas of forest to find alternative sources of nutrient-rich spring food.
Tero Mustonen paddles across the Ylinen Lake, near his village of Selkie. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
Tero Mustonen’s personal quest, under the guidance of Elders, to revitalize land-based traditions of his Finnish ancestors led him to found the Snowchange Cooperative http://www.snowchange.org/ in 2000. The Cooperative works to advance the role of traditional knowledge in environmental policy and practice. Headquartered in the village of Selkie, Finland — where Mustonen is a chief and a traditional seine fishing net master — Snowchange has grown into a respected international community-based network making important contributions towards global recognition of traditional knowledge in climate change adaptation and mitigation. Mustonen explains that Snowchange’s goal is, “To see our culture come back — complete rebirth on the land!”
Snowchange has made important contributions to the Arctic Climate Impacts Assessment, the Arctic Biodiversity Assessment, and the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) due out in 2014. Reflecting on these accomplishments, Mustonen smiles and says, “It is exciting, but a bit of punk rock — in a sense that we [a community-based cooperative] can play with the big boys [international agencies], but we still keep our own unique way.”
In addition to a solid base of over a dozen villages in Finland, Snowchange membership spans the globe, embracing communities, organizations and individuals working on local traditional knowledge-based projects in New Zealand, Canada, Russia, and Australia. All members of the Snowchange Cooperative work on developing locally-appropriate culture-based solutions to the challenges of environmental degradation, development and climate change faced by indigenous peoples and local communities around the world.
Tero Mustonen (left) and his neighbor Pekka Ikonen seine the waters of the Ylinen Lake for muikku or vendace, as European Cisco (Coregenus albula) is called here. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
Summer and winter seining for vendace and other fish in the lakes surrounding their community has always been an important subsistence activity for Selkie villagers. But now they worry about the environmental impacts of climate change on their subsistence fishery. Selkie residents have observed seasonal shifts in wind patterns, delays in freeze-up, increase in summer temperatures, earlier spring thaws and changes in the patterns of snow and rainfall. Ice leads — areas of open water that form when lake ice fractures and is kept open by the current — no longer occur in places well-known to local people, making winter travel on the ice a lot more treacherous.
Old residents of Selkie remember that the winter of 1986 was the last real winter when the lakes and rivers were frozen by mid-November. Today, the ice forms only in January when the temperature finally dips below -20°C for several nights in a row. Finland’s hottest daily temperature of 37 °C, was recorded in 2010 not far from Selkie. As summers become warmer, the fish seek cooler waters at the bottom of deeper lakes, which makes seining less reliable.
Like generations of Skolts before him, Jouko Moshnikoff welcomes guests at his fishing camp with salted and cold-smoked Atlantic salmon caught nearby. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
Fishing for Atlantic salmon ( Salmon salar) has always been an important part of Skolts’ subsistence and cultural heritage, and indeed, they consider themselves to be more fishermen than reindeer herders. Today, in addition to traditional delicacies, Moshnikoff can also offer his guests a few store-bought extras — like apples from Spain and vodka from Estonia — shipped to Finland from other EU countries. During the long winter evenings, after a skin-scalding sauna and a hearty meal, Moshnikoff would crank up a Honda generator from Japan to watch a show or a sports program on his Made in China TV.
While these changes add a great deal of convenience and comfort to their lives, Moshnikoff and other Skolt Sámi worry about the consequences and the real costs of such benefits of the global economy for local communities. They recognize that the changing climate is the price they are paying for the fossil fuel-infused food production and transportation system that, while delivering the goods to their homeland, makes their traditional livelihoods, such as the Atlantic salmon fishery on the Näätämö River, increasingly difficult to sustain. Feeling powerless to change the global economic model, the Skolts are nevertheless determined to find a way to sustain their traditional salmon fishery under changing conditions.
On the porch of Jouko Moshnikoff’s cabin — against the backdrop of one of the most significant spawning sites for Atlantic salmon on the Näätämö River — Illep Jefremoff, Vladimir Feodoroff and Tero Mustonen (left to right) examine the area map of the region. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
To describe their work last summer, Feodoroff shows Tero all the traditionally known spawning sites that he visited with Jefremoff as part of the project “Skolt Sámi Survival in the Middle of Rapid Change”. The goal of this collaboration between the Skolt Sámi, the Snowchange Cooperative and the United Nations University (UNU) Traditional Knowledge Initiative is to help the Skolts to develop a climate change adaptation plan. The project is part of the international Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Assessment (IPCCA) initiative that is being developed and coordinated by a Peru-based indigenous non-profit organization, ANDES, and supported by UNU.
By applying the IPCCA methodology of community-led self-reflection, evaluation, and future-visioning based on local worldviews and traditional knowledge, the Sevettijärvi Skolts are developing a community-based climate change adaptation plan. Out of this process a collective consensus has emerged that the climate change challenges faced by the reindeer, while significant, are manageable given the present-day nature of reindeer herding. Instead, the Skolt Sámi identified their customary salmon fishery, the other half of their traditional subsistence and cultural identity, as a much greater concern.
As a result, the Snowchange-Skolt partnership has chosen to focus their climate change adaptation efforts on enhancing the resilience of the Skolts’ traditional salmon fishery along the Näätämö River. After visiting all traditionally known spawning sites during the last summer and holding several community-based workshops and discussions, the Skolt-Snowchange partnership is planning on putting together an initial draft of the Atlantic salmon co-management plan for the Näätämö River in 2013, to begin discussions with other salmon users along the watershed, and the representatives of the state fisheries agency, about the future of the Näätämö salmon.
A late-September morning’s frosty air thickens into fog above the Näätämö River, enveloping birch trees on the riverbank. Photo: © Gleb Raygorodetsky 2012.
The Näätämö River is one of the few remaining free-flowing waterways in northern Europe that still supports wild populations of Atlantic salmon. The river meanders for 80 km from Lake Inari northward through Finland, until it reaches the Skoltefossen falls at the Norwegian border, 20 km from the Barents Sea. On average, out of eight tonnes of salmon caught annually along the river, only 20 |
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“I don’t wake up every morning saying, ‘Oh my goodness, I really want to be president,’ ” Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, said in an interview. “But somebody’s got to be out there, and if nobody is, I’ll do it.”A New York village has responded to national news controversy by redesigning its seal, after a vigorous debate over whether it represented racism or a nod to the area's history.
The Whitesboro, N.Y., emblem features a wrestling match between founder Hugh White and an Oneida Indian. Mr. White won, gaining the respect of the local tribe, but critics have said the seal depicts an inappropriate racist viewpoint, the Associated Press reported.
"The city of Whitesboro, NY proudly displays what looks like a European settler choking, or violently handling, a Native American man," wrote Ben Miller, a Native American with heritage in several tribes, wrote in a petition to change the seal last summer. "But to me, this seal is anything but respectful to my people and my heritage."
The logo has been debated for years, and one Native American organization sued Whitesboro in the 1970s. That the change is coming now could be emblematic of a broader shift in how Americans consider native people.
"This is but one of many important examples of communities taking welcome steps to be inclusive and promote our region's commitment to civility," the Oneida Nation CEO Ray Halbritter said in a statement after the change, the AP reported.
The most nationally visible debate has occurred in the sports arena, as Native American groups, President Obama, and even Adidas have encouraged sports teams to drop Native American names or mascots, including "Warriors," "Braves," and especially "Redskins."
Notably, the Washington Redskins NFL team owner Daniel Snyder told USA Today the "Redskins" name was staying, even as government agencies, major news publications, and others boycotted the name.
"We'll never change the name," he said. "It's that simple. NEVER — you can use caps."
Conversely, the University of Utah signed a five-year agreement in 2014 to continue using the nickname "Utes," the local tribe for which the state of Utah is named, the Deseret News reported. This case showed deference to the local tribe, however, because although Native American groups outside Utah complained, the Ute Tribe has said the nickname promotes awareness of their heritage.
The trend toward altering historical symbols, statues, and buildings as a tool for inclusion has been pushed by black Americans as well, including the removal of monuments to white Americans who espoused the race-motivated sentiments of their day.
One example is the University of Maryland, which changed a stadium named after Harry Clifton “Curley” Byrd, the University's president from 1936 to 1954, to "Maryland Stadium." The contention was that Byrd was a strict segregationist, and the university wanted to distance itself from his views, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
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"History is not about the past," wrote university President Wallace Loh in suggesting the change. "It concerns today’s debates about the past."
African Americans have arguably made more progress than indigenous people in scrubbing the American landscape of hateful or racist symbols and celebrating their heritage. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month in February are longstanding holidays that have honored black Americans for years, yet native Americans are only recently finding similar holiday recognition. The latest effort is to change the existing Columbus Day holiday to Indigenous Peoples Day, reported The Christian Science Monitor's Molly Jackson:My Good Work Graph™
Abhishek Madan Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 24, 2017
The Good Work Graph is a thought exercise. Why does it exist? For two main reasons:
To help me decide on which professional endeavours are worthy of my attention.
One of my earliest jobs at Oracle was to help a large manufacturing conglomerate print tax reports. While I found the analysis of their country’s tax and economic system fascinating, I did think the impact of my work was small. I was a little bitter, thinking “here I am helping a company print receipts, while my friends at ISRO are exploring the universe”.
As I grew older, I understood that there were many positive secondary effects of my work at Oracle. But I still yearn for jobs where the primary goal of my work is something I appreciate. To ensure that principle translates to action.
We’ve all been taught well. Do good work for your society, have lofty ambitions, use your privilege as a tool. But do these translate into job choices? In my personal experience, no.
Thus, I use the GWG™ to
a) decide if I should take up a new project
b) retrospect on the successes I have achieved in the past
The Framework
CAVEAT: As you might have guessed from the “my” in the title, my GWG™ is highly subjective and you may strongly disagree with it. I encourage you to make your own good work graphs (and then ™ them on your own blog post).
On the X axis — the primary effect of my work on life. Mostly self-explanatory. Saving lives is saving lives. Enriching lives could be delivering any kind of value that makes somebody’s life better. The degree of this obviously varies, this blog post is going to enrich far fewer lives than Plato’s Republic.
The Y axis is slightly trickier. On the top we have exploring ourselves internally — our minds and the civilisation we have created. At the bottom we have exploring everything that was given to us — our bodies, the universe, physics and chemistry, etc.
If a project does not fall anywhere on this graph, it’s not “good” work for me. If a project does, then I should judge its desirability on how far I can push it on the X and Y axes.
The graph above has some examples filled in. This is where things get really subjective. Where would you place the work you are doing on the graph? Where do you think your friend’s start ups figure? This, as always, has been left as an exercise for the reader :)Along with the Las Vegas shooting and Puerto Rico, Thursday’s White House press briefing featured a litany of questions about morning tweets by President Trump requesting the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate journalists for their “Fake News.” Needless to say, CNN’s Jim Acosta led the way in showing his profession’s displeasure.
“Sarah, why did the President tweet this morning that he'd like to see the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate news outlets and I guess this quest to go after fake news. Does he — does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” Acosta wondered to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Huckabee Sanders began to respond by stating that Trump “is an incredible advocate of the First Amendment” when Acosta tried to interject (in order to get into a made-for-TV throwdown).
Immediately Huckabee Sanders hit back, telling him that “I allowed you to finish” so it was her turn. The White House Press Secretary continued by noting that “[w]ith the First Amendment, with those freedoms also come responsibilities and you have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be accurate.”
More broadly concerning the media’s attention span for positive stories, Huckabee Sanders added:
I think right now when we've seen recent information that says only five percent of media coverage has been positive about this President and this administration while at the same time you have the stock market and economic confidence at an all-time high, ISIS is on the run, unemployment’s at the lowest it's been in 17 years, we’ve cut regulations at historic pace, fixing the VA. With you've only found five percent of your time to focus on those big issues. No a lot of the things you cover, not a lot of the petty palace intrigue that you spend your time on. I think we need to move towards a certainly more fair, more accurate and frankly a more responsible news media for the American people.
Acosta attempted a follow-up, but Huckabee Sanders quickly moved on.
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One America News Network’s Trey Yingst pressed her moments later:
YINGST: Sarah, does President Trump believe the Senate Intelligence Committee should investigate American media organizations? HUCKABEE SANDERS: I don't know that that's the case, but I do think that we should call on all media to a higher standard and certainly I think I weighed in very clearly what our position is when Jim asked a question earlier. YINGST: [INAUDIBLE] Senate intelligence committee looking into our fake news networks in our country? HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think you have a lot of responsibility and a lot of times false narratives create a bad environment, certainly aren't helpful to the American people, and you have a responsibility to provide and report fair and accurate details and, when we don't, that's I think troubling for all of us.
Prior to both reporters asking their questions, Politico’s Matthew Nussbaum went there first, asking “if there's any concern in the White House that the President's frequent use of the fake news to describe mainstream outlets muddies the water a little bit and makes it harder for citizens to identify the actual fake news that the intelligence agencies have said countries like Russia used to interfere in the last election?”
Acosta popped up on CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin once the briefing ended to state that, “Sanders sort of answered the question” later on, “where she said I don't think that's what we're talking about here, something along those lines, but we’re not really definitively answering this question, not definitively closing the door on this.”
In classic Jim Acosta fashion, he then inserted himself into the story:
When — if Congress were to start investigating news outlets, Brooke, we are then something less than the United States of America. That is just an appalling suggestion to come from the President of the United States and Sarah was saying, well, reporters shouldn't engage in opinions and so on, that, I guess, in her mind, amounts to some sort of fake news. But I don't think it's really an outlandish opinion to say that congress shouldn't be investigating news outlets, not in this country, Brooke.
On the issue of gun control, CBS’s Major Garrett and NBC’s Hallie Jackson stood out with questions from the left:
MAJOR GARRETT: Beyond bump stocks, does the president have as open an attitude about other methods of gun control that have long been evaded or is the White House openness, which, as you just described, in being willing to be part of that conversation, limited to one on bump stocks? (....) HALLIE JACKSON: You've been very clear the conversation is open to conversations surrounding bump stocks and perhaps other regulations on gun control. Does he want to lead that conversation? Will he get out and use the power of the presidential platform to push for more regulation on, for example, bump stocks which law enforcement officials have said were used in Vegas?
Here’s the relevant transcript from October 5's White House press briefing:Donald Trump, accused of leaking classified information to Russia during a meeting in the Oval Office, has seemingly done exactly what he has been criticising Hillary Clinton for since the 2016 presidential campaign.
Ms Clinton was being investigated by the FBI for purportedly using private email servers to send classified emails while she was Secretary of State. No charges were brought and the case has been closed, however it began a string a comments from Mr Trump on the matter of classified information sharing.
Here are six times he attacked Ms Clinton over her handling of classified information:
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
1. A'very big deal'
It appears to begin in 2015 on Twitter, when Mr Trump said Ms Clinton’s emails were “a very big deal”.
2. 'Extremely careless'
During July 2015 rally in North Carolina, Mr Trump then said that the FBI called Ms Clinton “extremely careless,” but he thought she was “grossly incompetent” and putting Americans lives at risk.
3. 'Not fit'
The next year in July 2016 tied Ms Clinton's ability to be president with her mishandling of classified information and said she was "not fit" for the job.
4. 'Wouldn't pass a background check'
During a speech in Virginia Beach, Virgina the same month, Mr Trump said that if “elected, Hillary Clinton would become the first president of the United States who wouldn't be able to pass a background check.“
5. 'Like the Cold War...'
As the campaign wore on, Mr Trump brought Russia and the Cold War into the discussion of classified information leaking.
During a speech in North Carolina in September 2016, he said “Like the Cold War, we also need to fight this battle by collecting intelligence and then protecting our classified secrets.”
6. 'RIGGED!'
Mr Trump claimed the FBI investigation into Ms Clinton's use of a private server was "rigged" because she was not charged, trusting Wikileaks as a source of reliable information. It furthered his continued rhetoric that mass news outlets were and continue to be what he deems "fake media."
However, after he took office his rhetoric seemed to shift to focus on what he deemed as dangerous and “curious” leaks within Washington and the intelligence community itself, rather than Ms Clinton.
His perspective may have changed after being in office for several weeks in February 2017 when he tweeted that the New York Times should not have reported on a story regarding information about White House internal politics as well as a report about his call with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
As late as March 2017 however, Mr Trump appeared to understand the severity of leaking information but still put the focus outside of the White House on those serving as media sources rather than his administration’s officials.
Later that month he did tell Time magazine that month though that he understood “you can go to prison” for leaking classified information. However, in the wake of the report that he did so to Russia, Mr Trump and his surrogates have explained the president can declassify information should he deem necessary.
There is a legal debate in Washington regarding Mr Trump’s actions, with some opponents calling for impeachment.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Subscribe nowShe is Harrisonburg's first woman mayor. But, on July 1, the city has a chance to choose a different person for the top spot. Carolyn Frank sat down and talked about her time as mayor.
"It was an incredible learning experience," those were Frank's first words.
Frank has been in Harrisonburg’s top spot for the last two-years, but it wasn't always easy.
She said there was definitely the good, the bad, the ugly. But like I said, I can always find more good in a situation, the good being the incredibly fine people here in Harrisonburg.
Some of the bad taking place right after she took office.
She was pushed to leave office after telling council member Larry Rogers they have a lot in common.
"I'm poor white trash and you're poor black trash." She said it was a rocky way to start off, at same time I think we have grown as a council. People have learned to appreciate one another, certainly appears the hatchet is being buried.
While the council has moved forward and made a number of important decisions- Frank still has a tough choice to make - whether or not to go for another term as mayor.
Her desire is to see Hugh or Larry step up to the plate and take office. I clearly feel the citizens are behind them and they have the support of the citizens of Harrisonburg.
But, Frank says she would accept another term. The Harrisonburg City Council will hold a meeting July 1 at 10 a.m. to choose the next mayor.A Florida woman is lucky to be alive after a bizarre incident while she and her boyfriend were kayaking in the Florida Keys. A fish jumped out of the water, hitting her so hard it broke her ribs and collapsed a lung.
She struggled to breathe and was in desperate need of medical attention.
On "The Early Show," CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reported on the terrifying, almost deadly turn the excursion of Karri Larson and boyfriend Michael Hinojosa took last October.
Four-Foot Flying Fish Stabs Florida Kayaker
In a 911 call, Larson's boyfriend can be heard saying, "Yes, I've got an emergency. My girlfriend's been hit by a flying fish. I think it was a barracuda or something."
First thought to be a needlefish, Larson says it was a barracuda that attacked her out of nowhere.
She saw it jump out of the water twice, and on the third jump, it dove toward the couple's boat and hit her on the side.
Hinojosa said on the call, "It came diving past the kayak, and hit her broadside, knocked her out of the boat and she's got, like, broken ribs and punctured lungs."
The operator asks, "She has a punctured lung?"
Hinojosa said, "Yes, sir. I have my hand holding her lungs closed."
Another operator responds, "Ok, sir, I need to know where you're gonna come in to."
"I'm holding her ribs with one hand," he responds. "I cannot paddle this kayak anywhere right now. I need you guys to come to me."
Getting to them would be no easy task in the Florida backwaters. Towboat owner Kevin Freestone volunteered to help search. He spoke to Hinojosa on the phone.
Freestone told CBS News, "He knew exactly what to tell me and he told me, he said, 'You need to get here as quick as you can. You need to save a life today."'
It had been about 30 minutes since the original 911 call, and time was running out.
Freestone explained, "We were going around the corner of this island. It's all mangroves. We were gonna see them soon see them soon see them soon all of a sudden, there it was -- orange kayak."
As Larson clung to life, she was transported back to the marina, then airlifted to a Miami hospital and taken straight to the intensive care unit.
Larson survived, but remained in the Intensive Care Unit for nine days, recovering from a shattered rib and a punctured lung.
In an exclusive "Early Show" interview Monday, Karri Larson and Michael Hinojosa, of Big Pine, Fla., and Kevin Freestone, of TowBoatUS, shared the story of what happened that day.
Larson said she's still in a lot of pain, but her condition is improving every day.
"Early Show" co-anchor Chris Wragge pointed out this incident left her with extensive injuries.
Larson explained, "The hole -- it opened a hole right up in my side. Shattered a rip where they eventually had to remove the rib and just pick pieces out, because it was just in little shards inside me and punctured my lung."
Hinojosa explained how it happened. He said, "We were out north of Big Pine, which is the island that we live on, feeling we were really safe. I spotted in the distance a giant barracuda coming in our general direction, probably 40, 50 miles an hour, really moving fast and skipping across the water. We've never seen a fish of this size jump before. I certainly didn't expect what happened to happen. It exploded on our left. Karri never saw it. It hit here in the ribcage and threw her out of the boat. It was moving really fast. It shattered her ribs, like she said. I had her scrambled back onto the boat and when I saw the wound, she had a hole in her side.... I cupped my hand over it, her lung was trying to pop out into my hand. I realized then that she might not make it and I was really, really scared. I didn't know what I was going to tell her family if she didn't make it."
Larson said she realized just how extensive her wounds were when she was pulled aboard the kayak.
She said, "I had a towel, and I looked down and it was just completely saturated with blood, so I knew I was losing, you know, a lot of blood. And then, from the way I was breathing and the extent of the pain, I could tell it was a rib injury, and could hear the gurgling, so I knew I had punctured lungs."
As the couple waited in the boat, Hinojosa, holding her lung closed, ajd Larson talked about the days to come.
"She didn't want to talk about the injury," Hinojosa said. "She wanted me to talk about positive, happy things. So I began realizing, she's going to have a lot of time off of work, so I started talking about potential vacations we could take. Places that I could take her to visit. She'd never been to Europe. I pestered her into getting a passport, so she has a passport. I wanted to take her to Europe. So I began trying to distract her away from what was actually happening. Because it was just too long."
And then, finally, Freestone arrived.
"We shot across (the water) over there and got up alongside and you could see she was in pain, but very coherent, sitting pretty strong. Mike's sitting there, put the paramedic on the boat, and the paramedic looked at me after he looked at the wound, he says, 'Get me inclusive dressing,' and he's looking around like, this is bad. I knew it was a second chest wound, and it just was really serious."
Larson said she was thinking of her daughter through the ordeal.
"One of the first things I thought of is she's getting married June 30. And I need to be able to walk her down the aisle," she told Wragge. "And so I just kept thinking that in my head, you know, keeping positive thoughts. And just waiting. Waiting. That was the hardest part."
Wragge asked, "Such a big part of your life being down on the water. You guys do it every week. How difficult is it to continue going back out on the water, think about being back out on the water?"
Larson said, "Well, we worked on that. We would go to a restaurant near the dock and sit there by the fish. Our house is on the water, so it's -- it's hard. I've been out on a boat twice since then. Just recently. And I did pretty well. I did pretty well."
Recently, Freestone was given the Coast Guard's Public Service Commendation Award for his actions last October. The award is for acts of courage or assistance in Coast Guard missions.There’s been much discussion on Detroit’s overbuilt roads. The loss of people and their cars not to mention the construction of the Interstates has left the city’s streets feeling bare — an excellent condition for bicycling.
In that same vein, many of Detroit’s traffic controls are no longer appropriate for the low traffic volumes.
So in response, the Detroit City Council is considering the removal of 15 traffic lights tomorrow:
Brown, reso. autho. Traffic Signal Removal at 15 locations. (There are fifteen (15) signalized intersections that are currently operating on full time “STOP control” mode for more than a year in compliance with the Michigan Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MMUTCD) and are scheduled for removal due to changes in traffic conditions.)
It seems some of these traffic lights haven’t been working for a while. Public Works has put up stop signs in their place.
And hopefully this removal effort is just a start. We’re guessing there are ten times more traffic lights that could be removed in Detroit.
This could make biking in the city just a tad quicker.
Tags: Detroit, downsizing, traffic signalsEconomic Conditions Shifting in Favor of Ethanol
February 7th, 2008 by Sarah Lozanova
Trees, agricultural waste, storm debris and trash are all viable fuel sources for ethanol, using the Coskata process. This highly flexible technology allows future manufacturing plants to cater to locally available materials, making ethanol viable in parts of the globe that would not use corn or sugar cane for fuel. Argonne National Laboratory tests show that greenhouse gas emissions are up to 84% lower for Coskta ethanol than conventional gasoline. It has a net energy balance of up to 7.7, compared to 1.3 for corn-based ethanol. These results were achieved with a production cost of $1 a gallon when timber was used as an ethanol fuel source.
On face of it, you would think that garbage would be the cheapest way to produce fuel, given the flexibility of the Coskata process. In fact, one of the most available and economically viable fuel sources is trees, with the low price tag of $50 a ton. There is a very efficient infrastructure for harvesting and transporting trees. They are available throughout the year, unlike some agricultural products. It is actually cheaper to use trees than sorted garbage and agricultural waste.
To make a dent in the 140 billon gallons of gasoline consumed in the US each year, new infrastructures and technologies need to be developed. A paradigm shift is needed in how we view and handle “waste.”
A study by the DOE and the USDA found that the US does have “a sufficient sustainable supply of biomass sufficient to displace 30% or more of the country’s present petroleum consumption…About 368 million dry tons of sustainably removable biomass could be produced on forestlands, and about 998 million dry tons could come from agricultural lands.”
Of the forestland biomass in the study, only 14% was comprised of newly harvested trees. We need to gain the ability to economically utilize residues from wood pulp, processing mills and construction debris. Consistent supplies need to be created, while maintaining low transportation and handling costs. It is not logical to send these valuable materials be wasted.
When looking at the agricultural landscape, the situation is ripe for change. Of the agricultural biomass in the study, over 50% is available from annual crop residues and animal manure. Current technology lacks techniques to make these products extremely dense, reducing storage and transport costs. We can put a man on the moon, yet we don’t have adequate technology and infrastructure for transporting agricultural waste to produce cost-effective ethanol.
This is where the marketplace can shine. There is money to be made by advancing the technologies necessary to make ethanol from waste.
Meanwhile, Coskata has hit the ground running. They announced a strategic alliance with IMC, Inc. yesterday, the leading ethanol plant design and build firm, that will construct their first plant. Expected to open at the end of 2010, this plant will utilize the Coskata process.
Coskata is very well positioned to shift the transportation fuels industry. They have formed an alliance with General Motors, who will increase production of flex-fuel cars that run off of either ethanol or gasoline. The Renewable Fuels Standard requires 21 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels to be used by 2022, which excludes corn and sugar as fuel sources. In addition, the Farm Bill offers a $.60-$.67 a gallon producer credit. Oil currently costs $87 a barrel.
The economic conditions are ripe for a shift away from fossil fuels. Coskata ethanol can be produced for under $1 a gallon and $.50-$1.00 less at the pump. Developing technology and infrastructure to utilize agricultural and forestland waste is the next step for large-scale renewable biofuels.
Note: General Motors paid for the travel and meal expenses associated with my tour of the Coskata laboratory.
Photo Credit: CoskataThis article is a recap of Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation.” There are spoilers and discussion regarding the episode’s plot.
Why does “Hated in the Nation” work?
I’m not sure I can answer that question. The episode is overlong, at 90 minutes, especially when you can more or less predict much of what’s about to happen in the very first scene, as you watch a woman’s Twitter feed fill with hateful invective directed at her. (She dies just a few minutes later.)
And yet I enjoyed “Hated in the Nation” more than any season three Black Mirror episode not named “San Junipero.”
Some of that is surely thanks to its crackerjack cast, which includes Kelly Macdonald, Faye Marsay, and Benedict Wong. Some of it is probably the nasty closing twist (which we’ll deal with in a moment). And some of it is the nicely inconclusive way the episode ends, with the investigation still technically in progress.
But if I had to guess what drew me into “Hated in the Nation,” it was probably the bees.
Watch out for robotic bees
Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker apparently hoped “Hated” would be his take on Nordic noir, the Scandinavian drama trend that has given us, among other series, The Killing and The Bridge. But essentially every critic I’ve talked to about the episode has compared it to The X-Files, due primarily to the episode’s very Black Mirror take on the Mulder/Scully, believer/skeptic dynamic.
Here, Macdonald plays Karin Parke, a grizzled veteran (how wonderful to have Kelly Macdonald playing a grizzled veteran), while Marsay is Chloe Perrine, a tech-savvy younger officer who is more comfortable with computers than Parke is. Flipping that believer/skeptic dynamic to tech-savvy/virtual Luddite is a very Black Mirror way of reinventing a tired trope.
But there’s also the way the episode is scary — and scary in a bunch of different ways, no less. There’s the mounting dread of Parke and Perrine trying to defend a victim from a swarm of robotic bees. There’s the strange sadness of the closing sequence, with all of those doomed victims slowly realizing their own fate. And there’s just the simple grossness of someone’s brain being short-circuited by a bee drone.
But let’s face it: The X-Files comparisons stem largely from the fact that the episode is focused on bees. I mean, yes, they’re technically robotic drones built to look like bees and fulfill their pollination functions, in a near future where colony collapse has led to far fewer bees around the globe. But as with the alien virus–carrying insects of The X-Files, “Hated” gets a great deal of mileage out of the sheer alien horror of a giant swarm of insects.
But the use of bees also strengthens the point of Brooker’s script without constantly underlining it. (The constant underlining is a Black Mirror problem consistent across all seasons.) The idea of a social media swarm using a hashtag to single out various people for death, only to have the bees actually carry out that death, is a great example of how much power the show can gain from simply making some of its more outlandish ideas literal.
Black Mirror is about seeing how far technology stretches human emotions. “Hated in the Nation” doesn’t have to push nearly as far as you might expect to go from “social media outrage cycle” to “literal swarms of insects killing people.”
Black Mirror is about worlds that have ended already — they just don’t know it yet
Truth be told, I was a sucker for “Hated” from the second that first little drone bee crawled around on a flower. The deeper I got into season three of Black Mirror, the more I started to realize that the show is, on some level, about a series of worlds where the apocalypse has come and nobody’s realized it yet.
So it is with the drone bees. Without bees to pollinate plants, the plants would die, taking life on Earth with them. Thus, humanity comes up with a solution to this problem — as you’d expect — via its technological knowhow. But as always happens on this show, that technological knowhow just turns out to be another way for humans to kill, hurt, destroy, or otherwise disappoint each other.
Now, that underlying skepticism of tech and social media could feel predictable here, as it does in other episodes. But it works because it’s impossible to avoid the sick gut clench of that final twist: Even as Parke warns that the source code for the bee drone override system was too easy to find, everybody plunges ahead, before the “#DeathTo” hashtag can claim a major government official as its next victim. (It figures that things would really step up once the government started being threatened.)
The drones, see, have been keeping a record of every single person who used the hashtag — and sure enough, once the source code is overwritten, the switch flips, and the drones swarm all of those hashtag voters. The gun firing the “#DeathTo” bullet turns out to have been pointing both ways.
We know something like this is coming. The whole episode has been framed as Parke’s testimony before some sort of Parliament subcommittee into what went wrong. (Curiously, the episode seems really centered on the UK. Was nobody in other countries using #DeathTo as well?) And any time an officer is giving testimony in a police drama like this, you know something horrible went down.
But that still didn’t quite prepare me for the agonizing slowness with which the final denouement played out. I complained in my season review about how season three’s episodes often slowed down their storytelling when they should be speeding up, but here it worked really well.
The audience realizes why the drones have been keeping all those social media profiles a split second before the officers do — and then all any of us can do is wait for the bloody inevitable, which Brooker and director James Hawes drag out as long as they possibly can.
A few notes on Charlie Brooker, villain extraordinaire
If there’s a quibble with “Hated” (beyond it probably being 15 minutes too long), it’s that the villain’s plan, ultimately, is kind of stupid.
He’s hoping to teach a moral lesson about the fact that words mean something, even when you’re shouting them into the social media void. But because we spend so little time with him (he’s basically a nonentity throughout the episode), the full weight of what he’s done doesn’t register as much as it could.
And yet the more I think about the episode, the more I become convinced that Brooker almost intends this figure as a sort of self-insertion character. Like Brooker, he’s obsessed with getting his audience to consider the darker side of technology, and like Brooker, he’s full of outlandishly grand ideas. (The two even kind of look alike if you squint.) But where Brooker created a TV show, our villain sets up an elaborate system to murder people using drone bees.
There’s still a sense here of the futility of trying to teach a lesson, of hoping that you might be able to get people to consider their words more carefully in any form of written communication.
Maybe the “#DeathTo” hashtag prompted some sort of national soul searching, but I somehow doubt it. If there’s one thing Black Mirror has taught us, it’s that people are irrational and spiteful and, above everything else, kinda shitty to each other.
And yet even in this scenario — the one with the murderous robot bees, I’ll say one last time — there’s some grim sense of hope on the horizon. Perrine might not have the criminal captured just yet, but he’s in her sights, and Parke knows her former partner is closing in.
Instead of having her kill herself (as the episode head-fakes toward), Brooker lets Perrine live — perhaps to catch the villain who just might be him, perhaps to miss that villain until another day. The answers, like so much on this show, lie tantalizingly out of reach, just around that next bend in the road.
Black Mirror season three is currently streaming on Netflix. Read the rest of our episode reviews and recaps here.You don’t see a big dotted line going through the middle, but this stadium in Brazil is located just on the Equator – so that both teams are defending one hemisphere.
Estádio Milton Corrêa, commonly knwn as Zerão (Big Zero, as in zero latitude) is a multi-purpose stadium in Macapá, Brazil. It’s mostly used for football, hosting several teams (Amapá Clube, Esporte Clube Macapá, Oratório Recreativo Clube, Trem Desportivo Clube, Santos Futebol Clube (AP), São Paulo Futebol Clube (AP) and Ypiranga Clube). In itself, it wouldn’t be special, but its location brought it a lot of fame.
As far as I could find, there wasn’t any master plan to make the stadium exactly on the 0 latitude line, and you can see there was little wiggle room in the neighborhood, but this is one nice coincidence.
The stadium is nicknamed after the neighborhood in which it’s located – Marco Zero. The neighborhood is also known for being located on the Equator… but then again, several parts in Brazil are.
Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!Mass protests intensify against Egyptian junta
By Alex Lantier
24 November 2011
Clashes continued yesterday in cities across Egypt, on the fifth day of mass protests demanding the overthrow of the US-backed Egyptian military junta. The protests started Saturday, when police used live ammunition and rubber bullets against a sit-in by a few hundred protesters in Tahrir Square, in Cairo.
Demonstrations have spread across the country, with hundreds of thousands filling Tahrir Square and clashing with police outside the Interior Ministry, which oversees Egypt’s hated police forces. Demonstrations also shook Alexandria, Port-Said, Qena, Aswan, Assiut, and other cities. There are calls for a million-man march in Cairo tomorrow.
These are the most powerful demonstrations since mass strikes and protests in February forced out pro-US dictator President Hosni Mubarak. The masses are turning against the military, whose leaders control much of the wealth of the country and formed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) junta led by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi to replace Mubarak. Protesters rejected Tantawi’s proposals on Tuesday to erect a civilian caretaker government next year, correctly fearing that this would only be a façade for continuing military rule.
The army and security forces have responded with an orgy of violence, trying to smash the protests. Significantly, Egyptian state media have cited police repression of Occupy Wall Street |
sign that something has gone horribly wrong since the Woodward-and-Bernstein days.
Some background: Last week, the Times published an expose detailing how President Obama personally orders the execution of American citizens and foreigners that he labels “terrorists.” According to the Times, this program deems “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; allows the president to be judge, jury and executioner; and operates wholly outside of the law. Indeed, the Times reports that the administration justifies such dictatorial power by insisting that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process can now “be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”
However, the memo laying out this utterly preposterous legal theory is secret — and, of course, hasn’t been ratified by any court.
In terms of size, scope and long-term effects, this program makes the Watergate scandal look altogether quaint. You would therefore think that at minimum, even the most flaccid, rubber-stamp Congress might ask a few questions about the president’s “kill list” and the dangerous precedents it sets.
But evidently, you would be wrong.
As the Times noted in that subsequent follow-up story, Congress is focused not on shutting down — or even overseeing — the assassination program. It is instead focused on making sure those who blew the whistle on it are punished. Why? Because that will ensure that other such unauthorized programs can continue.
If you think that description of motive is overwrought hyperbole, think again. As Sen. John McCain (R) made clear, he wants revelations of illegal activity halted and possibly prosecuted specifically because “such disclosures can only undermine similar ongoing or future operations.”
This, of course, is part of a broader campaign against those who are courageously exposing illegality. As former Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren reports, the federal government is now targeting whistleblowers for recrimination, with “the number of cases (against whistleblowers) suggest(ing) an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does.” That’s right — rather than celebrating the heroes who expose wrongdoing and then stopping the illegal acts, the government is shooting the messengers in order to let the crimes continue.
If you are an Obama partisan who insists the crackdown is appropriate because your favored politician is in power, take heed of the president’s own warning. As he said a few years ago, allowing any executive to ignore the Constitution is problematic because “you never know who is going to be president four years from now.”
You also never know what other executive might make the same moves in your own hometown. After all, if a president is arguing that indictments, juries and trials aren’t necessary to execute someone, it’s not hard to imagine a governor or mayor arguing the same thing when locking people up.
That’s why this war on whistleblowers is not just some theoretical problem only for academics to debate or for foreigners to worry about. It represents a genuine domestic threat to democracy itself. If through our silence and complacency we allow that threat to expand, we shouldn’t be surprised when more of us are in the government’s crosshairs.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.HYDERABAD: Huge discrepancies have come to light in projected population of Hyderabad and Rangareddy districts as well as bifurcated Andhra Pradesh vis a vis census records and the number of Aadhaar cards generated, putting UIDAI authorities in a fix.As per projections on the 2011 census, the population of Hyderabad district in 2017 should be around 43 lakh. However, UIDAI has generated 66 lakh Aadhaar cards, a 23 lakh variance. And though the projected population of Rangareddy district is 57.4 lakh, only 50.6 lakh Aadhaar cards have been generated, a shortfall of 6.8 lakh. “It appears that details of many from Rangareddy district, who live on the border with the state capital, have got included in Hyderabad statistics, due to which it has more Aadhaar cards and Rangareddy has less,” said an UIDAI official.Similarly, while the projected population of AP in 2017 is 5.25 crore, 5.14 crore Aadhaar cards have been generated. To add to the confusion, the Pulse Survey in bifurcated AP established the state’s population at 4.7 crore. “The population of AP in 2017 (based on 2011census) may be slightly over projected. Due to the huge migration to US and other countries from Krishna, Guntur, East and West Godavari districts, many may not have enrolled in the survey,” said an official, justifying why the survey numbers were lower than the projected 2017 AP population.UIDAI officials have also stumbled onto 10 lakh Aadhaar cards of original residents of AP, that were generated with addresses in Hyderabad and Rangareddy districts. A UIDAI official said: “It is believed that those who migrated to Hyderabad or were living temporarily with kith and kin for study and job purposes registered initially in Hyderabad and post bifurcation moved to AP and registered there.”Congratulations on that clean 3-0 sweep and your qualification for Worlds 2017! How happy are you right now?
I am really happy! We are going to Worlds! That is what we have been playing for the whole split. Actually, we are not even at Worlds yet but we are going to China and we will participate in the play-in stage. Hopefully, we will proceed to the actual Worlds tournament.
Just one week ago in Paris, the same match-up between H2k and Fnatic ended in a close 3-2 series in your favor. What has changed since then?
I don’t know what changed. I also think today’s series wasn’t as one sided as the result might look. They could easily have won Game 2 in particular, so the chance of this series being close was there but they just messed up at Baron in the second game. Then we gained momentum and we won. It is also different because the match in Paris didn’t really mean anything in theory whilst this is really important to us. It has been important to get a good start and we got that and that made out lives a lot easier.
This will be your first time at Worlds. How excited are you and what are your personal expectations?
I don’t know what my personal expectations are, to be honest. I think it is really hard to tell. Right now, I just want to go there, scrim against some teams and know where we stand. Realistically speaking it is impossible to tell how the play-in stage is going to go and then if we make it to Worlds whether we can make it out of groups or not. I will just see how it goes and hope for the best.
Who would you be really excited to face?
I would like to face Team World Elite. I think World Elite has been looking really strong as they’re one of the most renowned Chinese organizations so it would be super cool to face them.
Not long ago you were grinding away in SoloQ. Now, within less than a year, you’re going to the most prestigious events of all. Do you think this is a good sign for players around the globe?
I think it’s a sign that if you have a bit of luck and you’re dedicated enough, passionate enough, you can improve a lot in a really short time. It proves to newer players that if they try really hard then they can get very far in a short amount of time too.
What was your secret for making such an insane development within such a short period of time?
I don’t know what my secret was. I am really open to criticism which has surely helped me a lot. I respect everything that my previous coaches and teammates have told me. That has helped me to develop relatively quick as a player. Taking everything into account and trusting them on what they told me so that I could work on fixing my mistakes.
What was the most important lesson you yet had to learn as a pro player?
I learned quite a lot of things. First of all, living so far away from family and friends you quickly realize how much they really mean to you. Apart from that, I learned a lot of life skills since I live away from my family now. I gained a lot of crazy experiences including all the traveling, living with the team, competing in a competitive environment. These are a lot of cool things I’ve learned.
How is Denmark so good at League of Legends? Besides you and your teammates, there’s Zven, Bjergsen, Jensen – so many great players!
I’m not sure why Denmark is so good at esports in general. I really have no clue. Obviously, in the north, a lot of people start playing video games when they are young. Also, we are all really competitive and get insanely mad when we lose so we just want to get better all the time to smash our friends in games. As a whole, we all have very competitive mindsets. I don’t know if that is different in any other countries. It’s hard to say.
Since this has been the last match in EU for you this split, is there anything special you would like to address towards your fans or the fans of Fnatic?
Just thank you all for your ongoing support. The results during this split have been pretty much like a rollercoaster ride. After a really good start into the split, we got smashed at Rift Rivals. Sometime later we performed well again but then almost didn’t qualify for Worlds. It’s been a crazy ride this split so thanks to everyone who supported us all the way through. All the time we received mainly positive messages. That’s been awesome!
Thank you very much for your time and best of luck in China!Dez Cadena, who was a member of Black Flag, Misfits (which he recently left) and more, has sadly been diagnosed with throat cancer. A GoFundMe campaign was set up to help him out, and reads:
Dez has just finished debilitating radiation treatments, and is confident he will return to active performance again within a year. So Dez has had to take a long break from touring and recording and he had no other income to pay for the quite expensive treatments and doctor’s bills. We ask you today to donate funds to help Dez’s cause, as this friendly man has given so much to the music community, and he is literally a living punk rock legend, having played on some of the classic records of the genre, and remains one of the most beloved members of the scene. We ask you to please consider donating anything you can to help see Dez through the next year, so he can resume his proper place on the stages and records of our future. Thank you for assisting us in helping this very kind man in his time of need.
So sad to hear. Fingers crossed for a speedy recovery.
Dez’s other recent projects included the post-Black Flag band FLAG and CJ Ramone’s band. Watch him sing Black Flag’s “Rise Above” with CJ Ramone below…
—At the subway station, however, it is undeniable that Groomes was the aggressor. And New York law requires you to retreat – the opposite of what Groomes did – if indeed you are under attack.
According to Joscelyn, who spoke with me in early April 2015 (and claims not to have been interviewed by the DA’s Office), it was Gilbert and he that were, in fact, retreating – or rather escaping – from Groomes’ attacks on them during the ride into Brooklyn. I will leave the details of that ride for another post about Joscelyn and the charges against him. Suffice it to say that Borough Hall was not Joscelyn’s and Gilbert’s destination, but their escape route after Groomes, in that crowded subway car, took out his gun, loaded it, pointed it at Joscelyn and Gilbert and told them he was going to kill them.
Notwithstanding the DA’s statement, what happened or did not happen during the six-minute subway ride cannot erase – or justify – what we all see did happen at the subway station, thanks to bystanders’ videos: Groomes pursued Gilbert with loaded gun drawn, assaulted Gilbert, then killed him. That cannot not be a crime.
Unless you are in a protected class. There simply is no other explanation and will never be another explanation, unless the DA’s Office voluntarily – or under community or political pressure or legal compulsion – explains in greater detail why Groomes acted within the law. Will Groomes is black (as is DA Thompson), but is being treated like he is blue.Wine Announcement
The Wine development release 1.7.20 is now available. What's new in this release (see below for details): - X11 drag & drop fixes. - A few more C/C++ runtime functions. - Fixes for various memory issues found by Valgrind. - Some OLE storage fixes. - Various bug fixes. The source is available from the following locations: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.7.20.tar.bz2 http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.7/wine-1.7.20.tar.bz2 Binary packages for various distributions will be available from: http://www.winehq.org/download You will find documentation on http://www.winehq.org/documentation You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check http://www.winehq.org/git for details. Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Bugs fixed in 1.7.20 (total 88): 9616 Pronunciation Patterns 3 doesn't start 12371 Neural Noise Synthesizer (Thinstall virtualization wrapped app) fails to launch (GetEnvironmentVariableA/W needs to respect size limits for temp buffer allocation) 13432 ZDaemon: freezes when exiting launcher 13459 Oberon game launcher (incl. buttons) does not work 13719 E-texteditor installs but freezes on run 14693 Program halts when on another virtual desktop 14718 Rappelz will not update itself 14873 Voipstunt crashes trying to connect to server 15417 Easy68k: Exiting without closing help window causes page fault. 16127 Mouse Buttons do not work in BBC Basic For Windows 5.80a 17035 RPG Maker XP 1.x: Script editor selects complete script when program gets focus 18195 Medal of honor pacific assault: In bootcamp there are many bush glitches 19048 RegCleaner 4.3.0.780: assertion failure in LISTVIEW_GetItemT() 20077 User Interface of RPG Maker XP 1.x is unusable and freezes 20485 Uninitialised memory reference in FTP_DoPassive 20630 Services written in Delphi 6: impossible to start by "net start" command 20929 IDGET - Doesn't show disc drive 22494 Microsoft Office 2007 cannot be activated 22877 RegCleaner crashes on start 23696 oxygen xml editor license page does not appear in web browser 24302 STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl install reports incorrect hard disk space 24513 Background in VirtuaGirl is always black 24593 Livestream Procaster: login fails 24594 Livestream Procaster: Procaster's game streaming mode doesn't work due to a "DirectX Test Error" 25088 Crysis Warhead 1.1.x does not start 25799 GFWL (Games For Windows Live) 3.x client crashes at startup 26402 Cain and Abel: Crashes in libfreetype/libc 27433 mass effect 2 heisencrash on non-smp system 28108 urlmon: url.ok occasional test failure: unexpected call OnProgress_SENDINGREQUEST 28133 twain_32/dsm.ok crashes occasionally? 28710 ws2_32: sock.ok reads/writes invalid memory during async_getservbyport? 28821 kernel32/tests/time.ok: uninitialized memory read in GetCalendarInfoA 28822 mmdevapi/tests/capture.ok fails sometimes under valgrind? 28827 Digsby (PIM) won't start 28835 rpcrt4/tests/rpc_protseq.ok fails under valgrind 28865 Ski Resort Tycoon 2 crashes on startup 29430 RPG Maker VX crashes during startup 29662 IBankWizard.msi crash at the end of installing 30209 Exchange file manager (.NET 3.5 app) crashes on startup 30398 Word / Excel 2007: crashes while opening or saving documents 30484 rFactor 2 launcher UI does not detect machine setup 30601 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas crashes on startup 31177 SugarSync (sugarsyncmanager) crashes on startup 31221 Acrobat 8 page one is full of artifacts 31225 SA-MP (Multiplayer Online game mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas): chat and scrollbar offscreen, text invisible 31332 Project64: about page fails to render 31532 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas does not work on 75Hz 32353 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas crashes on new game 32388 Mezzmo shows runtime errors while starting 32545 TaxACT 2012 crashes at startup 32800 construct2 crashed on open file dialog 32849 Path Of Exile sound glitch 33882 gtags (GNU GLOBAL) 6.2.x crashes on indexing of large projects 34646 Virtual DJ v7.4 crashes on startup 35426 RPG Maker VX Runtime: games crash on startup 36002 ImpotRapide 2013 (.NET 4.0 app) crashes on unimplemented function msvcp110.dll.?gcount@?$basic_istream@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@@std@@QBE_JXZ 36065 PunkBuster service tests fail (DeleteService should mark active services in SCM database as pending for deletion) 36139 msi/db test crash on wine compiled with gcc-4.9.0 36153 Borderlands 2 mouse focus no longer works properly 36377 League of Legends crashes at game start with wine 1.7.18 36432 valgrind shows a possible leak in shell32/tests/recyclebin.c 36459 ICQ 7.x 'ServiceStarter.exe' tool crashes during post-install step 36477 Nikon Message Center 2 (part of Nikon Capture NX2) crashes on startup (needs support for 'CIM_Processor' WMI class) 36481 CFNetworkCopySystemProxySettings and kCFNetworkProxiesProxyAutoConfigURLString are unavailable 36482 Raiden Legacy (DotEmu) shows black screen after launch 36491 Theatre of War 3: Korea Demo hangs on start 36496 Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12.x crashes on unimplemented function msvcr100.dll._wcslwr_l 36505 DynDNS Updater 4.1.6 crashes on startup 36507 valgrind shows a definite leak in dpnet/tests/server.c 36518 Selecting character mission crashes Star Wars Rebellion 1.00 36526 When Delphi programs (e.g. InnoSetup) start, their global variables are corrupt. 36540 3dmark 2003 needs msvcp70.dll.?begin@?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@QAE?AV?$_Ptrit@DHPADAADPADAAD@2@XZ 36541 Prince of Persia (2008) launcher fails to start, crashes in msvcrt 36573 valgrind shows uninitialized memory use in shlwapi/tests/path.c 36580 valgrind shows two definite leaks in user32/tests/cursoricon.c 36584 valgrind shows a leak in winmm/tests/mci.c 36588 valgrind shows a definite leak in userenv/tests/userenv.c 36590 valgrind shows a definite memory leak in usp10/tests/usp10.c 36591 valgrind shows uninitialized memory use in vbscript/tests/run.c 36602 valgrind shows a possible leak in wininet/tests/urlcache.c 36603 valgrind shows uninitialized memory use in winspool.drv/tests/info.c 36604 valgrind shows two definite leaks in winspool.drv/tests/info.c 36605 valgrind shows a definite leak in wintrust/tests/softpub.c 36627 Games For Windows Live 2.0.0687.0 (PANORAMA_V2.00_RTM.090421-2351) needs MSASN1.dll 36661 valgrind shows an unintialized write in ws2_32/tests/sock.c: test_completion_port() 36667 VBScript doesn't handle numbers in exponential form (e.g. 1e2) 36698 AudibleManager 5.5.x crashes at startup 36715 3dmark 2003 needs msvcp70.dll.??8std@@YA_NABV?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@0@PBD@Z ---------------------------------------------------------------- Changes since 1.7.19: Akihiro Sagawa (6): oleaut32/tests: Use a boolean constant for BOOL argument. oleaut32/tests: Test UnRegisterTypeLib surely deletes registry keys. oleaut32: Delete opposite side keys on UnRegisterTypeLib. kernel32: Avoid uninitialised value read in GetCalendarInfoA. kernel32: Return correct buffer size when returning DBCS characters. user32: Don't close a popup menu when clicking a sub-menu parent item twice. Alexandre Julliard (4): vbscript: Avoid using bool keyword. comctl32/tests: Output message sequences only on failure. gdi32/tests: Remove some noisy traces. user32/tests: Remove some noisy traces. Alistair Leslie-Hughes (1): dpnet/tests: Correct memory leak (valgrind). Andrei Slăvoiu (1): wined3d: Recognize cards that expose GLSL 1.30 as DX10 capable even if they don't support EXT_GPU_SHADER4. Andrew Eikum (6): mmdevapi: Make buffer size divisible by number of periods. mmdevapi: Clock rate should be in bytes for shared mode. user32: Remove unused internal menu messages. riched20/tests: Allow conversions to non-English codepages. ole32: Fix return value logging. ole32: Fix return type. Aric Stewart (1): winemac: Reposition cursor for IME composition. Austin English (3): include: Add missing EntryInProgress member to _PEB_LDR_DATA struct. user32: Fix a comment. msasn1: Add stub dll. Bruno Jesus (17): ws2_32: Take care of EINTR inside the helpers. ws2_32: Avoid memory allocation for simple sends. ws2_32: Avoid memory allocation for simple receives. user32/tests: Fix a memory leak (valgrind). winmm: Fix a memory leak in mciSendStringW (valgrind). wintrust/tests: Fix a memory leak (valgrind). winspool.drv: Do not try to check the registry if opening the printer fails (valgrind). userenv/tests: Fix a memory leak (valgrind). wininet/tests: Fix a memory leak (valgrind). shlwapi: Avoid reading past the pointer in PathCreateFromUrlW (valgrind). usp10: Fix a memory leak in _ItemizeInternal (valgrind). wininet: Use a helper to send data and take care of EINTR. winetest: Take care of EINTR on send/recv. rpcrt4: Take care of EINTR on send/recv. wininet: Use a helper to receive data and take care of EINTR. ws2_32/tests: Initialize a test buffer (valgrind). kernel32: Limit the environment variable size to 32767 in GetEnvironmentVariable. Damjan Jovanovic (8): winex11.drv: text/html should be imported as CF_HTML ("HTML Format"), not CFSTR_INETURL ("UniformResourceLocator"). winex11.drv: Don't bother counting how many XDND selections are converted. winex11.drv: Use the global memory functions to allocate the memory for STGMEDIUM's hGlobal. winex11.drv: Use the clipboard functions and formats to import selections that XDND doesn't support. winex11.drv: Use the clipboard to import text/html XDND selections. winex11.drv: Import text/plain XDND selections through the clipboard. winex11.drv: Store XDND cached data in global memory objects. winex11.drv: Migrate importing text/uri-list XDND selections to the clipboard. Daniel Beitler (1): msi: Prevent call to memset with a null pointer in get_tablecolumns function. Felix Janda (3): server: Add missing includes of poll.h. dnsapi: stdio.h needs to be included for sprintf(). iphlpapi: stdio.h needs to be included for sprintf(). François Gouget (2): msvcrt/tests: Make qsort_comp() static. scrrun: Fix compilation on systems that don't support nameless unions. Guillaume Charifi (2): ole32: CoCreateGuid returns E_INVALIDARG on null-GUID. pdh: Implement PdhExpandCounterPathA/W. Hans Leidekker (9): wininet: Fix build on Mac OS X 10.5.8. winhttp: Fix build on Mac OS X 10.5.8. wbemprox: Handle NULL out parameter to object methods. wbemprox: Add a partial implementation of CIM_Processor. winhttp/tests: Mark some test results on Windows 8 as broken. winhttp: Ignore URL components if the buffer length is zero. winhttp: Only set the scheme if we have a valid URL. wininet/tests: Fix a couple of test failures on Internet Explorer 11. wininet: Only set the content length header if it's not explicitly set by the user. Henri Verbeet (20): d2d1: Add the ID2D1HwndRenderTarget interface. d2d1: Add the ID2D1DCRenderTarget interface. d2d1: Add the ID2D1GdiInteropRenderTarget interface. d2d1: Add the ID2D1Factory interface. wined3d: Increase the SM4 instruction length mask size. d2d1: Implement D2D1CreateFactory(). d2d1: Implement d2d_factory_CreateDxgiSurfaceRenderTarget(). wined3d: Recognize the SM4 discard opcode. wined3d: Recognize the SM4 dp2 opcode. wined3d: Recognize the SM4 ishl opcode. ddraw/tests: 64-bit ddraw only has DWORD surface pitch alignment in some cases. ddraw: Clear DDSD_LINEARSIZE on uncompressed surfaces. ddraw: Clear DDSD_PITCH on compressed surfaces. ddraw: Use wined3d_surface_get_pitch() to calculate dwLinearSize for compressed surfaces. ddraw: Properly support creating compressed user memory surfaces. ddraw: Don't try to create surfaces for wined3d internal textures. wined3d: Add format information for WINED3DFMT_R8_UNORM. d3d10_1: Forward D3D10CreateEffectFromMemory to d3d10. d3d10core: Implement d3d10_device_GetDeviceRemovedReason(). user32: Ensure at least one character is used in TEXT_WordBreak(). Huw D. M. Davies (6): dwrite/tests: U+1cc8 is not an assigned codepoint, use U+1cc7 instead. Fixes test on win 8. crypt32: Add a new element to SIP_ADD_NEWPROVIDER. crypt32/tests: Fix test failure on win 8. riched20: Don't skip the final carriage return in SFF_SELECTION mode. gdi32/tests: tmLastChar is solely governed by the last entry before 0xffff in the cmap. gdi32: CLIP_DFA_DISABLE should disable the font association mechanism. Jacek Caban (20): urlmon: Fixed some occasionally failing tests. ieframe: Added InternetExplore::get_HWND implementation. oleaut32: Rewrite debugstr_vt. oleaut32: Use debugstr_variant for dump_Variant implementation. oleaut32: Replaced dump_Variant by debugstr_variant. mshtml: Call unlink from HTMLDOMNode::Release. mshtml: Added new helper for getting element attribute value and use it in script.c. mshtml: Added new helper for GetAttribute based getters and use it in IHTMLMetaElement implementation. mshtml: Use get_elem_attr_value helper in get_font_size. mshtml: Use get_elem_attr_value helper in is_elem_name. mshtml: Use get_elem_attr_value helper in check_event_attr. mshtml: Use get_elem_attr_value helper in HTMLFormElement_get_dispid. mshtml: Use elem_string_attr_getter helper in HTMLLabelElement_get_htmlFor implementation. mshtml: Use get_elem_attr_value helper in npplugin.c. mshtml: Added function object default value getter implementation. vbscript: Added support for exponential form of numeric literals. ntdll: Removed no longer used defines. jscript: Properly handle NULL pvarResult in ParseScriptText. vbscript: Always initialize is_array value (valgrind). jscript: Added accessing not existing property on IDispatchEx tests. Julian Rüger (1): po: Update German translation. Marcus Meissner (2): jsproxy: Avoid potential NULL dereference (Coverity). msxml3: Removed unused allocation (Coverity). Michael Müller (2): server: Fix return value for FSCTL_PIPE_WAIT if pipe does not exist. ntdll: Stub TokenAppContainerSid in NtQueryInformationToken. Michael Stefaniuc (28): dmusic: Return S_FALSE for the unimplemented IPersistStream_IsDirty(). dmusic/tests: Test unimplemented IPersistStream methods in DMCollection. dmstyle/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of DMStyle. dmscript: IPersistStream_GetClassID() is not implemented for DMScript. dmscript/tests: Test unimplemented IPersistStream methods in DMScript. dmband/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of DMBand. dswave/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of DirectSoundWave. dmcompos/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of DMChordMap. dmscript: Move a struct definition to the.c file that uses it. dmloader/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of DMContainer. dmime/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of objects with DMObject. dmscript/tests: Test some IPersistStream methods of DMScriptTrack. dmusic: Simplify the creation of a DirectMusicBuffer object. dmusic: Don't leak memory on IReferenceClock creation failure. dmusic: Release the clock when destroying the IDirectMusic8 object. dmusic: Simplify the creation of a DirectMusic8 object. dmusic: Don't leak memory on DirectMusicInstrument creation failure. dmusic: Lock/unlock the module only on creation/destruction of the object. dmime/tests: Rather test for IDirectMusicObject as invalid iface. dmime: Move a struct definition to the.c file that uses it. dmband: Move struct definitions to the.c files that uses them. dmcompos: Move a struct definition to the.c file that uses it. dmstyle: Move a struct definition to the.c file that uses it. dmloader: COM cleanup for IDirectMusicContainer. dmusic: Move the common parts of DMObject to a generic implementation. dmusic: Use generic "unimplemented" methods for IPersistStream. dmusic: Get rid of the extra pointer to a DMUS_OBJECTDESC. dmusic: Remove the redundant "IDirectMusicCollection" from method names. Nicolas Le Cam (2): mshtml/tests: Remove unused variable. winedbg: Remove unused variable. Nikolay Sivov (29): scrrun/tests: Fix tests to depend on current codepage. scrrun: Implement Count() property for file collection. scrrun: Return disk space as VT_I4 if it fits. netprofm: Added IConnectionPointContainer stub for INetworkListManager. xmllite/writer: Implement OmitXmlDeclaration property. xmllite/writer: Implement ByteOrderMark property. scrrun: Return float type size when signed I4 limit exceeded. scrrun: Use existing helper to return file size. xmllite/writer: Initial implementation of WriteStartElement(). xmllite/writer: Initial implementation of WriteElementString(). propsys: Implement PSGetPropertySystem(). propsys: Forward corresponding methods to exports. ntdll: Fix LdrLockLoaderLock()/LdrUnlockLoaderLock() on 64bit. include: Add more error codes. include: Added IImageList2 definition. shell32: Update to FolderItem2. wbemprox/tests: Fix some test failures on older XP versions. comctl32/progress: Set default marquee animation timer to 30 msec. comctl32/progress: Erase background too on WM_TIMER for marquee animation. comctl32/progress: Update position by one step on PBM_SETPOS in PBS_MARQUEE style. comctl32/treeview: Simplify sending parent WM_NOTIFY notifications. comctl32/treeview: Send TVN_KEYDOWN in response of WM_KEYDOWN. comctl32/imagelist: Update to IImageList2. explorerframe: Query for more notification callbacks. explorerframe/tests: Mark some results as broken. explorerframe: Internally make calls with interface wrappers. services: Defer service delete until all handles are closed. quartz/tests: Unregister filters only when registered successfully. shlwapi/tests: Skip if test ini file wasn't created. Piotr Caban (17): vbscript: Parse doubles with bigger precision in parse_numeric_literal. msvcrt: Add _mbsnbcpy_s_l implementation. msvcrt: Add _mbscpy_s implementation. vbscript: Support multibyte characters in Global_Chr. msvcrt: Fix __libm_sse2_sqrt_precise implementation. msvcp100: Export basic_istream::gcount function. msvcrt: Rewrite qsort function. msvcrt: Add qsort_s tests. msvcrt: Add _wcslwr_s_l implementation. msvcrt: Return string in _wcslwr and _wcslwr_l. user32: Try to activate topmost activable window in WINPOS_ActivateOtherWindow. msvcp70: Export basic_string iterator functions. msvcrt: Handle negative file->_cnt value in fwrite. msvcp90: Fix typo in strstreambuf_freeze. msvcp70: Export operators working on basic_string. msvcrt: Add _strxfrm_l implementation. msvcrt: Add _wcsxfrm_l implementation. Sebastian Lackner (1): ntdll/tests: Fix exception test failures on x86_64. Shuai Meng (4): vbscript: Implemented CCur. vbscript: Implemented CDbl. vbscript: Implemented CLng. vbscript: Fixed CInt. Stefan Dösinger (5): include: Sync an attribute to the Windows 8.1 SDK. wined3d: Remove d3dfmt_p8_init_palette. d3d9/tests: Add a test for D3DUSAGE_WRITEONLY. d3d8/tests: Add a test for D3DUSAGE_WRITEONLY. ddraw/tests: Test D3DVBCAPS_WRITEONLY. Toshiaki Hirose (1): po: Update Japanese translation. Vincent Povirk (8): user32/tests: Add test for SendMessage race condition. server: Clear the queue's QS_SMRESULT bit when sending a new message. ole32: Use a snapshot file when sharing storages for writing. ole32: Invalidate all caches when the transaction sig changes. shell32: Fix memory leak. ole32: Don't store file size in FileLockBytesImpl. ole32: Support storage files larger than 4 GB. notepad: Check IsDialogMessage before TranslateAccelerator. Zhenbo Li (6): mshtml: Added IHTMLLocation::assign method implementation. mshtml: Added nsIDOMHTMLTableCellElement declaration. mshtml: Added IHTMLTableRow::deleteCell method implementation. mshtml: Added IHTMLLinkElement::media property. mshtml: Added IHTMLDocument2:toString method. mshtml: Added IHTMLTableRow::insertCell method implementation. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.orgThis Visit Brought To You By
All About UPC Barcode & EAN Barcode
The Universal Product Code or UPC barcode was the first bar code symbology widely adopted. Its birth is usually set at April 3, 1973, when the grocery industry formally established UPC as the standard bar code symbology for product marking. Foreign interest in UPC led to the adoption of the EAN code format, similar to UPC, in December 1976.
2005 Sunrise and the Global Trade Item Number initiatives from the UCC will begin on January 1, 2005. This is the "fourteen digit U.P.C." that everyone is talking about. There are quite a few misconceptions and considerable misinformation about the effect of this change. In a nutshell, if you are a manufacturer of a product that has an existing 8 or 12-digit UPC barcode, don't worry. You do not have to change anything. However, if you are a retailer or wholesaler with scanners, you potentially are affected. You will need to ensure that scanners are able to decode 8, 12, 13 and 14-digit barcodes (most scanners sold for the last 5 years can do this) and that database systems can handle the extra digits. Gregg London was kind enough to share an excellent white paper on the subject. Once January 1, 2005 comes, both EAN and UPC labels should scan properly worldwide.
There are now five versions of UPC and two versions of EAN. The Japanese Article Numbering (JAN) code has a single version identical to one of the EAN versions with the flag characters set to ``49''.
UPC and EAN symbols are fixed in length, can only encode numbers, and are continuous symbologies using four element widths.
UPC version A symbols have 10 digits plus two overhead digits while EAN symbols have 12 digits and one overhead |
who laid them off.”
Which brings us to the second problem. Politics at the presidential level is in no small part performance, one that Romney plays very badly. He attracts hostility not because he’s wealthy—that never hurt George W. Bush—but because he acts wealthy at a moment of economic crisis and in a manner that makes people think he has no idea how ordinary people live. While Romney was talking about his wife’s Cadillacs and saying he likes “being able to fire people” for bad service, Santorum was telling a rally in Lansing during the Michigan primaries that he will stand up for the “little man.” One small business owner there explained, “I get the feeling [Romney’s] more for big business. I love NASCAR and he has friends who own NASCAR teams, and it’s difficult to relate to that.”
Santorum, conversely, comes across as “a guy that can go into a union hall and at least make eye contact with a hard-core Democrat, remind them that their father voted for Ronald Reagan,” as Ed Kasputis, a former Republican state legislator in Ohio, told the Times. Santorum has had his own stumbles on issues of class. In February he said, “There is income inequality in America. There always has been and, hopefully…there always will be.” But he still looks better than Romney.
This is what makes widespread claims of class warfare in the GOP overblown. Class confusion, certainly, and class realignment, possibly. But warfare? Hardly, given that the candidates are ultimately all on the same side and working for the same interests.
What there is, though, is a frustrated aspiration for class-based politics that has no home in America’s electoral politics and so finds its outlet in cultural grievance and social resentment. The result is as unfulfilling as the simulated steak that the character Cypher savors in the movie The Matrix. “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist,” he says, holding a morsel to his lips. “I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” It’s hard to trust your gut on an empty stomach.“I can’t go on like this.”
They’re not words you ever want to hear a friend say. And yet, when Steve uttered them to me a couple of years ago, they felt like the break of dawn.
Steve is, among many other things, homeless and an alcoholic. When we first met, many months previously, he had been somewhat uncommunicative, but had since grown in confidence and trust. Now, for the first time, he was asking for help.
It was a moment of flickering hope that has been brutally extinguished by a system that has frustrated and failed him at every turn since. Because Steve’s just been sent to jail – and so scandalous has his treatment been that imprisonment may be the best thing that has happened to him for years.
If you want to know how to help an alcoholic, you're asking the wrong question | Patrick Strudwick Read more
I met Steve five years ago when he began sleeping on the porch of the church I used to attend; he was in his mid-40s and had recently been released from prison. He had never lived independently, and was clearly a man with complex needs. Many of us at the church grew to know and like Steve. He showed great care for others, and displayed an endearing wit: he’d describe the fruit he’d picked and stored in the crevices of the porch as his “ornaments”.
Steve could be aggressive when drunk, but was typically benign and the most committed churchgoer in the parish. We treated him not as a client or patient or problem, but as a person, and he respected that. So when he mustered the courage to seek assistance in turning his life around, we did all we could.
Our resulting experiences were akin to being punched repeatedly in the soul. Here’s a brief summary. He needed help for his chest pains, so we contacted a GP surgery. “No, we can’t help,” they said. “He needs to register with us.” What information do you need? “His address.” He doesn’t have one. “Then we can’t see him.” It took a formal complaint to the practice manager to get this vulnerable, sick man an appointment.
The benefits system was similarly ill-equipped to deal with Steve. He had no chance of navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy and alphabet soup of initialisms. Attempts to get the money to which he was entitled were stalled by the need for official documents, of which he had none. After weeks of struggle, the benefits were approved – but were accessible only by using a card, a device with which Steve was unfamiliar. So he’d need help just to get the money. No one official offered support with budgeting, either, so he had no idea how to manage it.
This was institutionalised buck-passing. Without our group from the church, he’d have been entirely alone.
Then there was the nausea-inducing carousel of mental health care. He didn’t tick enough boxes for any formal diagnosis; well-intentioned efforts were made to admit him to hospital, but he wasn’t ill enough. Because of his alcoholism, no hostel would take him; but without the stability and shelter afforded by a hostel, he had little chance of recovery. Mental health services wouldn’t help until he’d recovered from the alcoholism; but the alcoholism was bound up with his mental health issues. There was institutionalised buck-passing – and without our group from the church trying to help him, he’d have been entirely alone.
And then, 18 months ago, the very church in which he’d placed his trust evicted him. Some members of the church have continued their efforts but this has been made harder by the difficulty in knowing where he was. And now? He’s behind bars.
Officially, Steve’s crime was being drunk and disorderly on various occasions over the past few months, and failing to attend court hearings. But the system has set him up for this fall. Alcoholism and a chaotic life on the streets would make many of us drunk and disorderly and miss court hearings. In truth, his crime has been quite different: to be insufficiently dangerous to himself or to others to get the help he needs and wants, but to be insufficiently capable of running his life independently to get the help he needs and wants.
Steve’s story shames modern Britain. It’s a tale that exposes the fragility of the social infrastructure upon which we rely.Posted by: Bhushan Avsatthi | Posted on: November 18th, 2014
Sustainability, green buildings and energy efficiency are the buzzwords, and everyone is talking about it. These words are so talked about, is because, till now energy conservation was considered an issue that might arise in near future, however today it has become a major problem plaguing our present and hence addressing it is of crucial importance. One of the biggest reasons why energy modeling and green building design is yet to be accepted and widely used across every home and every building across the globe is that, people still think that it costs too much to go green – especially to design and develop energy efficient buildings.
(Image Source: bryanchristiedesign.com)
However, this is a complete myth, a great design and with implementation of lean construction methodologies, it will not cost you; instead, it will pay you to go green. In fact Energy Modeling/Analysis/Simulation for EPact 179D can result in potential tax savings for architects, engineers, builders and building owners. The Energy Policy Act 179D 2005, outlines the requirements for maximum tax deduction potential, of up to $1.80 per square foot of an energy efficient area.
Save a Dozen for a Dime:
True enough that if a developer pursues Energy Modeling & Building Simulation for LEED & Estidama Certification etc, it will definitely cost something. However, you get a dozen for the dime spent. These certifications increase the market value of your building, besides; making a building energy efficient, means you can save a lot on utility bills over the years. In several cases, the cost of extra investments made for implementing energy efficiency, are recovered within a few years of a building lifecycle, due to huge savings on utility bills.
Generate Your Own Energy:
Today energy efficiency in buildings, has reached its zenith, as it now not only restricted to net zero energy building (NZEB’s), now architects are developing building that generate surplus amount of energy. All this energy is generated from renewable resources such as solar energy, geothermal energy, wind and water etc.
The traditional architectural design process is linear, and in order to enforce the best energy efficiency solutions is it important to hire specialists for the job and conduct an Energy Analysis/Simulation in support of Energy Audit. After a complete analysis, solutions devised should treat the problem root up. When this is not done, and shallow resolutions are frantically enforced, it turns out to become a building design covered in green expensive bandages, which do little more than to cover-up the wounds. This is where the costs start weighing more than the benefits.
A Collaborative Approach:
A green building design revolution can be only brought about, if we change our mindsets. It is not an option, it is a dire requirement. A collaborative approach is very important for teams working on a building design and construction projects. When all the parties, architects, engineers, decision makers and stakeholders come together to discuss tradeoffs, a common goal of implementing green solutions can be achieved. For example, the if a team collective decides to invest in better insulation in a building, it might seem to be like more expenditure on the front, however it results in downsized HVAC equipments thus reduced costs. Such kind of fruitful tradeoff decisions can be taken in a better manner in a collaborative approach, thus saving a lot of time and money.I strongly suspect that there is a possible art of rationality (attaining the map that reflects the territory, choosing so as to direct reality into regions high in your preference ordering) which goes beyond the skills that are standard, and beyond what any single practitioner singly knows. I have a sense that more is possible.
The degree to which a group of people can do anything useful about this, will depend overwhelmingly on what methods we can devise to verify our many amazing good ideas.
I suggest stratifying verification methods into 3 levels of usefulness:
Reputational
Experimental
Organizational
If your martial arts master occasionally fights realistic duels (ideally, real duels) against the masters of other schools, and wins or at least doesn't lose too often, then you know that the master's reputation is grounded in reality; you know that your master is not a complete poseur. The same would go if your school regularly competed against other schools. You'd be keepin' it real.
Some martial arts fail to compete realistically enough, and their students go down in seconds against real streetfighters. Other martial arts schools fail to compete at all—except based on charisma and good stories—and their masters decide they have chi powers. In this latter class we can also place the splintered schools of psychoanalysis.
So even just the basic step of trying to ground reputations in some realistic trial other than charisma and good stories, has tremendous positive effects on a whole field of endeavor.
But that doesn't yet get you a science. A science requires that you be able to test 100 applications of method A against 100 applications of method B and run statistics on the results. Experiments have to be replicable and replicated. This requires standard measurements that can be run on students who've been taught using randomly-assigned alternative methods, not just realistic duels fought between masters using all of their accumulated techniques and strength.
The field of happiness studies was created, more or less, by realizing that asking people "On a scale of 1 to 10, how good do you feel right now?" was a measure that statistically validated well against other ideas for measuring happiness. And this, despite all skepticism, looks like it's actually a pretty useful measure of some things, if you ask 100 people and average the results.
But suppose you wanted to put happier people in positions of power—pay happy people to train other people to be happier, or employ the happiest at a hedge fund? Then you're going to need some test that's harder to game than just asking someone "How happy are you?"
This question of verification methods good enough to build organizations, is a huge problem at all levels of modern human society. If you're going to use the SAT to control admissions to elite colleges, then can the SAT be defeated by studying just for the SAT in a way that ends up not correlating to other scholastic potential? If you give colleges the power to grant degrees, then do they have an incentive not to fail people? (I consider it drop-dead obvious that the task of verifying acquired skills and hence the power to grant degrees should be separated from the institutions that do the teaching, but let's not go into that.) If a hedge fund posts 20% returns, are they really that much better than the indices, or are they selling puts that will blow up in a down market?
If you have a verification method that can be gamed, the whole field adapts to game it, and loses its purpose. Colleges turn into tests of whether you can endure the classes. High schools do nothing but teach to statewide tests. Hedge funds sell puts to boost their returns.
On the other hand—we still manage to teach engineers, even though our organizational verification methods aren't perfect. So what perfect or imperfect methods could you use for verifying rationality skills, that would be at least a little resistant to gaming?
(Added: Measurements with high noise can still be used experimentally, if you randomly assign enough subjects to have an expectation of washing out the variance. But for the organizational purpose of verifying particular individuals, you need low-noise measurements.)
So I now put to you the question—how do you verify rationality skills? At any of the three levels? Brainstorm, I beg you; even a difficult and expensive measurement can become a gold standard to verify other metrics. Feel free to email me at sentience@pobox.com to suggest any measurements that are better off not being publicly known (though this is of course a major disadvantage of that method). Stupid ideas can suggest good ideas, so if you can't come up with a good idea, come up with a stupid one.
Reputational, experimental, organizational:
Something the masters and schools can do to keep it real (realistically real);
Something you can do to measure each of a hundred students;
Something you could use as a test even if people have an incentive to game it.
Finding good solutions at each level determines what a whole field of study can be useful for—how much it can hope to accomplish. This is one of the Big Important Foundational Questions, so—
Think!
(PS: And ponder on your own before you look at the other comments; we need breadth of coverage here.)Is Marijuana Use Correlated to Increased Cognition? WSJ Team
If you took a survey of 100 people asking them whether or not there is any association between marijuana and creativity, how many do you think would vote yes? Throughout time many people have attributed their successes to the stimulated brain processes that you undergo when smoking marijuana. Artists, musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs have frequently embraced this culture to benefit their personal achievements. Big names like The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Lady Gaga, among several others have accredited their own artistic evolution to his discovery of, and experimentation with marijuana. Even when all of this is taking place the beneficial aspects of marijuana use still remain out of sight in the eyes of the masses.
A paper published in Psychiatry Research took a much more in depth look on this spectacle, delving further into the reason marijuana seems to release some type of loose associative thought. In the study, researchers discuss a phenomenon called “semantic priming”, in which the activation of one word triggers a quicker association to related words. For example, the word “water” might lead to a decreased reaction time for “pool”, “ocean”, and “drink” but would not alter how quickly one would react to “car”. They found that smoking marijuana induces a state of “hyper-priming”, in which the reach of semantic priming is exponentially extended to distantly related words, thoughts, and concepts. As a result, when we hear the word “water” when under the influence of marijuana, you may not only create an extended thought tree of “pool”, “ocean”, and “drink”, but also perhaps a memory of a specific circumstance you encountered at the beach.
If the science is valid, hyper-priming is related to these altered brain functions and evidence would conclude that marijuana most certainly enhances creativity. However, to the best of my knowledge, the science backing this evidence is still theoretical and not fact. In some eyes, these extended thoughts are what cause space-outs and lack of attention, but to others they are a gateway to expanded ideas, which could lead to further success in regards to your career, personal life, or whatever dilemma you may be facing.
Let us know your thoughts on the topic!
Related Posts via CategoriesAfter years of litigation between Congress and the Department of Justice over Operation Fast & Furious and a claim of executive privilege on related communications, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee finally has most of the relevant documents. Oversight chair Jason Chaffetz argues in a release today that the picture painted in these documents show a deliberate effort to obstruct the proper oversight role of Congress, and that DoJ officials all the way up to then-Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the effort to shield the ATF from exposure of its fatal incompetence:
More than previously understood, the documents show the lengths to which senior Department officials went to keep information from Congress. Further, the documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials—including Attorney General Eric Holder—intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress. Justice Department officials in Washington impeded the congressional investigation in several ways, including: Presuming that allegations about gunwalking in Arizona were false and refusing to adjust when documents and evidence showed otherwise.
Politicizing decisions about how and whether to comply with the congressional investigation.
Devising strategies to redact or otherwise withhold relevant information from Congress and the public.
Isolating the fallout from the Fast and Furious scandal to ATF leadership and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.
Creating a culture of animosity towards congressional oversight.
Some of the communications also show considerable ineptitude and miscommunication among DoJ and ATF officials. Senator Charles Grassley, then ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and now its chair, began demanding answers about the ATF’s gunwalking efforts in Mexico after the murder of Brian Terry. At first, ATF and DoJ officials insisted that Grassley was just ignorant of the facts and intended on conducting a political attack on ATF:
On January 31, 2011, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke wrote to Justice Department officials in Washington to share his concerns about a letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley to ATF Director Kenneth Melson raising questions about whether guns were allowed to traffic into Mexico. Burke wrote: “Grassley’s assertions regarding the Arizona investigation and the weapons recovered at the BP agent Terry murder scene are based on categorical falsehoods. I worry that ATF will take 8 months to answer this when they should be refuting its underlying accusations right now.”
Further down the chain, Deputy AG Jamie Weinstein insisted that the allegations were false and strategized how to undermine Grassley’s attempt to shine a light on Fast and Furious:
Weinstein then suggested to Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer that he email Melson “offering any assistance they need for the Grassley briefing.”6 Weinstein further advised that “ATF can and should strongly refute” that a Fast and Furious weapon was involved in the Brian Terry attack.
Five months later, both ATF and DoJ were still insisting that Grassley was all wet:
On Friday, June 17, 2011, in response to news reports that firearms used in a high-profile kidnapping and murder were linked to Fast and Furious, Associate Deputy Attorney General Matt Axelrod emailed ATF, asking: “Were two F&F guns actually traced to the scene of this kidnapping? Can you run that down for us?”8 ATF dismissed the connection by responding that day: “[T]o suggest the guns are linked is like saying there was a murder in southeast three weeks ago. Tonight a car load of guys g[o]t caught with guns in southeast. Ergo the guns are linked to the murder.”9
But five days later, apparently someone in the nation’s largest federal investigative agency got around to checking out the facts:
Only after Chairman Issa and Ranking Member Grassley wrote to the Ambassador of Mexico on June 21, 2011 to ask for further details did Axelrod ask more probing questions of ATF.10 Subsequently, on June 22, 2011, Associate Deputy Attorney General Matt Axelrod emailed senior officials, including Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole: “I just heard from ATF. Their initial reporting on this was incorrect. Evidently, when MX law enforcement arrested the kidnappers at their hideout, they seized a number of firearms, two of which tie back to Fast and Furious. I’ll double check Issa’s letter in the morning, but it appears that the allegations in it (and in the Fox News report) are accurate.”
D’oh! And yet two months later, Holder and his team strategized about how to quietly move out Ken Melson and Dennis Burke without prompting more curiosity about the Fast and Furious scandal:
On August 28, 2011, Attorney General Holder was strategizing with top officials in Washington about how to announce ATF Director Ken Melson and U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke would resign due to their roles in Fast and Furious. Holder was concerned the news would leak early because Melson had already cleaned out his office. He instructed his staff to have someone at ATF “close the door to his office.”31 Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole worried announcing Melson’s resignation would create the appearance Melson was the only official being removed. He wrote to Holder: “The problem with going earlier than Tuesday is that we won’t have Dennis in the package.” Holder responded: “Let’s hold all until Tuesday as planned.”33 He replied to his own email: “We have to make known the breadth of the changes- at the top in USAO and ATF. At worker level at USAO and ATF. No one is a fall guy here.” 34 Further proof of the coordination by main Justice of the Melson and Burke staff changes occurred when Melson emailed a proposed “draft press release” he “would like to issue from ATF.”35 David O’Neil responded to the chain (with Holder cc’ed): Ken’s message below reads like he may think he’s giving us a heads-up on the message he plans to send on Monday as opposed to asking for clearance. If we haven’t made clear to him that we want to approve/coordinate any messaging about this, we probably should say that OPA is going to revise the first draft he shared and we’ll get back to him with a new one.36 Stuart Goldberg alerted the email chain: “the DAG [Jim Cole] did tell him the change would be announced on Tuesday,” to which Holder questioned “Did Jim say it in Spanish?” Cole responded, “Further proof of the need for a change.”
Very clearly, everyone up the chain knew about the disastrous consequences of Fast & Furious. Yet rather than engage transparently with Congress — which has a legitimate role and responsibility to oversee executive-branch agencies like ATF and DoJ — Holder et al chose to obfuscate and hide.
Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff writes that the documents confirm Holder’s role in the cover-up … but that it probably won’t matter now. The stonewalling project succeeded:
When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform tried to investigate the scandal, Team Obama stonewalled. First, it denied that law enforcement officers allowed straw purchasers to buy firearms illegally in the United States with the intent to traffic them without apprehension. Almost a year later, it finally admitted that this is precisely what had happened. Second, when the Committee subpoenaed relevant documents, Eric Holder’s DOJ refused to produce them, citing “executive privilege.” The House voted to hold Holder in contempt and filed suit to obtain the documents. Three and half years later, Judge Jackson ordered production of the 20,000 pages mentioned above. … More broadly, this case illustrates that, whatever the extent of their moral shortcomings, cover-ups probably succeed more often then they fail. Here, Eric Holder largely succeeded in thwarting the Fast and Furious investigation. Four years later, Barack Obama is completing his second term. Sleazy Eric Holder is back at his top tier law firm that reportedly has represented large banks he declined to prosecute for their alleged role in the financial crisis. And Fast and Furious is all but forgotten.
By almost all but its victims, such as the families of Brian Terry and others killed by the weapons unleashed by the ATF. Let’s not forget either that this was less of an effort to plug the gaps in firearms sales oversight than it was an attempt to paint gun shops as witting accomplices to straw-man purchases in order to get political support for more regulations on federal firearms licensed dealers … enforced by the ATF and DoJ.Sky, Bolo, and Rotty to the Rescue!
Howdy Backers! We’ve got some special news for you today – a first look at our next major Half-Genie Hero expansion, “Friends to the End”! Up until now, we’ve referred to this one as simply “friends mode”: the stretch goal that adds Sky, Bolo, and Rottytops as playable heroes. Today we’re ready to pull back the curtain and show off this awesome new addition!
The Missing Piece of the Story!
Friends to the End takes place chronologically in the middle of Shantae’s storyline. Unlike the (possibly embellished) tale of Pirate Queen’s Quest, this new mode would be considered “official cannon”, and fills in a part of the narrative that we, as the audience, were previously not witness to.
Shantae has been turned to evil by the foul Risky Boots by way of a polarity-swapping machine, and is reborn as Nega-Shantae! Sky, Bolo, and Rottytops must enter Shantae’s mind in order to rescue her consciousness from the “Nightmare Realm”; a series of twisted memories designed to swallow Shantae whole.
This will not be an easy task for the three adventurers, who lack both genie magic, and the ability to get along.
This translates into a brand new mode with three new heroes, a whole new story, and altered memories (revamped versions of existing levels) to explore and conquer. The icing on the cake is a new final level, and a showdown against Nega-Shantae.
Friends Game Play!
For Friends to the End, you’ll be controlling Sky, Bolo, and Rotty all at the same time, swapping freely between heroes. Each hero has a special ability that is useful for overcoming certain obstacles, but players are given a wide berth as to which character they want to use for the most part. Let’s take a look at each character!
All About Sky:
Sky is quick and agile, and can make long jumps by using her bird Wrench as a glider. Sky attacks by throwing seagulls, which are somewhat weak, but can hit at long range. Her special ability is to toss eggs, which explode into instant platforms! Finally, she can spend Dream Magic to summon an orbiting flock of birds for extra defense! Sky is definitely the best character!
All About Bolo:
Bolo deals heavy damage with his spiked Bolo Chain, which offers medium range and decent speed. He can also fire a Spring Claw at odd angles to knock away annoying airborne enemies. His special ability is to latch onto certain objects with his Spring Claw, which lets him to swing around freely like some sort of bionic ninja! To hit distant enemies, Bolo spends Dream Magic to toss a pong-style Spike Ball, which bounces diagonally at high speed. Bolo is definitely the best character!
All About Rottytops:
Rotty attacks by removing her zombie leg and using it as a club, dealing massive damage at short range. Her special move is the Head Toss. Rotty can aim her head freely in any direction, and toss it through certain barriers and over or under obstacles. Anywhere her head safely lands, she can reform. By spending Dream Magic, Rottytops can eat a brain to replenish her Hearts! Rottytops is definitely the best character!
Leveling Up!
From a design perspective, Friends to the End differs from Shantae and Risky’s modes in that the power up system exists “in the field”. There are no menus or inventory to manage. Collecting Gems will cause a hero to LEVEL UP, increasing their attack speed and damage dealt. Getting hit by enemies incurs a penalty, dropping the power level. Enemies and Bosses have been tailored around these new concepts, dropping health and Gems to feed the player’s needs. You could say that "Friends to the End" is part puzzle game, part action game, and part player management.
Meet the Cast!
We’ve saved the best for last! The time has come to reveal the incredible talent who will be voicing Sky, Bolo, and Rottytops!
Karen Strassman as Sky!
Karen is an Actress, VO Artist, VO Director and Dialect Coach. She has created over a thousand voice-over characters of all shapes, sizes, genders, ages, and species, from classic Disney princesses, to iconic villainesses, to talking jellyfish and shy tadpoles.
Karen’s VO credits include: Monster High, DC Super Hero Girls, Sonic (Rouge the Bat), Hellsing Ultimate (Heinkel Wolfe), Ever After High, LEGO Friends, Winx Club, Rugrats All Growed Up, Resident Evil, LEGO Dimensions, World of WarCraft (Vanessa VanCleef, Chromie), League of Legends (Casseopeia, Fiora, Shyvana, Zyra & Elise), Mortal Kombat (Kitana, Mileena), StarCraft 2 (Izsha), Street Fighter X Tekken (Poison), Fallout 4 (Overseer Barstow), Fallout: New Vegas (Beatrix), Heroes of the Storm (Chromie), Persona (Aigis, Nanako), Zero Escape (Phi), Fire Emblem (Anna, Olivia, Hana), Dead or Alive (Helena), Diablo, Final Fantasy, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Silent Hill, Halo Wars 2, Bioshock 2, Bleach (Soi Fon, Momo), Code Geass (Kallen Stadtfeld) and many, many more.
Nathan Sharp as Bolo!
Nathan Sharp is an Asian-American voice actor, musician and songwriter best known for his music-oriented channel, NateWantsToBattle. Covering a wide array of songs, his music portfolio totals up to over 200 compositions and renditions that range from parodies of popular hits to English renditions of anime openings to music about video games and anime to his original album "Sandcastle Kingdoms" released in March 2017 that charted on iTunes #1 Alternative Albums and Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart.
Nathan’s voice can be heard in Funimation's dub of Luck & Logic as Yoshichika Tsurugi, Attack on Titan as Marcel, Gapri in Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry, Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator as Craig Cahn, Midboss's 2064: Read Only Memories as Chad, Magic Pants's Heroes Never Lose as Pronto, Skip Beat! as Imai, Kieran from Indigo Ignited, Pinstripe as George the Dog from Atmos Games, Funimation's dubs of Puzzle and Dragons X, Cheer Boys, Disastrous Life of Saiki K, Handa-kun and Endride.
Cherami Leigh as Rottytops!
Cherami Leigh has been in the industry for 20 years. She has been in over 75 commercials, and has worked on over 100 anime projects including "Lucy" in Fairy Tail, "Asuna" in Sword Art Online, "Road" in D. Grayman, "Lizzie" in Black Butler, "Mai" in Ghost Hunt, and "Patty" in Soul Eater and has worked on over 20 video games- including Borderlands 2- in which she plays the popular DLC- Gaige.
She voices "Sailor Venus" in Sailor Moon, "Tome" in Mob Psycho 100, "Kudelia" in Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans, "Claudia Peer" in Gundam: Thunderbolt, "Ilia" in RWBY, "A2" in Nier Automata and "Makoto" in the Persona 5. And was recently announced to be playing "Sarada" in Boruto: Naruto The Movie and multiple characters in Fire Emblem: Heroes. She has a lead role in the animated feature "Ribbit," has guest starred on "Doc McStuffins" and plays "Peanut Big Top" in the La La Loopsy Girls.
We’re thrilled to have these three incredibly talented performers playing alongside Cristina Vee (voice of Shantae and Risky Boots) in Friends to the End. Please hit them up on social media, show your appreciation, and welcome them to the project! As far as when you can hear them in action…
Release Plans!
Ok, one more bit of good news before we sign off...
Development of Friends to the End is FINISHED!
The game is being prepped for submission to Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve right now! This new DLC will be FREE to Backers, and paid content for the public. As usual, it takes several weeks to pass submissions and get download codes. We expect this content to arrive in time for the holidays, so we hope you’ll finish Mario, and clear your calendars!
Final Thoughts!
For those curious about the status of our physical rewards - we need to delay just a bit more on the art book and music CD so that we can include the extra artwork and music from "Friends to the End” and “Costume Mode”. We won’t be able to give a solid delivery date until everything is in hand, since it all will ship together. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Thank you, and get excited for Friends to the End!Earlier on this week, Neowin.net covered the Patch Tuesday vulnerability fixes; now Symantec has reported that hackers have begun to exploit the bug on un-patched machines. Reports suggest that the hackers were successful in exploiting the vulnerability only three days after Patch Tuesday
Usually when vulnerabilities are published in Microsoft's reports regarding Patch Tuesday, there is the expectation that hackers will use that information and usually be successful within 30 days. However in this case, there has been some surprise that the individuals have done it in a significantly less amount of time.
The vulnerability itself stems from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, version 8 and below, that was originally discovered back in January by a bounty hunter according to InfoWorld. The IE bug, which was placed as the most important update on Patch Tuesday by security analysts, causes issues due to its ability to automatically download malicious files. Symantec's Joji Hamada stated that, "we have only seen limited attacks taking advantage of this vulnerability and believe that the exploit is only being carried out in targeted attacks at present".
While for a minority who use other browsers and operating systems, a large amount of worldwide browser usage remains with Internet Explorer six, seven and eight. This incident only highlights the importance of updating a computer's files as soon as a patch becomes available because the longer a security hole is left exposed, the more risk there is to the user.
Image Source: pcworldme.netFinancial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.
Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.
Pay plans for bankers have been disclosed in recent corporate statements. Pressure on the US firms to review preparations for annual bonuses increased yesterday when Germany's Deutsche Bank said many of its leading traders would join Josef Ackermann, its chief executive, in waiving millions of euros in annual payouts.
The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.
At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.
In the first nine months of the year Citigroup, which employs thousands of staff in the UK, accrued $25.9bn for salaries and bonuses, an increase on the previous year of 4%. Earlier this week the bank accepted a $25bn investment by the US government as part of its bail-out plan.
At Goldman Sachs the figure was $11.4bn, Morgan Stanley $10.73bn, JP Morgan $6.53bn and Merrill Lynch $11.7bn. At Merrill, which was on the point of going bust last month before being taken over by Bank of America, the total accrued in the last quarter grew 76% to $3.49bn. At Morgan Stanley, the amount put aside for staff compensation also grew in the last quarter to the end of August by 3% to $3.7bn.
Days before it collapsed into bankruptcy protection a month ago Lehman Brothers revealed $6.12bn of staff pay plans in its corporate filings. These payouts, the bank insisted, were justified despite net revenue collapsing from $14.9bn to a net outgoing of $64m.
None of the banks the Guardian contacted wished to comment on the record about their pay plans. But behind the scenes, one source said: "For a normal person the salaries are very high and the bonuses seem even higher. But in this world you get a top bonus for top performance, a medium bonus for mediocre performance and a much smaller bonus if you don't do so well."
Many critics of investment banks have questioned why firms continue to siphon off billions of dollars of bank earnings into bonus pools rather than using the funds to shore up the capital position of the crisis-stricken institutions. One source said: "That's a fair question - and it may well be that by |
million worth of food stamps at commissaries from October 2012 through September 2013 fiscal year, as first reported by CNN. The figure has risen consistently since the economic recession hit in fiscal 2009.
Military families used about $5 million more worth of food stamps last year than in 2012. Their use of this government assistance, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, has increased by more than 300 percent since 2007.
An increased use of food stamps in recent years is not unique to the military; Americans across the country have turned to the federal government’s assistance program during the economic downturn and many states have lowered their standards to qualify for food stamps.
Still, the continuing rise could set off some alarms at the Pentagon, which is currently conducting a review of military compensation and is planning to issue recommendations in early 2015.
New soldiers make about $20,000 in base pay, according to CNN, and many military spouses struggle to hold down a job because they have to move so often.
Pay Bumps
The Office of Personnel Management provided a reminder — and some additional details — to all federal agencies that certain employees will be eligible for extra pay this year, thanks to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act.
One group benefiting from the NDAA is civil servants working in U.S. Central Command, primarily the Middle East and Northern Africa. The act extends for one year an agency head’s authority to waive the normal premium pay cap for civilians serving in the area. Premium pay allowable under the waiver authority increased to $233,000 this year.
The NDAA also extended through fiscal 2015 agencies’ authority to grant a civilian serving in a combat zone the allowances, benefits and gratuities provided to members of the Foreign Service. This includes paying for family members to follow the employee, travel within the country of service, special medical care and other travel expenses, as well as a special death benefit.
The Internal Revenue Service has a list of combat zones here.
Some reservists also will benefit from the act, as it extended for one year the Reserve Income Replacement Program, which provides additional pay for certain reservists who experience extended and frequent mobilizations for active duty.Another rotten apple has been revealed. A Kennewick teacher who owns Richland martial arts school has been accused of inappropriate contact with a girl and trying to set up a secret meeting for sexual purposes.
A certain Oscar Perez Garnica, 47, taught math at the local Highschool and was since getting charged placed on a PAID leave following charges. As per the district spokeswoman Robyn Chastain:
“Oscar Perez Garnica was placed on paid administrative leave before the school year began when the school district learned about the allegations from law enforcement”
Garnica has been a teacher at the Highschool since 2006 and also girls bowling coach from 2008 to 2016. According to Academies Website, Facebook page of the Choice Martial Arts Academy and Garnica’s personal page he is a judo black belt and a bjj brown belt. One picture claims he was a American National Judo Team Alternate.
The incident took place at Choice Martial Arts on Wellsian Way.
The about page of the academies website claims to be dedicated to child safety:
“We understand that your child’s safety is your top priority, especially when it comes to enrolling your kid in a martial arts school.”
The incident he was charged with was with a young teen girl according to the Tri-CityHerald, on August 7th at the Academy. The following day the girl in question disclosed the encounter to her counselor who had an obligation to report it.
The academy is registered under Garnica’s home adress in Pasco, and court documents say he is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu sensei, or teacher, at the school.
He was charged with 3rd degree child molestation with aggravating circumstances given that he was in a position of trust and confidence at the time.
Tri-City Herald notes:
“Garnica had been helping the girl “work through some difficult personal problems,” according to court documents. They were alone when he invited the girl to sit on his lap. They eventually began kissing and he touched her inappropriately, documents said.”
The two talked about having a sexual encounter the next day with Garnica planning to bring condoms.
Court documents also reveal he claims the incident was actually “that he hugged the teen while she was sitting on his lap and that his hand must have slipped” denying any wrong doing.
Deputy Prosecutor Megan Whitmire wrote that Garnica told the mother he had “been through this type of thing before,” that there would be interviews and his name would be placed on “a list” for a year, and then everything would be fine.
Phone records show more than 400 texts between the young teen and Garnica from July until the date of incident when the girl’s mother took the phone and got a civil court order to prevent Garnica from having any further contact with the victim.
Many of the texts were sent after midnight. At one point the victim wrote “I’m done … all I do is cause pain” to which Garnica replied “You bring happiness and smiles to my life.”Isn’t it amazing how once the Seth Rich story broke early this week, the flood of White House leaks started being put out by the Washington Post and New York Times? The timing was more than just coincidental. Kim Dotcom tweeted that he knew Seth Rich was involved with Wikileaks, and that Kim Dotcom was even involved in the leaking of DNC and John Podesta the molesta e-mails.
Kim Dotcom knew Seth Rich, statement coming Tuesday
I knew Seth Rich. I know he was the @Wikileaks source. I was involved. https://t.co/MbGQteHhZM — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 20, 2017
Kim Dotcom is meeting with his legal team on Monday, and will issue a statement on Seth Rich and the leaks on Tuesday of the coming week:
I'm meeting my legal team on Monday. I will issue a statement about #SethRich on Tuesday. Please be patient. This needs to be done properly. — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 20, 2017
if Kim Dotcom’s statement is going to be a big one on Tuesday, then expect another huge flood of Washington Post and New York Times leaks to try and knock out Kim Dotcom’s story off any news coverage. There is more to this Seth Rich murder and sudden flood of White House leaks than we know. The truth will come out eventually.Getty Images
When the Arizona Cardinals drafted wide receiver John Brown in the third round of this year’s draft, general manager Steve Keim went out of his way to talk up the 179-pound speedster from Pittsburg State.
At the time of Keim's remarks, plenty of people (myself included) were proceeding with caution since he has been known to zealously talk young players up before.
Yet, it appears as if Keim's hype of Brown truly was the real deal. In Brown’s first taste of live-game action against the Houston Texans, the three-time AP Little All-American tallied 87 yards receiving on five receptions.
His 87 yards receiving were a team high. And his five receptions were the second most of any pass-catcher in the game. While it may only be the first preseason game of the year, it’s safe to say the Cardinals’ passing attack appears to be lethal with the addition of Brown.
Yes, a lot can change from now until the beginning of the season, but let’s not forget how well quarterback Carson Palmer played over the course of the final nine games of the season in 2013.
By going back and examining his numbers (16:8 TD-to-INT ratio, 2,533 yards, 66.1 completion percentage) during that stretch, no one should really be surprised by the lethal nature of Arizona’s offense.
In addition to defensive coordinator Todd Bowles’ defense, you could say Palmer was one of the keys to the Cardinals’ success in 2013. He posted career highs in completion percentage (63.3) and passing yards (4,274) in head coach Bruce Arians’ scheme.
He also helped the Cardinals offense average 27.3 points per game in Weeks 9-17. This was a huge leap from the 20 points per game they averaged in Weeks 1-8.
Will Palmer and the Cardinals average more than 27.3 points per game in 2014? Probably not, yet there is a lot of truth to the comment the Pro Bowl quarterback made about the state of Arizona’s offense back in May, via Kent Somers of AZCentral.com:
“Where we're at this point is like light-years from last year. They [the wide receivers] are getting on the same page. Every play, they come back and there is good dialogue — ‘Why did you break out? Why did you break in?’”
Based on the Cardinals’ offensive performance against the Texans, they are light years ahead of where they were last year. But the good news is it wasn’t only the first-team offense. It was the second- and third-team offense as well.
For a case in point, take a look at the numbers fellow quarterbacks Drew Stanton and Logan Thomas amassed. Stanton finished with a 112.9 quarterback rating, 152 yards passing and one touchdown.
Thomas, on the other hand, finished with a 133.7 quarterback rating, 113 yards passing and one touchdown. Man, talk about efficiency. The Cardinals were on fire Saturday night.
As you can probably tell already, Arians’ game plan was well suited for every unit he put on the field. Not only did he draw up the perfect plan schematically, he mixed and rotated his players quite nicely as well.
This point brings me back to Brown specifically. It was good to see Arians sprinkle in Brown with Palmer and Stanton. No, Brown won’t see a lot of Stanton (if at all) in the regular season, but the extra reps will undoubtedly help him learn the offense.
It’s one thing to learn the offense by repetition in practice, but it’s another thing to learn it in real time. The latter seems to be the more effective method when you ask young players which they prefer.
Heading into the preseason, I would have said Ted Ginn Jr. was the clear-cut favorite to win the No. 3 wide receiver job. But with three preseason games left to go, it’s evident Brown is going to give him one heck of a battle.
The longer Ginn sits out with an injury, the quicker Brown will shoot up Arizona’s depth chart. Clearly, as I mentioned before, it has only been one game so it’s wise to temper expectations.
Yet, even with tempered expectations, the one preseason game should provide some hope as well. In a jam-packed NFC West, Arizona’s offense looks to be on par with its defense.
That’s a scary thought right there. If Brown can continue to grow and the Cardinals offense can average 25-to-27 points a game this year, Arizona could easily secure its first NFC West title since 2009.
It’s a good time to be a Cardinals fan.
Follow @TysonNFLHumble Beginnings Born in South Korea in 1972, Cho lived simply with his family before emigrating to the U.S. in 1978. “It was a time in Korea when there were very few modern conveniences,” he says. “We didn’t have a bathroom inside or a refrigerator. When you wanted chicken, you pointed at an animal that was clucking.” Still, he says, “it was a happy childhood.”
Falling into Film “I stumbled into acting as a student at U.C. Berkeley but had no idea where it would go,” says Cho, who notes he was very aware that there were few people in Hollywood who looked like him. His father, a minister, suggested an alternative career: newscaster. “He was saying, ‘You get to be on-camera, and there are actual Asians who read the news.’ But my goal was to support myself with acting by 40, or else I’d quit. I was very realistic about it.”
Finding a Slice of the Pie “The reason I think American Pie made my career is, as small a role as it was, people saw me and thought, ‘Oh, that kid is definitely American,’ ” says Cho. “It was significant in that they didn’t have to accentuate it with an accent or anything. Often Asian actors have to fight for the American part of their identity.”
The Face of a Movement In 2016 digital strategist William Yu started the “Starring John Cho” social campaign, placing Cho’s face on popular movie posters as a call for more Asian-American leading men. “I was defensive at first,” Cho says. “Then after spending two seconds with it, I thought it was brilliant. It was a very simple way to point out what’s wrong with how we perceive who our heroes are.”
American Made Now married with two kids, Cho believes his immigration story is what makes
him a true U.S. citizen: “Coming from nothing and trying to make something in a new place and thriving? That’s just American.”Timothy Liljegren
I know it's juuust an informal skate and all that, but Liljegren really stood out today in 3-on-3. Scored a few goals; v. smooth player. — Kristen Shilton (@kristen_shilton) August 30, 2017
Timothy Liljegren is in Toronto at the ‘unofficial’ pre-training camp practice sessions. If you’re unfamiliar with these arrangements, the CBA mandates the length of training camp so it doesn’t start for real for a couple of weeks. Teams make their facilities available to players who begin training earlier and earlier every year, and as long as no actual team coaching staff is running the show, it’s legit. Many teams, er, sorry, the players get together and hire retired players to run the practices.
Liljegren will be in the rookie tournament next week, and then he’ll move on to the real training camp in Niagara Falls. My guess is he will end up on the Marlies, but that’s just a guess, and until he’s officially not on Rögle’s roster for the entire season, I’ll keep him here on the report.
Carl Grundström
Carl Grundström played a couple more Champions Hockey League games with Frölunda. They’ve looked much better as a team in the more recent games, and that’s to be expected. This is pre-season action for them, and it takes time to get in the groove.
Grundström scored a goal against KAC, and if you find it exciting that a player on the CHL two-time champion Swedish team scored on an Austrian club, that’s fine, but I’ll just be over here saying I should hope he can score on a team that low in quality compared to his.
In the close match against Swiss club ZSC on Saturday, he played approximately five minutes and was a total non-factor.
Pius Suter, who is an invite to the Senators rookie camp, has been on fire for a very strong ZSC team. It will be interesting to see if a young Swiss-league pro can handle the level of play at that event.
Swedish press reports say Grundström is flying to Toronto on Tuesday, and his linemate Lias Andersson is also leaving for training camp with the Rangers, so it’s possible Frölunda decided to be careful with their younger players in a tough match. Devils prospect Jesper Boqvist broke his wrist in a CHL game a few days ago.
Yegor Korshkov
Yegor Korshkov is playing real hockey, unlike anyone else so far. Lokomotiv are five games into the regular season, and in the most recent game on Saturday, he played with new linemates. Alexander Polunin was not in the lineup, and may have been injured. Pavel Kraskovsky was moved down to the fourth unit, and Korshkov stayed on the second/third line with a rotating cast of the grownups on the team.
He assisted on Alexander Kadeykin’s goal in a 3-2 loss to Severstal. Kadeykin, a Detroit draft pick, is a little older at 23, and has played more KHL seasons. He’s not much of a scorer, but he is big, and isn’t as giraffe-like as Korshkov can sometimes be.
If this is a sign that Korshkov himself has earned the second/third line spot permanently, despite his linemates’ performance, that’s good. Playing with more established players is likely good for him. It’s been time to leave the junior super line behind for quite a while.
(All sources of KHL video are now geo-blocked. Only the occasional GIF will show up.)
Pierre Engvall
Pierre Engvall is getting in some gametime with HV71 in the CHL. He’s played all four of their games and has four assists on less than 10 minutes per game. Three came in one match, a loss to a DEL team, Adler Mannheim.
HV71 has lost to Adler Mannheim twice and is at risk of making an embarrassing group stage exit. Their next games are in early October, when the team will be in regular season shape, so they need a pair of wins to not get bounced.
Engvall has played well in a bottom six role at this level. The team itself has been outshooting their opponents, but not scoring or getting even adequate goaltending, so the overall system looks fine. If he can hold onto that roster spot in the SHL itself, then he’ll have done something meaningful.
Jesper Lindgren
Jesper Lindgren has three points in eight games in pre-season action for HPK, playing around 10 minutes per game. The Liiga gets going for real this Friday, and if he can keep getting in every game, that’s the first step for a defender his age who is new to the team.
Nikolai Chebykin
Nikolai Chebykin also starts playing this coming weekend. If the VHL plays pre-season, they don’t post the results, so he’s a blank slate so far.
Vladislav Kara
Assuming Vladislav Kara in the VHL, not the junior league this year, he’s in the same position as Chebykin, nothing to report so far.
Persons of Interest
Igor Ozhiganov: The CSKA defender who the Leafs have shown interest in is one of 10 defencemen on the roster. He’s not getting much playing time.
After going pointless in two games, he drew in on the fourth unit for CSKA’s sixth game of the season, a contest against the very overmatched Sibir. It’s hard to see much when watching CSKA other than the Kirill Kaprizov show, which is a hell of a thing to watch, to be sure.
Ozhiganov seems to play a competent enough game. He doesn’t stray far from the right point, puts the puck on net, which is CSKA’s style, and he moves and passes well. Nothing really stands out so far.
CSKA went up 3-0 in the first period and cruised along looking like they were on a perpetual power play — not a game to judge anything by. Ozhiganov played the sixth highest minutes of the eight defenders dressed, and did nothing exceptionally bad or good. Nikita Nesterov and Alexey Marchenko are the top pair on this team.Peter Drives
The Pagani Hauyra is loaded with technology but one bit of technology it lacks -- advanced airbags -- was enough for federal regulators to block its sale here.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Italian automaker Pagani was to begin selling its $1 million, 700 horsepower Huayra supercar in the U.S. later this year but federal safety regulators have said "Not so fast."
Pagani had applied for an exemption from federal auto safety rules requiring child-safe "advanced" airbags, arguing that complying with the rule would have caused "substantial economic hardship," according to documents from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
NHTSA denied the request, essentially blocking the car from sale in the U.S., because Pagani failed to show that installing the airbags on the twin-turbocharged 12-cylinder carbon-titanium car would cause the company undue financial strain. Also, the Italian carmaker didn't show that serious efforts had been made to comply, the agency said.
The auto safety agency sometimes grants temporary exemptions from specific safety rules, especially for automakers that plan to sell only a small number of cars.
Pagani created the Huayra as part of the automaker's plan to break into the U.S. market. The car was engineered and crash tested to meet safety standards in both the U.S. and Europe, the automaker had said in February.
Unlike Lamborghini which is owned by Volkswagen (VLKAF) and Ferrari which is part of Fiat (FIATY), Pagani is a small independent automaker. With a total of only 60 employees, Pagani's small factory can only produce so many of the largely hand-built cars.
Initial deliveries in the U.S. were to be limited to about five cars a year during 2012, the automaker said in February. After that, a planned factory expansion would allow for sales of as many as 10 cars a year here.
Pagani says it made the request for an exemption three years ago but the decision from NHTSA came just as Pagani was preparing official unveiling ceremonies in the U.S., the first of which took place in Los Angeles last Thursday.
Pagani is worried that NHTSA's denial will hurt the company financially. "Our having seven events in the U.S. very much impacts the budget of our small company."
NHTSA did not immediately respond to CNNMoney's request for a reaction to Pagani's complaints.
Pagani insists it will sell the car here, just not in 2012 as it had planned. The Huayra will now go on sale some time in 2013, a Pagani spokeswoman said.
Engineers are working on an advanced airbag system that will work in the car, the carmaker said in a statement.
Advanced airbags are designed to sense when children or small adults are in the vehicle and adjust the force with which they deploy accordingly. Early airbags were found to injure -- and even kill -- small children.
Much of the Huayra's structure, particularly the area around the driver, is made from a strong, lightweight material called carbon-titanium. The fuel tank, made from "different composite and ballistic materials," is integrated into the body just behind the cabin, according to the company.
At about 3,000 pounds, Pagani boasts that the Huayra is the lightest car in its class, enabling it to go from a zero to 60 miles per hour in about 3.5 seconds.
With its seven figure price tag the Huayra would have competed in the rarified pricing sphere of cars like the Bugatti Veyron which is finishing its sales run just as just the Huayra was preparing to enter the market, or the quickly sold out Lamborghini Reventon.
The Huayra, pronounced "why-rah," is named after the ancient Andean wind god Aymara Huayra Tata.Ah, mandatory installations. They're a necessary evil most PS3 users have gotten used to, and all too common in many unoptimized multiplatform titles.
While a relatively minor gripe, it's always nice to see a game whose developers have gone the extra mile to make everything work smoothly, and that seems to be the case for Final Fantasy XIII's PS3 incarnation.
At least, if a supposedly leaked scan of the game's case art is confirmed. The game will have no mandatory (or optional) hard drive installation, and even its save data will take up a piddling 500kb (with 1.9mb extra for Trophy data).
Better still, the game will support loss-less 5.1-channel audio, and its gorgeous FMV cutscenes will be rendered at up to 1080p. Mmmm, juicy HD.
Nothing's been said so far about the Xbox 360 version, seeing as Final Fantasy XIII is still a PS3-exclusive in Japan. Perhaps more information will be available as Square Enix's international marketing engines rev up.
A question comes to mind though, for you dual/console 360/PS3 owners: were FFXIII PS3 to offer these features, and the 360 version not (perhaps due to some Blu-ray snafu), would it influence your choice?
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Click to open photo gallery:The holy grail of CrossFit is upon us. The 2016 CrossFit Games are where 40 of the fittest men and women in the world will go head to head to compete for the ultimate title of the Fittest on Earth.
These athletes have poured their blood, sweat and tears into training over the past year. These women have traded manicures for torn hands, spent their weekends in the gym working on weaknesses, counting macros and pushing their bodies to the limit.
Beginning July 19, they’ll go head-to-head in the ultimate test — a weeklong competition filled to the brim with grueling events meant to test their mind, soul and body. Some are first-time Game competitors whereas others are old hats. All are thirsty for victory. Below, we’ve got the ultimate guide to athletes at the 2016 CrossFit Games female athletes.
2016 CrossFit Games Female Individuals
1. Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet
(c) CrossFit, Inc.
Strengths: Pull Ups/Gymnastic Movements | Weaknesses: Odd Objects
Heaviest Lift: 310-pound Back Squat | Social Media: @camillelbaz
Camille LeBlanc will be making her seventh appearance at the CrossFit Games. The 2014 Fittest Woman on Earth had a rough year at the Games last year — she finished 13th after taking first at South Regionals. Although most athletes would be stoked to finish in the top 15 among the fittest athletes in the world, LeBlanc was visibly distraught with her performance, bursting into tears at the culmination of Event 4 after multiple no-reps.
LeBlanc recently cinched another Regional victory at the South Regionals. She’s a smaller athlete — only 5’2″ and 130 pounds and an ex-gymnast, meaning she excels at most bodyweight-type movements. However, don’t let that full you — she posts an almost 200 pound snatch and can clean and jerk over 230 pounds.
Strengths: Heavy Cleans, Legless Rope Climbs | Weaknesses: Unbroken Handstand Walks
Heaviest Lift: 400-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @whitcapp
Cappellucci is making her first appearance at the Games as an individual competitor after five years of failing to qualify at Regionals.
If her name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s competing on Team Albuquerque at the Games in 2010 and 2011.
Cappellucci is an ex-rugby player meaning she isn’t afraid to get gritty when competing. You’ll see her excelling in weights and struggling a little more with the gymnastic-type movements, but overall, she’s a very well-rounded athlete with a lot of experience under her belt. This will be her last year competing — next year, she’s trading her barbells in for a stethoscope as she just got accepted to medical school.
Check out our exclusive interview with Whitney here.
3. Alexis Johnson
Strengths: Pull Ups, Bar Muscle Ups | Weaknesses: Squat Cleans
Heaviest Lift: 342-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @mf_mathlete
This will be Johnson’s rookie year in the CrossFit Games despite two relatively successful showings at Regionals in 2015 and 2014.
You’ll see this ex-gymnast excel at bodyweight movements — in case you couldn’t tell by here stellar performance during Regional Nate with the strict muscle-ups. Johnson has struggled mentally in the past — she faltered during last year’s Regional competition after a no-rep during handstand walks and struggled to regain her confidence — but has spent the past year training and preparing herself inwardly for this level of competition.
4. Tennil Reed
Strengths: Wall Balls, Heavy Snatches | Weaknesses: Muscle Ups
Heaviest Lift: 330-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @tennil_reed
Tennil Reed is one of six rookie athletes out of the South Region headed to Carson this summer.
Reed is a lifelong athlete with a stellar natural ability — she competed at Regionals on a team within a year of starting CrossFit and started competing as an individual in 2014. Since then, she’s struggled for a coveted ticket to California, falling just short in 2014 and 2015 and capturing fourth after quite the dog fight at South Regionals this year.
Reed is a bigger athlete — she’s 5’6″ and weighs 157 pounds, so you’ll see her excelling at movements like wall balls and on the rower as well as landing some pretty intense lifts including a 185-pound snatch. Expect her to struggle a little bit more on bodyweight movements, but don’t count her out. Reed will fight and she will fight hard.
5. Candice Wagner
Strengths: Deadlifts | Weaknesses: Swimming and Chest to Bar Pull Ups
Social Media: @candicewagner21
Wagner is a two-time Games athlete who went into the 2016 season with the goal of just having fun.
That is, of course, until she found herself sitting in sixth place going into Event 7 at the South Regionals in May. She gave it her all and sealed her third trip to California with a fifth place finish.
Wagner took the 2015 competitive season off because she simply lost her love for competing. This year, she’s training hard but isn’t revolving her life around her performance at the Games. Don’t let that fool you though — Candice has made it to the Games twice before and is an ex-marine to boot, so come July, she’ll be ready to play.
Check out our exclusive interview with Candice here.
6. Carleen Matthews
Strengths: Long Workouts | Weaknesses: Heavy Snatches
Heaviest Lift: 385-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @teamcarleen
Carleen Mathews has had a long road to the Games. She’s overcome addiction, an eating disorder, and losing her father and biggest cheerleader early in her CrossFit career.
This will be Mathew’s second trip to the Games after a 36th place finish last year. Mathews says she expects this year to be different because of her confidence levels — she knows she didn’t end up under the bright lights in Carson by accident. We’d say not, seeing as how she finished two Regional events in first place and all except for one event in the top 10.
Mathews is a smaller athlete at only 5’2″, but she’s mighty. Check out our exclusive interview with her here.
7. Emily Abbot
Strengths: Clean and Jerk | Weaknesses: Gymnastic Movements
Heaviest Lift: 240-pound Clean and Jerk | Social Media: @abbot.the.red
Emily Abbot is relatively new in the CrossFit world compared to many older athletes. She’s a two-times Games athlete, appearing in 2014 and 2015 with and eighth place finish last year.
Abbot almost accidentally ended up in competitive CrossFit after surprising herself by qualifying for the 2014 Regionals. Since then, she’s been kicking ass and taking names, excelling at events that draw from her collegiate basketball experience.
Abbot is also a farm girl and often described as a workhorse. She isn’t afraid to dig deep and power through a nasty workout, exemplified by her excellent performance in the sandbag event at last year’s Games.
8. Margaux Alvarez
Strengths: Pacing | Weaknesses: Heavy Snatches and Gymnastic Movements
Heaviest Lift: 375-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @321gaux
Margaux Alvarez has been a crowd-favorite since 2012 when she qualified for her first Regional a year after starting CrossFit. Before that, she spent the 2011 CrossFit Games working as a volunteer, soaking in the atmosphere and building hopes and dreams of competing under the big lights.
Now, five years later, Alvarez is a perennial power and is preparing for her fourth Games appearance. She’s long and strong, excelling at things like wall balls, rowing, rope climbs and long-grueling events where she can show off her engine. At 5’7″ and 150 pounds, Alvarez isn’t as strong with gymnastic and bodyweight movements but by that we mean she’s still light years ahead of the rest of us.
9. Katrin Davidsdottir
Strengths: Handstand Walks, Consistency | Weaknesses: Legless Rope Climbs
Heaviest Lift: 315-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @katrintanja
Katrin moved from the Meridian Regional to the East Regional this year and still dominated. The returning 2015 Fittest Woman on Earth took first and is now returning to defend her title at her fourth Games appearance.
Like many CrossFitters before her, Davidsdottir has a heavy gymnastics background but can also throw around a good bit of weight. She made easy work of the heavy snatch ladder in Event 1 at Regionals and won the Games last year by powering through some ridiculously heavy kettlebell deadlifts.
Davidsdottir’s one weakness might be legless rope climbs. She failed to qualify for the Games in 2014 due to legless rope climbs and then struggled with them again in Event 7 in Regionals a few weeks ago. Other than that, good luck finding anything this Icelandic athlete is bad at.
10. Thuridur Erla Helgadottir
Strengths: Strict Gymnastic Movements | Weaknesses: Consistency and Heavy Lifts |Heaviest Lift: 229-pound Clean and Jerk
Thuri surprised the world at Regionals in May by becoming the first and one of the only women to complete Regional Nate. This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s followed the two-time individual Games athlete — she cites Nate as one of her favorite WODs. Her slight frame — she’s less than 130 pounds — means she excels at bodyweight movements and gymnastics but struggles a bit more with throwing up heavy weight.
This is exemplified by last year’s performance at the CrossFit Games. Helgadottir found herself doing well in the running-style WODs and struggling more with the WODs where she had to move heavy weights like the event with the pig and heavy DT. However, she captured 5th in Meridian during the snatch ladder, so we’re excited to see how she’s improved since 2015.
For our exclusive interview with Thuri, click here.
11. Sara Sigmundsdottir
Strengths: Strength | Weaknesses: Gymnastic Movements
Heaviest Lift: 342-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @sarasigmunds
Sigmundsdottir is a powerhouse, plain and simple. She missed the title of Fittest Woman in the world by a hair in 2015, which was also her rookie appearance. There isn’t much she can’t do, but she’s well-known for being incredibly strong.
Last year, she struggled at the Games with deficit handstand push ups which cost her the title, but her performance in 16.4 cleared up any doubt that HSPU may be a weakness. Although Sigmundsdottir is a bigger athlete — she weighs 150 pounds and stands at a little over 5’7″ — she’s said since then that her struggle was a mental one, not a physical one.
This year, she showed up to Regionals ready to make a statement. She finished every event inside the Top 5 and snagged two event wins. If she keeps going at this pace, she’ll make a formidable opponent at this year’s Games.
12. Annie Thorisdottir
Strengths: Consistency | Weaknesses: Health Issues
Heaviest Lift: 363-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @anniethorisdottir
The 2011 and 2012 Fittest Woman on Earth hasn’t stopped fighting to get back to the top of the podium. To this day, she is still the only woman to ever win back-to-back titles.
Iceland Annie had a devastating setback in 2015 when she had to withdraw from the Games due to having a heatstroke during Murph. This year, she said she’s been taking a little bit better care of herself and traveling less in order to prepare for the Games.
This will be her seventh appearance at the Games and if Regionals is any indication, Annie is gunning for the podium. She finished in second place at the Meridian Regionals with only one finish outside of the Top 5. It’s hard to point out a weakness with Thorisdottir. She’s such a solid, well-rounded athlete that in any given year when she’s healthy, she’s a contender for the title. That being said, she’s a larger athlete with almost an identical build to Sigmundsdottir, so her weightlifting numbers will blow even most normal men away. However, gymnastics aren’t a weakness for the ex-national team gymnast, ballerina and pole vaulter — she’s got plenty of experience throwing her bodyweight around.
Thorisdottir is also surprisingly young for someone who’s been competing for as long as she has. At only 26, she’s younger than other veterans like Sam Briggs (34), Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet (27) and Emily Bridgers (29).
13. Sam Briggs
Strengths: Rowing | Weaknesses: Heavy Snatches
Heaviest Lift: 389-pound Deadlift | Social Media: @bicepslikebriggs
How do you even describe Sam Briggs? A machine? The engine? Probably the grittiest competitor on the planet? All would be accurate in describing the 2013 Fittest Woman on Earth.
Think of the nastiest workouts you can imagine — 14.5/16.5 for example — and those will be the ones where Briggs excels. She truly has a gift for living in the pain cave, as demonstrated when she competed last year despite having a broken ankle. Yeah, that’s the kind of tough we’re dealing with here.
The British powerhouse has already said that this will most likely be her last year competing as an individual. She struggles a little bit with the heavier side of lifting, having some of her worst finishes in the Snatch Ladder at last year’s Games and again at the snatch event at Regionals this year, but does well in |
to the houses that’s how it was.
Testimony #12
By the time we got out of there, it was all like a sandbox. Every house we left … a D9 [armored military bulldozer] came over and flattened it … The D9 was an important working tool. It was working nearly non-stop.
Testimony #15
After you left, were there still any houses left standing?
Nearly none. Once when we went to a house … there were paths which were more broken-up wherever the tanks had passed through – it was just sand, it wasn’t agricultural land with plants any longer. Uprooted olive trees everywhere. The houses themselves were broken … no house was supposed to be left standing. A 500-meter radius where not a single house is left standing.
Testimony #18
When we left after the operation, it was just a barren stretch of desert. Incredible. Of all the houses that were there, I think I saw maybe four or five still intact, or relatively intact. It was crazy. We spoke about it a lot amongst ourselves, the guys from the company, how crazy the amount of damage we did there was. I quote: “Listen man, it’s crazy what went on in there,” “Listen man, we really messed them up,” “Fuck, check it out, there’s nothing at all left of Juhar al-Dik, it’s nothing but desert now, that’s crazy.”
What caused all the destruction?
Most of it was D9s [armored military bulldozers]. They just took down all the orchards. Not a single tree left. They worked on it for three weeks. When they didn’t have a specific job like leading our way or opening up a specific route for us or some other mission, they just went and flattened things. I don’t know what their specific order was, but they were on a deliberate mission to leave the area razed, flattened.
Testimony #20
They tried to maintain constant fire towards al-Bureij, mostly to keep their heads down. There was no specific target. Every so often, ‘boom’, a shell, or ‘boom’, suddenly a machine gun was fired.
What were you shooting at?
At houses.
Randomly chosen houses?
Yes.
Testimony #21
I don’t know how they pulled it off, the D9 [armored military bulldozer] operators didn’t rest for a second. Nonstop, as if they were playing in a sandbox. Driving back and forth, back and forth, razing another house, another street … everything turned upside down … the level of destruction looked insane to me. It looked like a movie set, it didn’t look real. Houses with crumbled balconies, animals everywhere, lots of dead chickens and lots of other dead animals. Every house had a hole in the wall or a balcony spilling off of it, no trace left of any streets at all.
Testimony #25
At that stage, we returned to pretty much the same area in which we were stationed before, and we didn’t recognize the neighborhood at all because half the houses were just gone. It all looked like a science fiction movie, with cows wandering in the streets – apparently a cowshed got busted or something – and serious levels of destruction everywhere, levels we hadn’t seen in [Operation] ‘Cast Lead.’ No houses.
Testimony #30
[The brigade’s] conception was, “We’ll fire without worrying about it, and then we’ll see what happens.”
Only at the houses you’re going to enter?
No, at the surrounding houses too. There are also agricultural fields there, the D9 rips them all up. And tin sheds. It takes down whatever’s in its way, it topples greenhouses. Lots of houses were flattened … Empty houses that bothered us. Bothered us even just to look at. I don’t even know what to call that.
Testimony #37
One of the high ranking commanders, he really liked the D9s … Let’s just say that after every time he was somewhere, all the infrastructure around the buildings was totally destroyed … He was very much in favor of that.
Testimony #39
Was any fire directed at power stations?
Yes. Like the bombing of the Wafa Hospital.
Testimony #55
So many shells were fired at [the house], and it was clearly empty …It was meaningless. It was just for kicks – the sort of fun you have at a shooting range.
Testimony from Israeli solider in Le Monde newspaper
We bombed civilian targets for entertainment. One day at about 8am we went to the Al-Bureij; a highly dense residential area in central Gaza, and the commander told us to select a random target and shoot it, at the time we did not see any Hamas fighters, no one shot at us, but the commander told us jokingly: “We have to send Bureij a morning greeting from the Israeli army”‘.
6.3. Non-existent rules of engagement: ‘This is Gaza, you’re firing at everything.’
Testimony #34
What rules of engagement were you provided with before you entered [the Gaza Strip]?
I don’t really remember what was discussed in terms of formal instructions before we entered, and after we entered nobody really cared about the formal instructions anyway. That’s what we knew. Every tank commander knew, and even the simple soldiers knew, that if something turns out to be not OK, they can say they saw something suspicious. They’ve got backup. They won’t ever be tried.
Testimony #52
[We were shooting at] at everything, basically. At suspicious houses. What’s a ‘suspicious spot?’ Everything is a suspicious spot. This is Gaza, you’re firing at everything.
7. Israel: A rogue state for whom impunity = atrocity
Israel has all the characteristics of a rogue state.
It has a dangerous and outspokenly extremist political and military leadership in charge of an out of control military.
It frequently and flagrantly flouts international law, including by committing regular war crimes;
It severely restricts the human, civil, democratic, economic and national rights of those under its control;
It maintains a permanent occupation of Palestinian land and continues to build illegal settlements while engaging in ongoing acts of ethnic cleansing;
It maintains an apartheid regime of legal, political and societal ethno-supremacist domination of one population group over another;
It denies displaced Palestinian people their right to return home because they are of the ‘wrong’ ethnic background, while offering the same right to anyone from anywhere in the world as long as they are the of the ‘correct’ ethno-religious background.
Mouid Rabbani of the US-based Institute for Middle East Understanding has stated that the current Israeli government is “the most extremist in its history,” and argued, correctly, that
“Since this government does not pay even lip service to the charade of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, the international community and Western powers in particular can dispense with the traditional honeymoon period. If there is to be any hope for peace in the Middle East, it needs to begin with an end to Israeli impunity and by holding this government to account for its actions.”
Indeed, for every day that Israel remains unaccountable and unsanctioned, the Irish government, the EU and the whole international community bear increasing responsibility for the ongoing injustices perpetrated against the Palestinian people. That responsibility only grows when Israel is ‘rewarded’ in the form of grants and commercial purchases, favourable economic preferences, inclusion in European funded-projects and bi-lateral cooperation agreements, and being a respected member of the international arms trading arena.
Western governments, the Irish government included, have consistently and shamefully ruled out implementing boycotts, divestments or other meaningful sanctions upon Israel; the actions taken by the EU, for example, go merely as far as disallowing EU money going towards projects or entities in the illegal settlements, while some governments are now arguing for a labelling of illegal products produced in the illegal settlements – not even their banning from European markets. This is a paltry and pitiful response to a government which has openly vowed to continue its decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and war crimes.
The message this diplomatic and economic inaction sends to Israel is quite clear: ‘Carry on killing, dispossessing and stealing, there’s nothing to worry about from us.’ Therefore is should be no surprise that Israel continues to do just that; daily arrests and beatings; frequent killings; home demolitions; settlement building; a new massacre of the people of Gaza every couple of years; attacks on neighbouring countries; etc, etc, etc.
The equation is simple, ‘impunity equals atrocity’. Its negation is similarly straightforward; to end atrocity we must first end impunity.
8. So what can be done? Three words. Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed presciently that “true peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” Thus, with regard to Palestine, it can be said that there can never be a genuine, true and just peace until the Israeli occupation has ceased and Palestinians enjoy their full rights under international law.
However, it should be clear by now that no Israeli government has genuinely had an interest in pursuing a just peace. At all. Ever.
Last summer’s slaughter in Gaza was but the latest large-scale attack on the Palestinian people in an ongoing process of colonisation. At other times this practice takes on a less dramatic facade, but it is a constant process nonetheless. Yet the Palestinian people will never simply lie down and allow more and more of their land to be stolen and colonised, nor will they meekly submit to an apartheid regime. For this reason Israeli violence – whether inflicted by soldiers or by systemic, structural means – against them will continue. Palestinians have been subject to Israeli-imposed injustice for too long.
It must end.
We believe the Irish government has a key role to play in helping to bring about this end to Israeli injustice. In order to do so, it must first listen to and heed the call for justice from the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), which represents the broadest possible alliance of Palestinian civil society, trade union, faith and political organisations. This demand for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is the best means by which Israeli impunity can be ended, and a just and lasting peaceful solution based on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people be found.
Therefore, in line with the demands of our Palestinian partners, until Israel ends its occupation of Palestinian land, and abides fully by its obligations under international law, including granting equality to all its citizens and implementing the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homeland, we ask the Irish government to:
8.1. End the Irish arms trade with Israel and call for an international arms embargo
There is a Palestinian-led international civil society initiative calling for the end of the arms trade with Israel; countries and companies should neither sell arms to, nor buy arms from Israel.
Sadly and shamefully, the Irish state has bought €14.7m worth of arms and military components from Israel over the last decade, while Irish-based companies have exported €6.42m worth of military and ‘dual use’ hardware to Israel since 2011. Meanwhile, Israel has killed over 9,000 Palestinians, including 2,060 children since 2000. Military items exported from Israel will have used Palestinians as ‘human test subjects’ so such weapons can be marketed as ‘battle-proven’.
While Israeli arms companies promote such products with the slogan that they have been ‘battle-tested’, such sterile language masks the horrific reality on the ground. What this means, in plain language, is that these bullets, drones, targeting devices and other military items have been used to viciously attack, kill and oppress the people of Palestine who live under Israel’s apartheid occupation regime.
Any military components exported from Ireland to Israel will be used to kill and maim yet more Palestinians and to entrench the decades-long military occupation.
Simply put, neither Israel nor arms manufacturers in Ireland should be allowed to profit from the killing of Palestinians; this trade in death must end. We call upon the government of Ireland to end the Irish arms trade with Israel, and to advocate for an international arms embargo at EU and UN levels until Israel ends the occupation of Palestinian land and complies fully with its obligations under international law.
It should be unconscionable for a state like Ireland that claims ‘respect for and the promotion of human rights has always been and will continue to be a cornerstone of foreign policy’ to allow such a trade to continue.
There is more information about the End The Irish Arms Trade With Israel Campaign on the IPSC website here.
If you are a public figure or politician and would like to become an endorser of the campaign, please contact us at info@ipsc.ie. We also ask members of the public to sign the online petition by clicking here.
Alongside the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the campaign has been endorsed by many politicians, public figures, NGOs, community groups and trade unions, including; Robert Ballagh; Dr Raymond Deane; Dr Ronit Lentin; Sinn Fein; Anti-Austerity Alliance; The Socialist Party; Communist Party of Ireland; Sen. David Norris; Richard Boyd Barrett TD; Joan Collins TD; Padraig Mac Lochlainn TD; Paul Murphy TD; Clare Daly TD; Thomas Pringle TD; Martina Anderson MEP & European Parliament Chair of the Delegation for relations with Palestine (DPLC); Lynn Boylan MEP; Matt Carthy MEP; Liadh Ní Riada MEP; Nessa Childers MEP; Sen. Averil Power; Sen. Labhrás Ó Murchú; John Douglas, President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and General Secretary of Mandate trade union; Patricia McKeown, NI regional secretary, Unison; Brian Campfield, NIPSA General Secretary; Frank Keoghan, General President of TEEU; The Communication Workers Union; Afri – Action From Ireland; The Centre for Global Education; Palestinian Community in Ireland; Palestinian Rights Institute; Academics for Palestine; Gaza Action Ireland; Trade Union Friends of Palestine; Peace and Neutrality Alliance; Irish Anti-War Movement; The People’s Movement; Shannonwatch; TCD Apartheid Free Campus Campaign; NUIG Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Cllr. Paul Hand; Cllr. Michael O’Brien; Cllr. Paul Mulville; Cllr. Éilis Ryan.
8.2. Call for the suspension of Israel from the Euro-Med Agreement
A recent letter from the European Eminent Persons Group on Middle East issues (EEPG) – a group of former European leaders, ministers and diplomats including former Taoiseach John Bruton – implored that:
“The re-election of Benyamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister and the construction of a new Israeli coalition government now requires urgent action by the EU to construct a coherent and effective policy on the question of Palestine.”
We, along with our Palestinian partners, firmly believe that the most “coherent and effective” action the EU can take is to suspend the EU Israel Association Agreement (aka, the Euro-Med Agreement).
This agreement, the main treaty between the EU and Israel, grants Israel trading privileges with the EU. Article 2 of the Agreement states that:
“Relations between the Parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this Agreement.”
If “respect for human rights” form an “essential element” of the agreement, then Israel simply should not be a party to the agreement.
Regarding taking action to suspend the agreement due to breaches of its obligations, when responding to a question about EU double standards in rescinding trading privileges and imposing sanctions on states such as Sri Lanka and Russia but not Israel, the European Commission asserted that “Article 79 of the Association Agreement provides that if one Party considers that the other Party has failed to fulfil an obligation under the Agreement, it may take appropriate measures”.
Furthermore, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini has also stated that
“the Association Agreement between the EU and Israel … can be terminated by either Party notifying the other. On the EU side, this would require a unanimous decision by the Council. Article 79 of the Agreement describes the procedure to be followed if either Party considers that the other Party has failed to fulfil an obligation under the Agreement.”
Unfortunately, Ms Mogherini continued by saying that:
“The EU is currently not considering a review of the Association Agreement with Israel. We remain convinced that political engagement is the most effective way to convey our concerns. Matters related to Human Rights in Israel are addressed regularly with the Israeli authorities, at different levels, and more specifically in the framework of the EU’s political and human rights dialogues with Israel. The EU has raised issues related to minority rights in Israel at such occasions.”
That the EU refuses to even consider the issue of suspension reflects negatively on its proclaimed commitment to “democratic and human rights values”. That it continues to insist that “political engagement is the most effective way to convey our concerns,” despite the fact that Israeli aggression and apartheid towards the Palestinian people has only gotten progressively worse in the 15 years since the Association Agreement has been active suggests that the EU is, at best, naive, or at worst, utterly unconcerned with the fate of the Palestinians and happy to facilitate Israel’s destructive policies toward them.
We call on the Irish government to take the brave step to become the first EU member state to openly make this call for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Even the very fact of it being discussed at all could have a dramatic impact on Israel’s behaviour and policies. In doing so, the Irish government would be listening to the demands of the Palestinian people, and joining the 63 MEPs who, in a unique cross-party initiative in January 2015, called for the Agreement’s suspension, and the more than 300 human rights groups, trade unions and political parties from across Europe who last December also called for this move to be taken.
What is certain is that as long as the EU, in the words of its Ambassador to Israel, hopes “close relations … will continue” and “would like to see [them expand] in more fields in the future”, then Israel can rest assured that its impunity will continue. Such messages are not only unhelpful, they are a de facto green light for Israel’s continued oppression and destruction of the Palestinian people.
8.3. Ban the importation of Israeli goods into Ireland
In 1986, Ireland became the first country in Western Europe to ban imports of fruit and vegetables from Apartheid South Africa. The Irish government should again lead the way and take steps to ban goods from Apartheid Israel, revenues from which help fund Israel’s brutal assaults like last summer’s assault on Gaza so harrowingly described in the testimonies above, the many others that have gone before it and that will undoubtedly follow it if action is not taken.
8.4. IPSC policy submissions to the Irish government: The ‘National Plan on Business and Human Rights’ & ‘Foreign Policy Approach to Palestine-Israel’
In 2014 and 2015 the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign made two separate policy submissions to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the fields of Foreign Policy and Business and Human Rights.
2014: IPSC submission re: ‘Review of Ireland’s foreign policy approach to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’
2015: IPSC submission re: ‘National Plan on Business and Human Rights’
The recommendations contained in both submissions remain as valid and as urgent as when they were written, and we urge the government to take action to implement these suggestions as soon as possible.
8.5. Palestine, Israel and the International Criminal Court
On 1st April 2015, Palestine officially accepted the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Unfortunately, it appears that some western governments are seeking, or will seek, to prevent Palestinians from exercising their right to justice in taking cases against Israel to the ICC. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the Irish government makes it a priority to ensure that it supports Palestinians in seeking justice at the ICC and Israel being held accountable for war crimes.
9. Conclusion: From Johannesburg to Jerusalem, the great moral issues of our times
To those, including the Irish government, who oppose BDS and counterpose ‘dialogue’, ‘political engagement’ and ‘negotiations’ as a means of achieving justice, we must pose the following question: ‘What have decades of such an approach achieved?’
The answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing, except an ever more extremist Israeli polity, military and society, and the further entrenchment of the occupation and its associated criminality. Just as the strategy of ‘constructive engagement’ did not help bring about the end of Apartheid in South Africa, so too will its modern equivalent fail to assist in bringing about an end to Apartheid in the Palestine-Israel region. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign offers the only glimmer of hope for us in the West to help to achieve this noble aim.
Ireland has supported international sanctions on many human rights abusing countries in the past. Why have we never supported even the mildest of sanctions against Israel? Whatever the reason Israel is singled out for such special treatment, it is time to end this impunity. The concrete actions outlined above must be implemented, for, if they are not, in another two or three years’ time the world will be horrified by yet another Israeli massacre of Palestinians and the election of a yet more extremist government intent on continuing the destruction of the Palestinian people.
As legendary anti-Apartheid fighter and former South African president, the late Nelson Mandela said, Palestine “is the greatest moral issue of our time”. The heroic sacrifices of the Palestinian people over the past seven decades demand that people of conscience take action to help them achieve their freedom, justice and equality, and ultimately a true and just peace for everyone in the Palestine-Israel region. Sixty-seven years after Al Nakba – the Palestinian Catastrophe that saw the foundation of the State of Israel at the expense of the indigenous people, the first act in the drama of their ongoing destruction – nothing less is acceptable.
The time to act is now.
Appendix – Other statements by Israeli government extremists
Other statements made by Israeli extremists in the new Israeli government, compiled by Ben White for Middle East Monitor.
Naftali Bennett, Minister of Education, Minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs
“There is not going to be a Palestinian state within the tiny land of Israel.”
Yuval Steinitz, Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water
“We will not agree to the division of Jerusalem and giving up the Jordan Valley.”
Silvan Shalom, Minister of Interior
“We are all against a Palestinian state, there is no question about it.”
Moshe Kahlon, Minister of Finance
“We should annex all the territories that same day.” (When asked what he thinks Israel should do if the Palestinians unilaterally declare independence).
Uri Ariel, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development
“I think that in five years there will be 550,000 or 600,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], rather than 400,000 [now].”
Ze’ev Elkin, Minister of Immigration and Absorption, Strategic Affairs
“There is no place for a Palestinian state, not in temporary borders and not in any other configuration.”
Ophir Akunis, Minister without Portfolio
“I resolutely oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state in the place where our nation was born.”
Danny Danon, Minister of Science, Technology and Space
“We will strengthen the settlements in [the West Bank].”
Yisrael Katz, Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, Minister of Intelligence
“I am opposed to a Palestinian state. It is unacceptable, mainly because of our rights to this land.”
Gila Gamliet, Minister for Gender Equality, Minorities and Young People
“I disagree with the word ‘occupation.’…The Gaza Strip can annex itself to Egypt, some of the Palestinians can annex themselves to Jordan. They have many countries.”
Benny Begin, Minister without Portfolio
“If the two-state solution is the only solution, then there is no solution.”
Haim Katz, Minister of Welfare and Social Services
“The conclusion is clear – not to establish a Palestinian state, for this will become a terror state on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”
Yariv Levin, Minister of Tourism, Minister of Internal Security
“A clear Israeli law will…show our insistence that we are a Jewish state.”
Miri Regev, Minister of Culture and Sport, Minister of Intelligence
“The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish People, and not only to the Jews who live in that land.”
About the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign
The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) is the largest and longest established organisation working for Palestinian rights on this island. We formed in 2001 as a democratic, broad-based and multifaceted campaign to support the human, civil, political and national rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, in Israel and in the Palestinian Diaspora. In partnership with Palestinians now living in Ireland the IPSC was formed to provide a voice for Palestine in Ireland.
We are proud to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and have been to the forefront in promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel since the Palestinian call was issued ten years ago. The IPSC is a volunteer-based coalition of individuals, human rights and political activists, academics, journalists and trade unionists all committed to a just peace in the Middle East. We are independent of all Irish and Palestinian political parties and groups.
The IPSC campaigns for freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people and for an end to Israel’s racist and colonialist apartheid system. We do this through raising public awareness about the human rights abuses in the occupied territories, the violations of international law and the historical causes of the injustices to the Palestinians that lie at the heart of the Palestine-Israel issue.
The IPSC lobbies the Irish government and politicians at local, national and international level and the EU, campaigns on the streets and urges for a vigorous Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign similar to the one that played a part in ending Apartheid in South Africa. The IPSC also holds public talks with Israeli and Palestinian speakers and various cultural and fundraising events.
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Note: You can download this document as a PDF file by clicking here
========================================================Former FBI Director James Comey repeatedly warned Thursday that news reports based on leaks of classified information pertaining to the Russia investigation have been consistently wrong.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Community, Comey said stories about Russia that are based on classified leaks have been a persistent problem for the FBI because news organizations have often received bad information.
“There have been many, many stories based on — well, lots of stuff, but about Russia that are dead wrong,” Comey said.
Sen. Tom Cotton Thomas (Tom) Bryant CottonHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington MORE (R-Ark.) asked the former FBI director about a bombshell New York Times report from Feb. 14 titled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”
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“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials,” the Times wrote.
Cotton asked Comey if that story was “almost entirely wrong,” and Comey said that it was.
The Times has run one meaningful correction to that report, saying it overstated the number of people whom the FBI has examined. The Times report did note, however, that so far intelligence officials had seen no evidence of "cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin,” the Times wrote.
"In the main it was not true," Comey said.
But in an analysis of Comey's comments on Thursday evening, the Times argued that sources cited in the Feb. 14 article have vouched for the account put forth, though the newspaper's reporters were not able to contact them immediately after Comey's testimony.
The analysis raises the possibility that Comey could have been disputing the article's characterization of Russian intelligence officials.
Another possibility, according to the Times, is that Comey may have disputed with the newspaper's description of the evidence as "phone records and intercepted calls."
Comey said incorrect reports are frustrating because the FBI’s policy is not to comment on the media's coverage of its investigations.
“The challenge — and I’m not picking on reporters — about writing stories about classified information, is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it,” Comey said. “We don’t call the press and say, ‘Hey, you got that thing wrong.’ ”
Trump has repeatedly railed against “fake news” and the media’s reliance on unnamed sources.
CNN this week had to issue a correction after it reported that Comey would testify that he never told Trump that he wasn't the target of an investigation.
In his opening remarks, Comey confirmed that he told Trump three times he was not personally the target of an FBI investigation.ON JUNE 20, 2001, Andrea Yates, an ex-nurse from Houston with a history of severe postpartum depression, drowned all five of her children (aged six months to seven years) in a bathtub. Following a conviction in 2002 that was overturned on appeal, Yates was acquitted in 2006 as not guilty by reason of insanity. Yates’s attorneys, backed by expert testimony, contended that she thought she was being persecuted by Satan and needed to protect her children from eternal damnation by killing them.
Forty-six U.S. states have some version of the insanity defense on the books, with Utah, Montana, Idaho and Kansas disallowing it. This defense is designed to protect people who are incapable of understanding or controlling their criminal actions and to help them get treatment. Nevertheless, the idea of offenders being deemed legally innocent is hard for the public to swallow. In the case of Yates, radio talk-show host Mike Gallagher captured the sentiments of many: “So now,” Gallagher opined, “officially and formally, Andrea Yates did not drown her five children, is that it?” Similarly, after the 1982 acquittal of John W. Hinckley, Jr., for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, an ABC News poll revealed that 76 percent of Americans believed that Hinckley—who was deemed delusional—should have been convicted.
Although excusing the violence of Yates and Hinckley may seem wrong, the insanity defense is actually tailored to such situations. The concept of criminal “guilt” refers to more than whether a defendant committed the crime; in almost all states, it also requires that the person be deemed of sound mind when the act was performed. And although many believe the plea dumps dangerous felons back on the streets, in fact attorneys attempt the defense only rarely and typically fail in the attempt. Even when the defense succeeds, the acquitted usually end up with sentences similar to or longer than those for convictions. The main difference between an acquittal and conviction: those acquitted on the basis of insanity are usually sent to psychiatric hospitals rather than prisons.
Origins of a Plea
In 1843 Daniel McNaughton went to 10 Downing Street in London with a plan to kill the British prime minister, Robert Peel. Mistaking Peel’s secretary for Peel, McNaughton shot the secretary, who died five days later. McNaughton was acquitted on the grounds that he believed the government was plotting against him, but the verdict had no clear precedent and rested on fuzzy legal grounds. Reacting to public anger to the verdict, a panel of judges fashioned a guideline for insanity, now called the McNaughton rule: to be declared insane, defendants must either not have known what they were doing at the time or not have realized their actions were wrong.
The McNaughton rule, which many U.S. states adopted, hinges on cognitive factors, excusing people from legal responsibility because they lacked understanding of the crime’s meaning. Some states now employ the looser guidelines set out by the American Law Institute in 1962, which broadened the insanity defense to also include cases in which a person cannot control his or her impulse to act because of a psychiatric disorder. Proponents of the defense, in either guise, regard it as a needed exception for the rare cases in which people are unable to inhibit their destructive behaviors. Most advocates believe that it is inhumane to punish individuals who did not adequately grasp what they were doing. Instead, they say, we should try to rehabilitate or least treat them.
But critics contend that excusing individuals for a crime that they unquestionably committed makes no sense. To them, the insanity defense confuses the question of whether a person should be found guilty of a crime with that of what punishment he or she should receive. Most skeptics believe that all defendants who commit a crime should be found guilty but that those with severe mental illness should sometimes receive lessened sentences.
Catering to this view, about 20 states have introduced the verdict of “guilty but mentally ill,” which holds a person legally accountable for a crime but permits mental illness to be considered as a mitigating factor in sentencing. This verdict is supposed to enable an ill individual to receive the treatment he or she needs. In reality, those deemed guilty but mentally ill sometimes fail to receive adequate therapy. What is more, the verdict has not led to a clear-cut reduction in the number of insanity acquittals.
Judicious Use?
Whether or not the insanity defense is justified, it is intended only for the rare instances in which a bona fide mental disorder has obliterated the psychological brakes most of us use to stop ourselves from acting immorally. Yet many Americans perceive the insanity defense to be widely invoked and commonly successful. In a 2007 study psychologist Angela Bloechl of the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and her colleagues found that college students estimate that the defense is used in 30 percent of criminal cases and succeeds 30 percent of the time.
Yet data from multiple studies show that only about 1 percent of cases involve the plea, and only 15 to 25 percent of those result in acquittals. Although notorious insanity plea acquittals, such as those of Yates and Hinckley, garner outsize media attention, scores of other defendants, including Jack Ruby (who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s assassin), David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), Jeffrey Dahmer (serial killer) and Lee Boyd Malvo (one of the two Beltway snipers), have been convicted after pleading insanity.
Many people also believe that those acquitted on the basis of insanity get a quick and easy pass out of prison. “A few years of treatment in a mental hospital, then presto! She’s all better now, free to be released into an unsuspecting public,” Gallagher speculated about Yates. But only about 1 percent of those who use the insanity defense successfully are released immediately, and the average length of hospital stays for people let off because of insanity is about three years. Indeed, as of this writing, Yates remains institutionalized in a mental hospital in Kerrville, Tex., more than four years after her acquittal. Moreover, data collected in 1995 by sociologist Eric Silver, then at Policy Research Associates in Delmar, N.Y., suggest that those deemed not guilty by reason of insanity often remain in institutions just as long as people convicted of comparable crimes do; in some states, such as New York and California, they stay longer.
Thus, the insanity defense is far from a quick passage to freedom. Citizens and policy makers must understand the plea for what it is: an extremely rare exception that proves the rule that almost all individuals should be held legally responsible for their criminal actions.Image caption Unemployment in Spain stands at close to 20%
Spain's minimum wage will rise by 1.3% in 2011, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has announced.
The increase will take monthly minimum pay to 641.50 euros (£551; $851).
Mr Zapatero said state pensions would go up by at least the same percentage - and more in the case of those receiving the smallest pensions.
He told a news conference the government was making "a special effort at solidarity" despite Spain's economic crisis.
The proposed rise in the minimum wage is well below inflation, which is currently 2.3% a year in Spain.
The prime minister predicted that Spain would go from recession to recovery in 2011 after "a difficult year" in 2010.
This view has already been endorsed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which said earlier this month that Spain's economy would grow by 0.9% in 2011 and by 1.8% in 2012.
The country's unemployment, which at almost 20% is the highest in the EU, would "drop slightly" to 19.1% next year and to 17.4% in 2012, the OECD said.
The body also reiterated its forecast that the government's budget deficit would be 9.2% this year, 6.3% in 2011 and 4.4% in 2012.
The Spanish government is currently able to borrow money from the international money markets in order to fund its debts, although at much higher rates than before the eurozone debt crisis began.Schedules : B18 Set Defaults : Show Maps Basic Maps Show Long Path Station Any Station 3AC Radio Monaco 3BB Mauritius Radio 3DP Suva Radio 3SD Beijing Meteo Fax 3VT Tunis Radio 3VW La Goulette Radio 4KZ Innisfail 4OB Bar Radio 4XZ Israeli Navy Haifa 6WW Dakar STANAG 7TA Alger Radio 7TO Oran Radio 9KK Kuwait Radio 9VF Kyodo News Agcy Fax 9YL North Post Radio A3A Nukualofa Radio Aberdeen Coastguard Wx Abidjan Radio Adelaide Radio Adventist World Radio Adygeyskoye Radio Agadir Radio AIR Ahmedabad AIR Bhopal AIR Chennai AIR Delhi AIR Delhi FM Gold AIR Delhi Uttarakhand AIR DIGITAL AIR Gangtok AIR Hyderabad AIR Jaipur AIR Jeypore AIR Kurseong AIR Leh AIR National Channel AIR North-East AIR Port Blair AIR Shillong AIR Srinagar AIR Suratgarh AIR Thiruvananthapuram AIR Vividh Bharati Air-horn channel marker AktyubinskAero Ambarcik Alcarav?n Radio Algiers Radio All India Radio DIGITAL All India Radio GOS Alsmood Amateur Radio Today Amhara State Radio Annaba Radio |
long day during which he’d driven 90 minutes from the University of Georgia to South Carolina and back to see Kasich, said the hug meant a lot.
“I’ve watched Gov. Kasich this entire campaign and he is always talking about slowing down and how we as human beings need to celebrate people’s victories and be there for them when they’re down,” Smith, a senior who studies political science, wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “His story about his parent’s dying in a car crash” — a familiar tale on the stump — “and how after that tragic event he found hope, optimism, and the Lord and I just felt something similar and relatable (in its own unique way) that really touched me and I wanted him to know that his positive message isn’t falling on deaf ears.”
For Smith, no other candidate will do.
“I’m all in for Kasich,” Smith said. “At one point I may have considered Jeb or Rubio as close seconds, but I don’t think Rubio is ready and I don’t think the electorate is longing for another Bush.”
(Courtesy Brett Smith)
Smith also offered more details of the events of 2014, his very bad year.
“It started when my best friend’s dad took his life,” he said. “And he took his life a few days after my family and I had just spent an entire week on vacation with him and his family. We were a real close bunch. … He was depressed, and like a lot of people suffering with depression it wasn’t something that was shown on the surface.”
But this was just the beginning of a dark time.
“And then a few months after his death my parents divorced, and then a short time after that my dad lost his job, and it just felt like one bad thing on top of another,” he wrote. He found he was scared even to ask about the reasons behind his parents’ split: “With that I didn’t ask too many questions. I didn’t want to know because I didn’t want to think different of either one. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.”
College can be quite the cure for a family crisis — friends, fellowship, working hard and playing hard. But for Smith, the University of Georgia wasn’t like that. At least not that year. His mind took him to bad places, and it took him there alone.
“It didn’t help that was living by myself at UGA either,” he wrote. “I was in a dorm and I didn’t have a roommate so I really had a lot of time alone with just me and my thoughts, and they weren’t the happiest of thoughts. Luckily I found hope and happiness and eventually, as Gov. Kasich likes to say in his speeches, the light overcame the dark.”
It’s not clear what comes next for Smith. He was contemplating law school, but decided against it. Come summer, he’ll be living with his mother in Franklin, Ga., looking for a calling — or just a job. He’s thinking about journalism, or maybe working with a campaign. Though he didn’t get a chance to have a long chat with Kasich after the event, the candidate did have time for a photo, and said he wanted to get Smith’s contact info.
“Hopefully I will get to meet him again when he stops in my state and we can chat without all the cameras and people, and hopefully no tears this time,” Smith wrote.
(Courtesy Brett Smith)
He also thinks his favorite governor may soon be president.
“I do,” he said. “It won’t be easy, but I think the more voters see of Gov. Kasich and the more they see of the other candidates, especially as the scrutiny increases, I really think Kasich will stand out and that as a uniter the voters will be receptive to his message.” He added: “I would just encourage people to look past big rhetoric and look at records and to look at character and electability. If they look for those things in a candidate, then they’ll end up in Kasich’s corner where I am.”
And the hug may have made this all the more clear.
“In every sense, a Kasich event is the emotional opposite of a Trump rally,” Charles P. Pierce of Esquire wrote. “It is warm where Trump’s are hot. It is open where Trump’s are closed. But the fellow-feeling in the halls are no less real for all their differences. People engage themselves with the candidate, albeit in different ways. This is what brought Brett Smith up from Georgia. In both cases, people care about the candidates as much as they care about the campaign. There is something happening with the Kasich campaign, and the only question is whether or not it’s happening too late.”
Correction: An earlier version of this post said Brett Duncan Smith was wearing a vest with a Green Bay Packers logo on it. It was a University of Georgia Super G.A Saskatchewan member of the legislature is being criticized for presenting a petition that asks for changes to provincial abortion laws.
Greg Ottenbreit, the minister responsible for rural and remote health, tabled a petition last week that calls for "speedily [enacted] legislation requiring parental consent for abortion."
Girls under 18 years old do not need parental consent to receive an abortion in Saskatchewan.
A similar petition was presented by New Democrat Warren McCall in mid-April.
NDP health critic Danielle Chartier said Thursday that it was an inappropriate move by Ottenbreit, given his portfolio.
"There are many beliefs that can be held in a caucus, but the reality is he's one of the health ministers... who is responsible for funding and setting policy, and therein lies the problem," she said.
Ottenbreit is a member of the Saskatchewan Pro Life Association.
The group held a rally outside the provincial legislature Thursday with some members holding signs that read "parental consent."
Chartier suggested Ottenbreit could have asked another legislature member to present the petition.
Health Minister Dustin Duncan, who said there won't be changes to the province's abortion law, said MLAs have an obligation to present petitions on behalf of their constituents.
"We present petitions as MLAs in a way that doesn't say we endorse the petitions, but we're doing so because our constituents have presented us with something that they feel strongly about," Duncan said.
The role of an MLA doesn't change based on what issue is at hand, he added.
"If a group of constituents... come to my office and present a petition, I'm not going to throw it in the garbage. I'm not going to put it in a shredder," he said.
People who signed the petition listed their addresses in Craik, Regina, Mossbank and Davidson — communities hundreds of kilometres away from Ottenbreit's constituency of Yorkton.
A government spokeswoman said MLAs are able to present petitions regardless of where signatories live.
Ottenbreit was unavailable for comment because he was travelling, the spokeswoman said.In this post I will briefly explore the ethics of gatekeeping in transgender healthcare. Many trans people want access to Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and surgery. But historically HRT and surgery was not given to just anyone. One had to fulfill a strict set of criteria and pass numerous hurdles before getting access to these interventions. First, you have to be in therapy for months or years to be diagnosed with “true transsexualism” in order to weed out the "pseudo-transsexual". Clinicians thought that only “true transsexuals” (whatever that means) will not regret transition. Clinicians also thought that regret was about the worst possible outcome of transition. So regret must be avoided at all costs by setting up strict and narrow criteria for the diagnosis of gender dysphoria as well as placing numerous obstacles in front of the trans patient before they get access to either HRT or surgery.
What happens when a patient demands a medical intervention that the doctor is reluctant to give? How does informed consent play a role in protecting the autonomy of the patient? How far can we push that principle? If the doctor thinks the intervention will reduce the patient’s well-being, but the patient is rational and has assessed the risks/benefits, do we protect the doctor’s autonomy to practice medicine as they wish or do we protect the patient’s autonomy? Gatekeeping is when a medical professional restricts access to an intervention on paternalistic grounds. When is gatekeeping justified and when is it not?
One obstacle that was used and is still used is the so-called “real life experience” test or just RLE. For RLE you are required to live socially in your gender for months if not years in order to determine if you are up to the challenge, whether you can blend into society well, and ultimately whether medical transition is appropriate. Often times the RLE test required trans people to get and keep a job in your "new" gender identity. Now keep in mind this test was historically used as a gatekeeping mechanism for HRT (now it is used more for surgery, which I discuss below). But many trans people cannot “pass” without HRT. So the RLE test did not actually simulate living in your gender - it simulates living as a visibly trans person in a transphobic society. Many people failed this test because of passing problems as well as difficulties transitioning in the workplace in a state without protections for gender identity or in finding a job in a transphobic society as a visibly trans person, especially if your legal documents are not in order.
Furthermore, forcing trans people to go out into the world as visibly trans before even getting access is HRT is an act of violence, especially for trans women of color (TWOC), who often face violence and harassment just for being visibly themselves. Forcing people to attempt to pass without the aid of HRT is cruel and dangerous because it exposes trans people to violence and harassment that they might have otherwise avoided if they had access to HRT. It also biases against the lucky few who can pass without HRT and ends up perpetuating stereotypes about who is a “true transsexual”. The petite feminine AMAB is assumed to be more “truly” trans than the large masculine AMAB because the petite AMAB can pass the real-life experience test easier - but whether you pass or not pre-HRT is a totally arbitrary criterion to judge someone's "true transness". So the RLE experience test is not an exercise is simulating lived experience in your true gender. It’s just a vehicle to see who can handle the social difficulties of being trans in a transphobic society - and it's a mechanism to test your resolve and determination.
The RLE test also violates autonomy because it fails to allow people to transition according to their own vision for how they want their life to go. Some trans people socially transition right away even before HRT. But other trans people start HRT first and then only socially transition later. For trans women a popular transition plan is the “boymode fail” strategy. You start HRT and present as male until people start gendering you female in public - your “boymode” is failing. Once this happens reliably you socially transition.
The point I’m making is that trans people should have the autonomy to choose the transition plan that is right for them. The RLE test is a one-size-fits-all solution that is tailored according to the biases of the clinicians. But if you actually listen to trans people, the RLE test is perceived as being counter-productive to the actual goals trans people have.
So those are arguments against the RLE test for HRT but one might still argue that RLE is a good idea for more “radical” interventions such as Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS). Right now according to the latest World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) the requirements for GCS for FTM and MTF include “ 12 continuous months of living in a gender role that is congruent with their gender identity.” The rational is: “The criterion noted above for some types of genital surgeries—i.e., that patients engage in 12 continuous months of living in a gender role that is congruent with their gender identity—is based on expert clinical consensus that this experience provides ample opportunity for patients to experience and socially adjust in their desired gender role, before undergoing irreversible surgery.”
Some might argue that this form of gatekeeping is paternalistically justified. It’s simply in the best interest of trans people to undergo RLE before having “irreversible surgery”. But if paternalism is generally a bad model for accessing healthcare in other areas of medicine, how can it be justified for trans surgery? Why is trans surgery deemed more “radical” than other forms of surgery that do not have gatekeeping mechanisms in place? It can’t just be that trans surgery is “irreversible” because we allow people to do irreversible things to themselves all the time. Did Lizard Man need to spend 12 months living as a lizard before he received irreversible surgical modifications to look more like a lizard? If a person wants to get their 5th nose job, we don’t put gatekeeping mechanisms in place simply because the procedure is “irreversible”. There must be something else going on to justify the gatekeeping.
Perhaps it’s the idea that trans surgery involves the possibility of "radical regret". But if we think it’s abhorrent that pro-life advocates want to force pregnant people to have counseling before abortion because of the possibility of post-abortion regret - then it should also be abhorrent to justify paternalism for trans surgeries on the small chance of there being regret. As it turns out, most surveys show that the rate of post-operative regret for trans people is 1-2%. One might argue however that the low rate is low because of successful gatekeeping. However, there is an alternative hypothesis which is that the rate of regret would be just as low even without gatekeeping because the vast majority of people who decide to undergo GCS are (1) rational (2) informed of the risks and benefits of surgery and (3) highly desirous of the surgery. Trans people have often been grappling with dysphoria for decades. Their desire for surgical intervention to relieve dysphoria is very intense and persistent. Their understanding of the risks and benefits is often very high due to years of research on the internet - trans people are probably more informed about the risks and benefits than many doctors. Generally they are a class of medical patients that actually upholds the high standards for rational autonomy built into informed consent procedures. My thesis is that the rates of regret would be the same if the RLE test became recommended rather required.
Furthermore, I want to challenge the implicit assumption that post-operative regret justifies paternalistic gatekeeping. If the “worst outcome” is regret and detransition back to their assigned gender, is that really such a bad thing? If you actually read the stories of people who detransitioned you will find the narrative is more complicated than simply “regretting it”. Often people will say they would do it all over again, that they wouldn’t be who they are today if they hadn’t transitioned, that it was the right choice at the time, that it was necessary at the time to relieve their dysphoria, etc. Simply labeling it “regret” does not capture the nuance of detransition. Furthermore, someone might regret transition and still be a happy successful person living in their gender. Moreover, most of the reasons people regret transition and surgery are incidental to transition itself and more indicative of difficult social situations. If someone regrets transition because post-transition they were exposed to transphobic violence, that doesn’t really justify paternalistic gatekeeping as much as it justifies trying to make the world safer for trans people to live in.
The RLE test is just one of the obstacles in place for trans people. There are often other hurdles as well such as getting "letters" from therapists/psychologists but arguing why those are problematic will have to wait for another post.
This post stems from my dissertation research. If anyone has good examples of justified or non-justified gatekeeping in other areas of medicine, I would love to hear them.Two short sessions with John John Florence at home in Hawaii. Throwaways mostly, but excellent fun anyway — and you know that one of these days he’s going to stick one of those giant inverted tweaked out spinny thingies; in fact it’s quite possible he’s stuck one already, and is saving the footage for his forthcoming movie. Also: the air-drop and scoop up into the barrel right at the end is well into ridiculous territory. Filmed by Jason Muir and Nimai Strickland.
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Read our full Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions.Street Fighter V will make its playable debut at Community Effort Orlando 2015, according to a brand new trailer released by the event’s organizers.
This latest development is yet another piece of a tournament that refuses to stop growing. In addition to Tekken 7 also being present at the event courtesy of Bandai Namco and Mad Catz, this year’s Community Effort Orlando will see further developer support in the form of huge pot bonuses for Ultra Street Fighter IV, Mortal Kombat X, and Killer Instinct.
The highly anticipated follow-up to the iconic franchise’s 2009 return, Street Fighter V features a classic lineup of cast members in Ryu, Chun-Li, and M. Bison as well as the return of fan favorite Charlie Nash. Capcom has provided very little official information regarding the title’s gameplay mechanics, making this appearance at Community Effort Orlando that much more important to fans hungry for details.
Check out the full trailer below.
Community Effort Orlando 2015 is scheduled for June 26-28. Additional details can be found through their official website.
Source: CEO GamingWASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA - FEBRUARY 27: Bob Goodlatte, House Judiciary Committee Chairman speaks at the St. Regis Hotel on February 27, 2013 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)
U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) asked the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday to investigate what he says may be fraudulent cases of asylum requests from Mexican nationals fleeing a drug war that has claimed 70,000 lives since 2006.
Hoping to raise pressure on the Obama administration to address the issue, Goodlatte speculated that Mexican asylum applicants are “being coached” on how to apply for asylum, following reports by an ABC affiliate and Fox News earlier this month.
“I am concerned that credible fear claims are being exploited by illegal immigrants in order to enter and remain in the United States,” Goodlatte wrote in the letter. A finding of “credible fear,” a legal designation referring to immigrants who have a reason to fear returning to their home country, is the first step to initiate an asylum claim.
Goodlatte points out that the overwhelming majority of Mexican nationals claiming asylum do not ultimately receive it, using statistics culled from unspecified press accounts. He implies that the applications overwhelmingly get rejected because they are illegitimate.
But while some 91 percent of Mexican asylum applications are denied, according to DHS figures cited by the Associated Press, applicants are not necessarily refused because their claims are fraudulent.
Drug war violence has become rampant in Mexico since former President Felipe Calderón launched a frontal assault on the country’s cartels. And drug gangs aren’t the only ones to wreak havoc on the Mexican public in recent years -- evidence suggests that Mexican police and military have tortured, summarily executed and forcibly disappeared civilians since the onset of the drug war, according to Human Rights Watch.
Despite the well documented drug war violence and evidence of government complicity, it’s difficult for most Mexicans to win an asylum claim because the U.S. government does not generally equate criminal violence with persecution, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Nevertheless, immigration officials have seen an increase in the number of Mexican asylum seekers. Credible fear claims hit 14,610 by the end of June this fiscal year, which ends in October, AP reports. That figure is almost double the 6,824 claims in fiscal year 2011.
The figures refer only to so-called “defensive” applications, filed at ports of entry. They exclude “offensive” applications, filed by people already residing in the United States.
While Goodlatte does not specify the press accounts the letter is based on, the article raises many of the same points and uses language similar to that of two articles published by ABC 10 News and Fox News earlier this month. Both articles quote the same source, former U.S. Attorney for Southern California Peter Nunez, saying that the uptick in credible fear claims is the result of an orchestrated attempt to game the system.
The issue of Mexican asylum cases gained attention last month, when a group of undocumented immigration activists known as the “DREAM 9” crossed into a legal port of entry at Nogales, Arizona, as a form of protest against the Obama administration’s deportation record.Unless, of course, the doctor and patient are deciding whether or not she wants to terminate a pregnancy.
Price is a longtime opponent of abortion in all shapes and forms. He twice co-sponsored bills to establish that the Constitution protects the rights of zygotes from the moment of fertilization. That would ban not only abortion but also morning-after pills and, according to some advocates, birth control methods like IUDs.
He is also the person who could resolve any questions about a Trumpcare law, like that change in coverage for maternal health. “To what extent will he use regulation to try to even worsen the situation?” asked Representative Pallone in a phone interview.
The Obamacare repeal bill makes it much less attractive for insurance companies to cover abortions in their policies, and includes a ban on federal funds for Planned Parenthood. Lately, it seems as if everything the House of Representatives touches includes a ban on funds for Planned Parenthood. Someday soon you will learn that there was a Planned Parenthood amendment attached to a measure renaming a post office in Nebraska after a recently deceased World War II veteran.
You wouldn’t think getting rid of an organization that provides crucial services like breast exams, family planning and checks for cervical cancer would be a major fixture of a health bill. But this is an administration that wants to fight terrorism by defunding the Coast Guard to pay for a wall. What can I tell you?
Planned Parenthood does not get federal funds for abortions, but it does get a lot of money for its other work with underserved poor and rural Americans. President Trump has let it be known that he’d support the organization if it just stopped providing abortions, period. Planned Parenthood refused, under the theory that women need, um, the freedom to make that choice on their own.
So you’ve got two sides here, people. One believes all Americans should have the freedom to make their own decisions about their bodies. The other believes all Americans should have the freedom to not have health insurance. You pick. But do it fast.In a sharp escalation of a case that has roiled the Cook County court system, Rhonda Crawford, the judicial candidate who allegedly donned a judge's robe and ruled on traffic cases in August, was arraigned Friday and charged with official misconduct, a felony.
Crawford, 45, also was charged with one count of false impersonation, a misdemeanor. She pleaded not guilty to both charges and was released on $10,000 bond.
At the same time, Valarie Turner, the Markham judge who Crawford has said allowed her to wear her robe and handle three traffic cases, was not expected to be charged in the case.
"We do not anticipate any additional charges at this time, however if new information or evidence were to come to light we would certainly review it," said Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state's attorney's office.
Crawford's lawyer, Victor Henderson, said she would fight the charges, adding that he was astonished that she was being prosecuted for what Crawford has called an honest mistake.
"This incident that happened over three to four minutes is being blown out of proportion," Henderson said. The felony count carries a potential sentence of two to five years in prison.
A date for Crawford's trial, which was assigned to Judge Alfredo Maldonado, has not been set.
Crawford, who won the March Democratic primary, remains on the ballot in the Nov. 8 general election for the 1st Judicial Subcircuit, a district that includes the city's South Side and some south suburbs. She is running unopposed, except for a long-shot write-in candidate, Maryam Ahmad.
Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune Law clerk Rhonda Crawford, center, after her bond court hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building on Oct. 21, 2016, in Chicago. Law clerk Rhonda Crawford, center, after her bond court hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building on Oct. 21, 2016, in Chicago. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
After the hearing, Crawford remained steadfast in her intent to stay in the race.
"I've acknowledged that I wore the robe. I've acknowledged that it was a mistake. I've apologized for that mistake and I look forward to continuing the campaign," she said.
Turner has not spoken publicly about the case, and a court spokesman acknowledged for the first time that Turner, 59, has been on medical leave since Aug. 22. Her lawyer did not return messages seeking comment. But court records prosecutors filed Friday indicate that Turner believed Crawford was, in fact, a judge.
One legal expert said he was not surprised that Turner was not charged. Samuel V. Jones, a John Marshall Law School professor and an expert on judicial ethics, said that based on what he had seen and read, Turner did not commit a crime.
"I don't think there is a criminal charge for allowing someone to put on your robe," Jones said. "It's more of an ethical offense. She lent the prestige and dignity of the judicial office for the private benefit of Crawford."
He also said that prosecutors had little choice but to charge Crawford, especially since she has refused requests to voluntarily drop out of the judicial race.
"I don't believe it's overkill to charge her criminally," Jones said. "We cannot tolerate engaging in this kind of conduct, impersonating a judge. The Cook County judiciary has enough issues."
At issue is an incident that occurred in the south suburban Markham courthouse on Aug. 11, when Crawford took a seat in the witness box in to shadow Turner and learn more about her work as a judge.
The day was routine enough, but during the 1 p.m. hearing, officials said, those in the courtroom were informed that Crawford was going to put on Turner's robe, sit in her chair and hear cases. According to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, the state panel that oversees lawyers, she heard and ruled on three traffic cases from the village of Dolton.
In days that followed, Chief Judge Timothy Evans fired Crawford from her $57,000-a-year job as law clerk and staff attorney. He also reassigned Turner to administrative duties while also referring the matter to the Judicial Inquiry Board, the state agency that oversees judicial conduct.
That board could file charges with the Illinois Courts Commission, which ultimately can impose anything from a reprimand to removal from office. The board has declined to comment about the matter.
As for Crawford, she is facing other sanctions as well. The lawyer disciplinary commission urged the Illinois Supreme Court to suspend Crawford's law license and prohibit her from taking office.
The Supreme Court on Friday ordered Crawford to explain in writing by Oct. 28 why her license should not be suspended.
While under indictment, Crawford can continue her campaign. Election officials have said a felony conviction would disqualify her and if she loses her law license, she cannot become a judge.
Also on Friday, Ahmad, the write-in candidate running against Crawford, asked the Supreme Court to order election officials to remove Crawford's name from the ballot and not count votes cast for Crawford.
Ahmad's lawyer, Burt Odelson, said Crawford was unfit to practice law or to be a judge.
"Should Crawford remain on the ballot or her votes are counted, Illinois will again be embarrassed, throughout the world," Odelson said, "this time by electing a lawyer under criminal indictment and facing possible disbarment."
tlighty@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @tlightyFinian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
The US' strategy has been to isolate Russia internationally. Evidently, it is Washington that is becoming more isolated on the global stage. This week in the run-up to the G20 summit in Germany, the reverse in fortunes could not be more glaring.
While North Korea was openly defying Washington with a breakthrough ballistic missile test, and US President Donald Trump was embroiled in his usual juvenile tweeting antics, Russia and China’s leaders were proudly consolidating their strategic alliance for a new multipolar global order.
Western media won’t acknowledge as much, but the meeting this week in Moscow between Putin and Xi Jinping was of historical importance. We are witnessing a global transition in power. And for the common good.
'Major even in bilateral relations' Chinese president comes to Moscow to strike $10bn worth of deals https://t.co/WGDTMfT6Axpic.twitter.com/48mS4Skjoa — RT (@RT_com) 4 июля 2017 г.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping bond through an apparent deep sense of mutual respect and wisdom about the political challenges facing today’s world. The two leaders have met on more than 20 occasions over the past four years. President Xi referred to Russia as China’s foremost ally and said that in a topsy-turvy world the friendship between the two was a source of countervailing stability.
On the breaking news of North Korea’s successful test launch of its first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), both Putin and Xi called for calm restraint. By contrast, US President Trump took to Twitter to taunt Kim Jong-Un. “Does this guy not have anything better to do with his life?” said Trump in words that could apply more pertinently to the American president.
Then the US and its South Korea ally also launched their ballistic missiles in a military drill aimed as a show of strength to Pyongyang. Kim Jung-Un responded that the ICBM was a “gift for the American bastards” on their Fourth of July Independence Day holiday and that there would more such gifts on the way.
Rather than escalating tensions, Putin and Xi put forward the eminently reasonable proposal that North Korea should freeze its missile tests and the US should likewise halt its military exercises on the Korean peninsula. All sides must convene in negotiations with a commitment to non-violence and without preconditions to strive for a comprehensive settlement to the decades-old dispute.
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The contrast in Putin and Xi’s dignified, intelligent response with that of Trump’s petulance is clear proof of Russia and China showing real global leadership, whereas the Americans are just part of the problem.
But the Korean drama was only one illustration this week of how American ambitions of unipolar dominance have become redundant.
The G20 summit prelude of Putin hosting Xi in Moscow was followed by the Chinese president making a state visit to Germany on Wednesday two days before the gathering in Hamburg. Xi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly signed new trade deals between the world’s two leading export economies.
“Relations between China and Germany are at their historic best,”said Michael Clauss, Germany’s ambassador to Beijing. “The economic and political dynamic from a German perspective is moving toward the east.”
Of significance too was news this week the European Union is preparing to finalize a major trade pact with Japan.
It is also significant that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on China and Russia to help mediate the Korean crisis immediately following Pyongyang’s ICMB test launch.
Evidently, Japan, despite being an ally of Washington, is reaching out to a multilateral solution as proposed by Moscow and Beijing.
In so many ways, therefore, whether on matters of security or trade and economy, the world appears to be moving inexorably toward a multipolar format as the most appropriate response to challenges.
Not so from the American point of view, especially under Donald Trump’s leadership. All nations seem to be nothing more than a footstool for the “exceptional” Americans who feel entitled to hector and browbeat everyone else to get what they want.
America’s isolation in the world was glimpsed at the G7 summit earlier this year in May when the other nations awkwardly diverged from Trump on his decision to withdraw the US from the global climate accord. Two months on, the isolation of Washington is even more vivid on the world stage as G20 leaders gather in Hamburg this weekend.
A Bloomberg News headline put it succinctly: ‘Trump risks uniting Cold War allies and foes against him’.
Trump’s quest for “America First” through trade protectionism and his narrow-minded unilateralism toward issues of global security have put America out on a limb as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
Where is the American “team player”, the supposed “leader of the free world”? All the self-proclaimed virtues are being seen for what they always were: overblown, pretentious and vainglorious bombast.
America is seen as nothing more than a selfish, hulking giant. Its trade imbalances with the rest of the world are not because of “rotten deals”, as Trump would have it, but rather because the American economy has ruined itself over many decades. The off-shoring of jobs by American corporations and gutting of American workers with poverty wages are part of it.
When America now talks about upholding international law and security, the rest of the world just laughs with bitter irony. The wars across the Middle East and the sponsoring of terrorism are largely US products of criminal regime-change intrigues. Who is this deluded head-case in Washington?
It will be the two leaders' first meeting since Trump's inauguration https://t.co/qI4htULC6j — RT America (@RT_America) 29 июня 2017 г.
The same deluded head-case that has “beautiful chocolate cake” with China’s president in a Florida beach resort, and then proceeds to slap sanctions on China and make provocative military incursions on its territory. It’s not just Trump. It’s the whole American political leadership. The American ruling class has become so blinded by hubris that it can’t even see how the world it claims to dominate is collectively shutting the door on it and walking away.
Washington has no answers for today’s world challenges. Because simply put, Washington is the source of many of today’s problems. It has not even the modesty to acknowledge its responsibility. The only thing the US seems capable of is to make current problems fiendishly worse. The Korean crisis is an object lesson.
Presidents Putin and Xi are not scheming to usurp world domination, as Washington would have us believe. Only in Washington would a vision for a multipolar, more democratic global order be construed as something threatening and sinister. That’s because American ambitions of unipolar “full spectrum dominance” are actually threatening and sinister.
The world can be thankful it has genuine leaders in Putin and Xi who are forging ahead to create a multipolar global order. Fortunately, the strategic alliance between Russia and China is underpinned by a formidable military capability. Joint naval exercises this month carried out in the Baltic Sea are a vital insurance policy to back up what Moscow and Beijing are increasingly bold enough to say to the Americans.
That message, as Putin and Xi effectively gave to Trump this week, is that American ambitions of world domination are no longer acceptable and no longer tenable. Washington’s days of bullying the world with its moralizing hypocrisy and military aggression are over.Indonesia finally made a big decision yesterday (Sept 3). For months it’s been mulling competing offers from China and Japan to build a high-speed rail link between the capital of Jakarta and Bandung. Each side has been sweetening the deal while sending envoys to Jakarta to woo politicians. China is Indonesia’s largest trade partner, and Japan its second-biggest investor, so there were diplomatic sensitivities for Jakarta to consider.
But in the end president Joko Widodo, with help from the cabinet he recently reshuffled to reassure investors, gave practical—not political—reasons for going with neither partner and scrapping the idea altogether.
As Darmin Nasution, the nation’s new coordinating minister for economic affairs, explained, the distance between the two cities is only 150 kilometers (93 miles) and the trip the involves a number of stops. So it’d be difficult for a high-speed train to achieve its trumpeted speeds of 300 kmh (188 mph) in the first place.
Reuters/Darren Whiteside Currently a train ride from Jakarta to Bandung takes about three hours.
Nasution said a medium-speed train would make more sense, cost 30% to 40% less, and be only about 10 minutes slower. The high-speed rail promised to cut the time from about three hours currently to 35 minutes. Apparently 45 minutes is fine with the cabinet, considering the enormous savings: the high-speed project would have cost about $5 billion.
While a medium-speed line might not be as sexy, Nasution welcomed China and Japan to bid on that, too.Published online 14 October 2011 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2011.592
Corrected online:
News
Participants in the 1000 Genomes project reconstruct the genetic variation of a Native American tribe from their descendants.
The Taínos were the first Native Americans to encounter European explorers. Peter Newark American Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library
The Taínos were the first Native Americans to meet European explorers in the Caribbean — and they soon fell victim to the diseases and violence brought by the outsiders. Today, the genomes of most if not all descendents of Taínos now contain few of the unique markers that characterized their ancestors.
But the genetic footprints of these ancestors are scattered throughout the genomes of modern Puerto Ricans, according to geneticist Carlos Bustamante at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. On average, the genomes of Puerto Ricans contain 10–15% Native American DNA, which is largely Taíno, says Bustamante.
At a presentation at the 12th International Congress of Human Genetics in Montreal, Canada, Bustamante described preliminary results from a study that aims to reconstruct the genetic features of the Taíno people. The cryptic information was found in the genomes of 70 modern Puerto Ricans, some of the latest additions to the ongoing 1000 Genomes project, an international consortium whose goal is to find the variations in DNA sequence among the genomes of all human populations.
Window on the past
The genomes of modern |
is amazing – he is one of the best players’ coaches in the nation. I got a great feel for that with him. My parents love the facilities, the stadium, the way they structure their academics and how their academics come first. I got along great with recruits, and everything that I wanted in a college was there.” Ryan said he fell in love with Death Valley, and can’t wait to see the stadium come alive on game day. “The stadium is huge,” he said. “I love the way they come out and get on the bus, and they drive around the stadium and the place is going nuts. And then they have Howard’s Rock on the hill – there is no other school in the country that does anything like that. When we were going over that part of it, it was sending chills down my spine. I want to be there right now.” Ryan said he got to spend time with Stanton Seckinger, Patrick DeStefano and even spent time with Sammy Watkins. “The whole day Saturday, we took tours of the academic and athletic buildings, and then we had dinner at the stadium,” he said. “We sat and talked to the players and coaches, and we were having a lot of fun just sitting at their table and talking, Sammy was a very cool guy, very laid back. Everybody was laid back and easy going, and you can tell they love being at Clemson. It is something I want to be a part of.”
Ryan said his parents fell in love with Clemson as well. “My parents loved it,” he said. “I think you know how much my dad loved it. My mom loved it, too. She loved the family-oriented atmosphere. My mom loved the atmosphere, and she is going shopping for her orange.” He said it didn’t take him long for him to realize where he wanted to be. “It was about ten minutes into my talk with Coach Swinney,” he said. “Throughout the whole thing, I kept thinking this is what I imagined college would be. When I went into my meeting in Coach Swinney’s office, he blew me away with how much he cares about his players and how he structures everything. I was thinking, ‘This is what I want.’ Later that night, I told them I was going to commit to Clemson.” Ryan said he will graduate high school on June 20th, and will be in Clemson to start summer school classes three days later. See previous article for more on RyanA short history of the nationwide wildcat strike of US rail workers in 1919, which won pay increases despite being viciously undermined by the trade unions.
There were a large number of strikes in 1919, many of which were "outlaw" or wildcat strikes, opposed as heartily by the unions as by the employers. These spread even to such citadels of trade union authority as the printing trades. But the most important of all was on the railroads.
For practical purposes, the right of railroad workers to strike did not exist after the Federal suppression of the Pullman strike. The unions generally supported this state of affairs. Thus those railroad strikes which occurred met the opposition not only of the railroads but of the unions and the government. This was all the more true during the war and post-war period because the railroads were under Federal control until March, 1920. Discontent rose with the cost of living; by April, 1920, prices had risen one hundred percent since 1914, railroad wages only fifty percent. After April, 1919, the government refused all requests for wage increases. According to Commons' History of Labor in the United States, "in the minds of the men the pent-up resentment against this injustice became directed not only against the dilatory government officials and railway managers but also against their own union officials who apparently bore this situation with a patience unbecoming... "
In this charged situation, a railroad worker named John Gru-nau, a leader of an insurgent Chicago Yardmen's Association, was demoted in the Chicago yards on April 2nd. The 700 switchmen on his line immediately walked out in protest. The strike crystallized the general discontent of the railroad workers, and within two days every railroad in the Chicago area was involved in the strike, with 9,000 switchmen out. By April 9th, the strike had spread spontaneously across the country, reaching New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha and Detroit. Engineers, conductors and firemen joined the striking switchmen.
In the midst of the strike the workers created several temporary organizations. For instance, 1,700 workers on nine railroads entering Cleveland voted to form a Cleveland Yardmen's Association. Similar organizations developed in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Kansas City; representatives from these various groups met in Washington and formed a national alliance of striking switchmen and yardmen. Sylvia Kopald describes the best-known of the outlaw organizations, the United Railway Workers of America, thus:
Originating among the Jersey strikers, this organization, according to the statements of its accredited spokesmen, was not intended to continue after the strike. The organization had no central direction. At its head stood an Executive Committee of 15 men, including a chairman and a secretary who were chosen from the members of a General Strike committee. This latter committee in turn was composed of representatives elected [rom the various roads, each of which contributed 18, or three for each craft (yardmasters, engineers, firemen, conductors, road workmen and yard service men). The Executive Committee was vested with power to "conduct the strike and make such moves as seem advisable to carry it to a successful conclusion." Its actual power, however, was drastically limited by the fact that it could take no important action without the express authorization of a general meeting.
The railway unions launched a bitter drive against the strike. Dozens of union officials concentrated in Chicago and other strike centers ordered the men back to work, on the grounds that the strike violated union rules and contracts - although no contracts with the employers existed, the roads having just been returned from Federal control. They red-baited the strikers as Bolsheviks and charged them with destroying the union. They threatened the strikers with expulsion if they did not return to work, and actually applied this penalty to tens of thousands of workers.
Finally, the union leaders themselves recruited hundreds of strikebreakers. For example, a Chicago officer of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen wired all member unions outside Chicago to send switchmen to "break.the strike of Grunau's rival organization." An official of the Order of Railway Conductors wired members, "Strike is illegal, against our Brotherhoods and against railroads. Our existence is at stake. Our members justified under the circumstances in working in yard and road service to help us save our organization." Even those who did not join the strike resented this practice, however; as a union official reported of his meetings with his rank and file:
Many members present showed a strong sympathy for the striking switchmen and said they would not work with "scabs" or "finks." It was impossible to convince our members at this stage of the illegal strike that men who took the switchmen's places were not scabs or finks and that they were friends of bona fide organizations helping them to maintain their contracts which were made by their duly authorized representatives.
At another meeting, he reported, the principal topic was "the stated fear and undesire of our men to work with what they called 'finks.' "
Finally, the power of the state was turned against the strikers. Attorney General Palmer attacked the strike leaders as I.W.W.'s and Reds. On April 15th he had twenty-three strike leaders in Chicago arrested on charges of violating the Lever and Sherman Acts, and there were arrests and raids on meetings in Cleveland, New Orleans and other cities as well.
The strike succeeded in forcing President Wilson to appoint a Railroad Labor Board. The Board strengthened the hands of the official unions by agreeing to meet exclusively with them and refusing even to hear the outlaws. It granted a general wage increase in July. With the combined pressure of repression and concession, the strike gradually faded as positions were filled by strikebreakers or men returning to work.
This text has been excerpted from Jeremy Brecher's excellent book, Strike! and very slightly edited to make sense as a stand-alone text by libcom.org.About
AluminumCanCraft is Handcrafted Recycled Aluminum Can Novelties. Until recently, over the years I have been making AluminumCanCraft when I needed a few extra bucks or a gift. Times have changed and I need to save for retirement, someday. I have invested in the press and still need dies which would save time preparing the parts for assembly. Right now, it takes much longer to cut the parts than it does to assemble the finished item. The press with dies will mean more finished items can be produced in a shorter amount of time and the parts will be cut more precise.The novelty will still be handmade, even with some of the parts being cut by press and dies.
I have been designing and making aluminum can novelties for 30 years. I make several different items-bi-planes, trains, ships, jalopies and Christmas ornaments. I also have many patterns that I haven't produced yet. With a press and dies, it would cut my labor dramaticly.and I will have more time to concentrate on assembly and future projects.
I am sharing my Bi-Plane,Train and Sleigh color illustrated manuals as rewards for helping me raise $2,500.00 for the dies for the Bi-Plane, which is the favorite item. The pictures take you step by step.
Since AluminumCanCraft is handmade from recycled cans, one person can only make so many items in a day. The more people making AluminumCanCraft, the less aluminum cans making it into the landfills. The manuals are fully color illustrated and I have not received a complaint in the many years I have been selling them. Most people order one of the manuals and come back to order the others. Parts and Tools needed for each item is available on my website.
Not everyone will want to make AluminumCanCraft but want the finished item. The Bi-Plane design is favored and I am offering the Bi-Plane as a reward for backing my project. Pick your brand (depending on can availability). They make excellent gifts and conversation pieces. I do not use glue on any of my designs and there aren't any sharp edges. You are more apt to get a paper cut than get cut by the aluminum. I sometimes put my hand in a bag of scraps and grab a hand full and squeeze to make my point. The can novelties sell themselves and often draw crowds at the flea market. I have seen my bi-plane design in a couple movies, a TV show and in The Colorado Parade of Homes.
My store at Mile High Flea Market in Denver. My son runs the store on weekends leaving me free to make more novelties.
TV interview 28 years ago
Aluminum Can Sleigh
Aluminum Can TrainGet the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Louis van Gaal has told Manchester United fans to prepare for more short-term pain.
The Red Devils travel to Burnley at lunchtime today looking for their first win under Van Gaal, after two defeats and a draw this season.
Despite having 10 players out injured, Van Gaal is ready to offload SIX first-team stars before Monday’s transfer deadline.
Van Gaal said such a cull could see United lose more games before they start winning regularly – but the Dutchman insisted it was the right thing to do for the good of the club.
“I am not a short-term coach,” said Van Gaal. “I am thinking always for the long-term.
“You have to take measures that are not good for the short-term but is better for the long-term for the club. That may not be good for me as a coach. But I am not here for me myself as a coach – I am here for the club.
“I have given players a chance before September 1, to give them a reasonable chance to move or not - it’s their choice.
“But this process needs time. We are building up a new team and I hope we will succeed. I hope we are in the top four this season, because the Champions League suits a club like United.
“Then maybe the next step is to be champions, then the next step is to be the winners of the Champions League. But that takes time.”
United are expecting to offload Tom Cleverley to Aston Villa, although the midfielder is keen on a loan deal rather than a permanent move.
Danny Welbeck’s future remains unclear, with Tottenham keen on the £15m-rated England striker, whom United are unwilling to sell to a rival top-six club.
Valencia and Juventus have made bids for Javier Hernandez, while Shinji Kagawa is likely to return to former club Borussia Dortmund, who are keen to take him back. United have so far received no offers for midfielder Anderson, but Wilfried Zaha has made a loan switch to Crystal Palace.
And on Friday night United were on the brink of clinching Daley Blind’s £20million signing from Ajax. Blind will be crowned Dutch footballer of the year on Monday.
Did you know that we have a dedicated Man United Facebook page?Burning of Qur'ans and urinating on corpses in Afghanistan led to allegations against six US army soldiers and three marines
Six US army soldiers and three marines escaped criminal charges but received administrative punishments for mistakenly burning Qur'ans and urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, US military officials said Monday.
US military leaders widely condemned the incident revealed earlier this year. The Qur'an burning triggered riots and retribution killings: two US troops were shot by an Afghan soldier and two US military advisers were gunned down at their desks at the interior ministry.
The soldiers were disciplined for the burning of Qur'ans earlier this year at a US base in Afghanistan, and the marines were punished for their participation in a video that showed them urinating on Taliban corpses.
Discipline against a Navy sailor in the Qur'an burnings was dismissed, and the Marine Corps said it would announce discipline against additional Marines in the urination case at a later date.
The exact punishments were not disclosed on Monday but could include demotions, extra duty or forfeiture of pay. They could also stall any future advancement and end the military careers of the nine.
Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for the Afghan president, said Hamid Karzai's office would review the decisions. News of the punishments came late at night in Afghanistan.
The religious books and other materials were thrown into a pit used to burn rubbish at Bagram air field, a major US base north of Kabul.
US officials said the holy books were pulled out by Afghan workers before they were destroyed. President Barack Obama later apologised to Karzai for the incident.
The urination video, which came to light in January and appeared on YouTube, showed four marines in full combat gear urinating on the bodies of three dead men. On Monday, the Marine Corps revealed that there were also photographs taken at the time. In the video, one marine looks down at the bodies and says, "Have a good day, buddy."
The unit involved fought in the southern Afghan province of Helmand for seven months before returning to its home base in North Carolina last September.
The Marine Corps said one marine pleaded guilty to urinating on the Taliban soldiers and posing for a photograph. Another marine pleaded guilty to wrongfully videotaping the incident and posing for a photograph and a third pleaded guilty to failing to report the mistreatment of human casualties and lying about it.Southern California Road Agency Courts Bankruptcy With Highway Addition
Today, U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group released a new report, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future.” In it, they examine 11 of the most wasteful, least justifiable road projects underway in America right now.
This week we’ve previewed the report with posts about the proposed Effingham Parkway in Savannah, Georgia and the harebrained scheme to widen I-240 through Asheville, North Carolina. Here we continue with an egregious example from the Golden State.
Southern California’s toll road agency has proposed extending an existing toll highway that might eventually span inland Orange County and connect to Interstate 5. The number of cars on previous sections of the highway, however, have failed to meet projections. Also, the agency is already struggling to avoid default on its debts.
California 241 is one of several toll roads in Orange County built and operated by the legislature-created Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA). California officials enabled the creation of toll roads in the area in the late 1980s amid both a shortage of state transportation funding and the perception of insatiable demand for more highways.
Traffic on California 241, however, hasn’t met official projections for a decade. In recent years — and especially since the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 — driving on existing sections of California 241 has declined.
The TCA measures road use by counting the number of transactions conducted by toll payers on the combined Foothill/Eastern Toll Roads, which include not only Route 241 but also Routes 133 and 261. The TCA’s count shows fewer transactions in fiscal year 2014 than in fiscal 2004. As indicated by the dotted trend line below, there were about 32 million fewer transactions in fiscal year 2014 than would have been expected if the trend from 2000 to 2006 had continued.
TCA data do not allow measurement of traffic on Route 241 alone, but California Department of Transportation data do and show a similar trend: Traffic peaked in 2007 and has not shown a return to that level. By 2012, the most recent year for which data are available, traffic on Route 241 was lower than it was in 2002. (See Figure 7, below.) Traffic is 36 percent lower than it would have been if pre-2006 trends had continued. As a result, toll revenue has not met projections since 2007. The toll roads’ system-wide revenue has been so low that the TCA was recently at risk of defaulting on $2.4 billion in bonds.
Despite the trend of declining road use, the TCA has proposed a $200 million “Tesoro Extension” project to extend the road 5.5 miles, in what the agency intends to be the first stage of a 16-mile extension of Route 241. The project would add to the financial liabilities of an agency that is already in trouble.
The TCA’s financial woes come despite several attempts by the state of California to help the agency. The agreement between the Transportation Corridor Agencies and the state’s transportation agency, Caltrans, lets the TCA borrow money to build roads, and then collect tolls until its roads’ construction and operations debts are repaid, after which point the highways would become free to all drivers.
While the bonds are not backed by the state of California, Caltrans, which maintains the TCA’s roads, must approve any refinancing that would extend the TCA’s debt repayment schedule. In 1997, the TCA got permission to extend tolling on California 241 and two nearby toll roads (Routes 133 and 261) from 2033 to 2036, to get more time to pay off the roads’ construction costs. In 2011, the TCA was allowed to extend that time further, to 2040. In 2013 it asked for and received approval to extend tolling even longer, to 2053. As a result of stagnant driving and the TCA’s financial woes, drivers in Orange County will be paying tolls on these roads for decades longer than originally anticipated.
The TCA has also raised toll rates, which, Businessweek reported, “helped the agency’s revenue reach a record $111.8 million… even as the number of vehicles using the roads fell to a 12-year low.” The TCA’s finances show no sign of improvement — income has been “about 75 percent of projections,” according to Businessweek.
These facts have led critics to assail the financial case for the extension plan. An analysis by the free-market-supporting Pacific Research Institute found “there is scant evidence that the viability of the 241, which is currently questionable, is improved with the extension.” Concluding that drivers are not willing “to pay a toll that is high enough to cover all maintenance, operational, and capital investments necessary to support the road,” the Pacific Research Institute declared, “spending money on plans to extend the 241… is not justifiable and should cease immediately.”
Phineas Baxandall, senior policy analyst at U.S. PIRG, and Jeff Inglis, policy analyst at the Frontier Group, are co-authors of the report, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future.”Florentino Pérez might be an idiot, at least it when comes to matters on the field, but off of the pitch, he could be a genius. Therein lies the double-edged sword that defines the Real Madrid president in his time at the helm of the world’s biggest club.
In the past week “Uncle Flo” has been universally panned for his impulsive firing of Carlo Ancelotti, who’s been replaced today by a far less desired Rafa Benítez. The former Valencia and Liverpool coach now has the dubious honor of being the 90th coach to serve under Pérez during the embattled president’s 12-year reign.
For many fans, this may prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, though the heavy vitriol levied at Pérez could soon become an afterthought. After all, this has happened before. It’s all part of an approach that maintains a precarious balance between success and failure; part of what makes Pérez such a difficult figure to define.
Cover/Getty Images
Off the pitch, he has proven to be a visionary, Long before oil oligarchs and airline moguls became the norm, Pérez created the blueprint for the modern, global club, one that valued success off the field as much as victory on it (sometimes, perhaps even more so). For every swashbuckling, ego centric, team-debilitating move he’s made, Pérez has countered with a brilliant commercial move in the boardroom, many of which have secured the long-term future of the club.
To truly measure this, we must return to the first days of his presidency. In 2000, on the back of two Champions League titles in three years, former Madrid president Lorenzo Sanz called elections early. Like Pérez, the cigar-smoking Sanz was another president shrouded in polarization, under whom Madrid finally broke its 32-year Champions League drought in 1998. But while the team flourished in Europe, Sanz was busy running Madrid’s finances into the ground. Still, he was bullish about his re-election chances, working under the assumption that his trophy-laden reign would be enough to see him through.
But Madrid’s fans were worried, not only about the team’s league form (during Sanz’s reign, Madrid finished outside the top two three times, even finishing as low as sixth in his first year in charge) but also about the long-term stability of the club. Enter the relatively young upstart Pérez, who promised to alleviate the club’s financial burden. Perhaps even more importantly, Pérez, pandering heavily to the emotions of the fans, promised the arrival of Barcelona’s Luis Figo.
In hindsight, it was the perfect cocktail for victory. Figo’s then record-breaking move remains one of the most fascinating coups in soccer history, with Joan Gaspart, then president of Barcelona, reacting with scathing criticism: “I’ll not forget this. Whoever is responsible for this will pay for it. We’ll see how and when.” Not surprising, as Henry Winter of The Telegraph summed it up in 2000: “He [Figo] had offended not only a club but a culture. His £37 million summer move was not a transfer but an act of treachery towards Catalonia.”
Pérez lived up to his financial promises as well. For a club on the brink of financial ruin, he arranged the re-zoning of Madrid’s training ground in a deal with the Spanish government for 500 million euros, clearing Madrid’s debt and paving the way for Pérez’s first “Galácticos” project. He also completely renovated the Santiago Bernabéu, created a new sports complex in Valdebebas and opened the Alfredo Di Stéfano stadium. The Bernabéu, in particular, was a specific goal of Pérez, who had vowed to improve the comfort of the historic stadium, the quality of its facilities and to maximize its revenue.
As a result, Real Madrid is currently valued by Forbes as the richest club in the world, a distinction it’s held for the past three years. The strategies of venturing into Asia at a time when that market was relatively untapped and securing 50-50 splits of star players’ image rights were innovations. As outlined this 2006 research paper:
“After the arrival of Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid, with its huge commercial apparatus, has become responsible for approaching and negotiating with large commercial brands. Real Madrid pioneered this system in Spain, with Figo being the first player to cede his image rights to the club. The soccer players signed subsequently, football stars Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, and Beckham, have followed the same process.”
Pérez was always aware of the impact of his market-altering deals. “As far as transfers go, there is no such thing as cheap or expensive,” he said once. “A hundred million euros can be cheap and €20 million can be expensive. Zinedine] Zidane cost €73 million and he was the cheapest player.”
In terms of trophies, Pérez’s plans proved far less lucrative. Madrid’s run from 2003-2006 would be barren. Pérez eventually resigned, claiming the transfer policy that had spent prodigiously to bring so many marketable names to the Bernabéu had been a failure, and that the club needed a “change of direction.”
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When he returned in 2009, however, it was more of the same. That summer saw Cristiano Ronaldo, Ricardo Kaká and Karim Benzema join the club. Always one for the grandiose, it’s was as if Perez condensed three transfer windows into one, undertaking what was then the biggest single-window spending in world soccer history.
It was the revival of this almost Frankenstein-ian Galácticos ideology has now permeated all factions of the club. It’s toxic and dangerous, and though it’s rarely blown up visibly, the perils always bubble under the surface. It’s an approach that’s executed with the tact of a teenager messing around in FIFA 16’s career mode, constructing star-studded squads, without regard for tactical fit or chemistry. It’s a policy that leads to whistling at the stadium and coaches who feel pressure — explicit or implied — to play star players regardless of form.
This season Ancelotti seemed to have his hands tied with some of his lineups. Who is brave enough to leave a Galáctico on the bench?
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Still, to reflexively call for Pérez’s head is to defect from what Madrid has become. It ignores Flo’s duality, overlooking that the same wandering eye that can’t resist a new coach has built a financial monster. If fans wish to decry his meddling, they should then remain silent when those flashy star players sign for the club. Pérez’s aptitude to grow the club can’t be separated from his desire to inflate the squad.
But a mass call for his head is hardly likely to happen, as Pérez maintains a tight grip on supporters’ allegiances. People cried when Mesut Özil was sold, even pleading for him at Gareth Bale’s presentation (note Pérez gesturing that they should remain silent), but within weeks Isco was the toast of the town. The German became a forgotten relic of a time gone by. Ángel Di María’s loss was heartbreaking for a couple weeks, and then James Rodríguez was all the rage. Pérez knows he can play right into the emotions of a fanbase that has developed a Stockholm Syndrome-esque relationship with fickle president.
That doesn’t make Pérez’s duality any less baffling. For all his financial aptitude, Pérez can’t seem to comprehend that his methodology just doesn’t work on the field. In business, it’s good to constantly be adaptable, but a squad cannot thrive in a state of perpetual motion. Worst yet, Pérez isn’t simply throwing money at the problem. His impulsivity creates previously non-existent problems that he then tries to throw money at.
We saw it a little more than 10 years ago with the arrival of David Beckham and the subsequent sale of Claude Makalélé, then the fulcrum to Madrid’s Galáctico contraption. A bitter Pérez even offered a childish critique of the Frenchman’s game after he completed his move to what was then an up and coming Chelsea side.
“He wasn’t a header of the ball and he rarely passed the ball more than three meters,” Perez said. “Younger players will arrive who will cause Makélélé to be forgotten.”
Yeah… that worked.
Less than two seasons after that, Pérez would find himself scrambling to acquire the likes of Thomas Gravesen and Pablo Garcia – two players who occupied the same place on the pitch but possessed nowhere near the ability of Makélélé.
Even more recently we saw the jettisoning of Di María, arguably Madrid’s most important player down the stretch last year, for the darling of the 2014 World Cup, James Rodriguez. Not an exact switch, of course, but the transfers where implicitly linked.
Denis Doyle
In the long run, the Colombian will likely prove to be a brilliant transfer, he’s marketable and still only 23 years old; not to mention his brilliant debut season where he finished with 17 goals and 15 assists in all competitions. Di María, of course, struggled in England this year, but who’s to say that he doesn’t have a much better season if he’d stayed in Madrid, where it clearly seemed that he turned a corner? Di María was deemed expendable because he wanted an improved contract, something most club presidents wouldn’t mind throwing at someone who played such an integral part. But not Pérez, who worried what breaking away from Madrid’s strict wages policy would mean long term. Predictably, Madrid missed Di María heavily at times during the last campaign, especially with Luka Modrić’s injury issues.
The overall result has become a case study in ineptitude – a philosophy without an obvious end goal. How can’t he see that continuity is one of the most important and fundamental ingredients to success? That his myopic season-by-season strategy lacks any of the long-term analysis he puts into his financial decisions? He views the team in a silo, as if each season is it’s own entity and nothing existed before.
Imagine what could have been. What if Pérez’s intruding fingerprints stayed in the boardroom and not the dressing room? What if the behemoth he’s created off the field was left to match that success on it?[Complete] The maintenance is complete as of 2:05 PM Pacific Standard Time. Cash items in your inventory have been extended to cover the amount of time the game was unavailable. Please log out of Nexon Launcher and then back in before you play the game.
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When food is in short supply women are more likely to bear daughters than sons, suggests an analysis of one of the most disastrous famines in modern history.
Shige Song, a sociologist and demographer at the City University of New York, analysed data from more than 300,000 Chinese women who gave birth between September 1929 and July 1982. This period included the Great Leap Forward famine, which resulted in millions of deaths and was linked to efforts by Chinese leaders to boost industrial productivity by means including ordering workers off the land.
Starting just over one year after the beginning of the famine, Song found a sharp dip in the proportion of boys being born — falling from 109 boys born for every 100 girls in April 1960 to 104 boys for every 100 girls by October 1963, about two years after the famine ended. The ratio did not return to pre-famine levels until around July 1965.
Song's analysis, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B1 today, supports the sex-ratio adjustment hypothesis — the idea that species alter the sex of their offspring in response to environmental conditions. Unhealthy, poorly nourished males tend to have fewer offspring than similarly undernourished females, so the hypothesis predicts that, to keep populations up in times of famine, women should give birth to fewer boys.
Studies in animals including red deer2 have already lent weight to the hypothesis, but until now the evidence in humans has been “much less clear”, says Song. Findings from earlier studies of famines — the 1944–45 Dutch Hunger Winter3, 4 and the severe food shortages during the siege of Leningrad in the Soviet Union in 19425 — have been inconsistent.
Song thinks that he was able to observe the effect clearly in the Chinese famine because the food shortage was more severe, ran for longer and, crucially, affected many more people than previously studied famines, giving him a much larger data set to work with. The analysis also gives an insight into the time required to trigger the effect — about a year at minimum, he says.
Reasons for the ratio
The data that Song analysed were collected in 1982 as part of the national one-per-thousand-population fertility survey by the Chinese State Family Planning Commission, which asked women about their entire childbearing history. The survey's accuracy depends on the women reporting the sex of their children correctly, notes Song, but he thinks that they would be unlikely to forget or lie about such a thing.
Song adds that China's one-child policy — which was introduced in 1978 and has skewed sex ratio at birth to favour boys, who bring greater economic advantage to their families — is unlikely to have influenced the results. The policy was in its very early stages when the data were collected, he says, and ultrasound technology that would allow parents to learn the sex of the baby before birth and opt for selective abortion was not widely available at the time.
“I am convinced that the change of sex ratio shown in the study is causally related to famine exposure,” says Cheng Huang, a demographer and population economist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. However, malnutrition may not be the sole cause of the dip, he says. Increased psychological and physical stress were also “well documented” during the Great Leap Forward campaign, he says, and may have had a role.
“At this point we don't know the reason for the dip,” says Lambert Lumey, an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York. He suggests that Song could make a stronger case if, rather than looking only at the population as a whole, he also examined male–female birth ratios in specific Chinese regions that were exposed to the famine at different times.
Song hopes to explore that avenue using data from a 1988 survey. That study should also shed light on how the one-child policy has affected natural patterns, he says.The Government of Singapore has announced its latest initiative to draw potential invest to national small businesses and start-up firms.
On June 28th SPRING Singapore, a national enterprise development agency, revealed details of the long-awaited Angel Investors Tax Deduction Scheme (AITD), which was first announced in the national 2010 Budget. The new scheme offers angel investors the opportunity to offset 50 percent of their cash investment against their personal taxable income. The program is especially aimed at increasing investment into start-up firms in the high-tech and biotech industries.
Under the AITD program, angel investors are required to make a minimum personal deposit of SGD 100 000 (approx. USD 71 541) before March 15th 2015 to qualify for this tax deduction. Upon the completion of a 2 year holding period, investors will be eligible for the tax relief. Additionally, the investor is required to serve on the firm’s board of directors for the entire holding period of the investment. According to Spring Singapore, the condition will ensure that small businesses and start-up firms will benefit from the experience of its investors, thereby aiding their growth. To be eligible for the program, investors are also required to be approved by Spring Singapore. Under the AITD, angel investors must be either experienced angel investors, serial entrepreneurs, or experienced senior management executives.
The AITD also speculates that the investment-receiving firm will not undertake illegal or undesirable activities, speculative activities, hold investment assets, invest in real estate or carry out property development. The Government of Singapore has reserved the right to deem further activities unsuitable for the AITD program.
Explaining the economic benefits of the scheme at the 44th Action Community for Entrepreneurship, Tan Kai Hoe, Deputy Chief Executive of Spring Singapore, said, “…angel investors bring along their business skills, industry expertise and business contacts that are invaluable to help in the start-ups’ growth… this is what we want to achieve with the scheme – for innovative start-ups to tap the expertise and networks of the angel investors.”
Photo by Balaji DuttIn a new court filing, the Department of Justice revealed that it kept a secret database of telephone metadata—with one party in the United States and another abroad—that ended in 2013.
The three-page partially-redacted affidavit from a top Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) official, which was filed Thursday, explained that the database was authorized under a particular federal drug trafficking statute. The law allows the government to use "administrative subpoenas" to obtain business records and other "tangible things." The affidavit does not specify which countries records were included, but specifically does mention Iran.
This database program appears to be wholly separate from the National Security Agency’s metadata program revealed by Edward Snowden, but it targets similar materials and is collected by a different agency. The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, reported Friday that this newly-revealed program began in the 1990s and was shut down in August |
Dachau, and more than 40,000 prisoners died there. The camp was liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945.
Former Vice President Joe Biden visited Dachau during a trip to Germany in 2015.
Making his first overseas trip as vice president, Pence spoke to foreign diplomats and defense officials at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday and met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders.
Shortly after his arrival in Brussels later Sunday, Pence said the American people appreciate the nation’s alliance with Belgium and he’s looking forward to his meetings with European Union and NATO leaders on Monday.When I first opened this book my mouth just dropped. It had been years since I had seen a book typeset using LaTeX. But in an instant it made sense as the book is crammed packed with the kind of equations that would have been a nightmare to build with any other tools. Chapter after chapter has everything a really smart person needs to do curve fitting, statistical measures, differential equations, time-frequency analysis. But don't expect a play by play here. You will get the equations, set within a few dense paragraphs, with maybe a spreadsheet and a chart or two to show the results.The first chapter concentrates on the getting the most out of Excel as a tool. All the chapters that follow dig into specific data analysis techniques. Chapters two, three and four are on least squares. Chapter five and six cover the analysis in the time domain including fourier transforms. Chapter seven covers differential equations. Chapter eight returns to Excel by digging in deeper into macros. Which leads into chapter nine, where we dig deeper into basic mathematical operations. Chapter ten covers matrix operations. And chapter eleven wraps it all up by giving you some spreadsheet best practices.In University style there are also some exercises that you can do along the way if you want to tweak your brain pan a little more. To amuse myself I tried a few and I believe the book would have assessed my attempts 'wanting' if it had a voice to tell me.Where most books like this would have several authors this book has just one; Roberte de Levie. This means that the tone, style and quality of the book is consistent throughout. A fact that you will come to appreciate as the book wades in ever increasingly deep data analysis concepts as the chapters roll on.Though I would have preferred the book to have code samples in C#, I understand that the language of Excel is VBA and I guess I have to live with that. Thankfully VBA has come a long way and if you so inclined it would likely be easy to translate the code into C#, Java, or whatever else you like.The fact that one person wrote the book left me wondering, "Who is this guy?" In my minds eye I kinda of figured he would look like one of those pulsing brain guys from Star Trek. Turns out he is a professor at Bowdoin College. And his fields of study include ionic equilibria, electrochemical kinetics, electrochemical oscillators, stochastic processes, and a whole lot more stuff that almost seems made up to sound impressive.When this book isn't serving as an amazing reference for both Excel, scientific problem solving, or just insane equations it serves other purposes as well. It's a handy portable IQ test, as the count of pages you can grind through in one sitting, plus 90, is roughly your intelligence quotient. And if you fail at that you can always put a copy of the book, along with the Orange Bible, under your pillow and try to osmose your way to becoming the Kwisatz Haderach.In all seriousness, this is a great book. It represents the kind of in-depth work and research we used to see in books that came out twenty years ago. Robert is to be applauded for his work. This is an excellent resource for anyone looking to do scientific data analysis but who was unaware of the powerful capabilities that Excel provides that is likely waiting just one Startup menu click away.The book is not without fault. I would have preferred that it had been in color, or at least have one color section to show some of the more impressive visualizations that I'm sure would look great in color. In addition the index is silly short for a book that clocks in at 700 pages. But those are only minor quibbles for what is all-in-all an amazing piece of work.You can purchase Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission pageA wedding ring and a new dishwasher led to the sudden death of a Volusia County man on Thursday evening.
Jason Ferguson, 33, of Port Orange, was leaning on the metal door of a dishwasher he was installing for his brother-in-law and sister-in-law at their home in South Daytona when his wedding ring touched an element in the appliance, the South Daytona Police Department said.
Ferguson's family was getting dinner ready as he assisted them with the new appliance about 7 p.m.
"It was noticed that Mr. Ferguson was on his knees leaning against the dishwasher with his left arm extended behind the dishwasher and was not moving nor had he moved in a few minutes," officials said.
Ferguson was electrocuted and taken to Halifax Medical Center where he died upon arrival, Lt. Daniel Dietrich of the South Daytona Police Department said.
mdostis@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5735President Obama faces an uphill battle for reelection, with unemployment projected to remain high at about 9 percent through 2012 and job approval ratings in the tank.
But as an incumbent president facing no primary challenger, Mr. Obama enjoys one big advantage: fundraising. So far, he has raised $155 million for both his campaign and for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which will help his reelection effort. That’s way more than all the Republican candidates have raised, combined.
All that money allows the Obama campaign to start organizing now in the key battleground states, renew contacts with the 2008 voters, and recruit volunteers. The Republicans, meanwhile, are still figuring out who their nominee will be.
Obama’s advantage comes not just in the quantity of money he has raised, but in the opportunity for efficiency. Thus, an early emphasis on high-dollar fundraisers, because each one is a three-fer: In one fell swoop, Obama is pulling in cash for his opponent-free primary season, the general election, and the DNC. If a donor maxes out on all three, that’s $35,800.
“When you’re president, you don’t have time to do two fundraisers a day,” says Anthony Corrado, an expert on campaign finance at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “[The big fundraisers] allow them to be very efficient with the principals’ time – not just the president, but also the first lady and vice president.”
Another reason to hit the high rollers early: The $30,800 donation limit to the DNC is annual. The Democrats want their big donors to give this year, so they can ask for another $30,800 next year.
For other reasons, small donors are also critical. We don’t see a lot of press releases about the high-dollar events, but plenty of hoopla about how many folks have gone online and sent in even a few bucks.
The Obama campaign home page has a big ticker at the top counting the number of donors. On Monday, the campaign was so excited about reaching its one-millionth donor that press secretary Ben Label sent out a screen shot of the ticker close to 1,000,000 and then another one when it was at exactly 1,000,000.
Last Thursday, in an e-mail to supporters, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina highlighted the number of people who donated in the third quarter of this year – a record 606,027 – before getting to the grand total of money raised, $70 million to the campaign and DNC. Those who donated made 766,000 donations, with 98 percent of them at $250 or less. The average donation was $56.
“That support translates directly to what we can do on the ground,” Mr. Messina writes. “In the past three months we’ve grown our organizing staff by 50 percent, and opened up three new field offices every week. Thousands of volunteers and organizers made 3 million phone calls and in-person visits to voters.”
Donations from the financial services sector present a mixed picture for Obama and the Democrats. The president has raised $15.6 million from employees of that industry, according to an analysis by the Washington Post of data from the Center for Responsive Politics. But some $12 million went to the DNC.
In a head-to-head matchup against leading Republican candidate Mitt Romney, a founder of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, Obama doesn’t fare too well in financial-sector donations. The president has raised just $3.9 million, versus $7.5 million for Romney, the Post reports.
Still, Obama and the DNC have had some success in raising money on Wall Street. One-third of the president’s top 40 fundraisers come from the world of finance, including former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine of MF Global, hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer, and UBS executive Robert Wolf, according to the Post.
But the president isn’t exactly advertising the Wall Street support he does have, as he strikes a populist tone in speeches and tells reporters he understands the frustration expressed by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In the end, Obama’s healthy fundraising numbers – so far, $89 million for his campaign and $66 million for the DNC – don’t tell us much about how he will do on Election Day, Nov. 6, 2012.
“What it shows you is that he retains a loyal base of support,” says Mr. Corrado. “He’s going to amass the sums needed to be financially competitive with whoever the GOP nominee is. But the real question is going to be whether the investment he’s making now in organizing and campaigning is going to be enough to overcome general perceptions about the state of the economy.”Today’s update in Game of Thrones location filming comes to us courtesy of Hoy. The publication reports that the show will be shooting scenes for season 7 in the castle located in Trujillo, Cáceres province, Spain. The filming will take place on just one day, November 18th.
The castle in Trujillo was built between the 9th and 12th centuries, constructed over the remains of a Muslim fortress. The castle has seventeen square defense towers around it, and has preserved four of its gates.
Hoy reports that shooting will be focused on a courtyard in the castle. It appears that members of production visited the site in late July. They’re potentially looking at other locations as well in the area but those are not confirmed yet, according to Hoy.
The report further says that Cáceres is being referred to as the headquarters for filming in the area and that there will be a large number of people involved in the production there.
The new series Still Star-Crossed is being filmed in Cáceres as well, but their filming is happening at the moment, and hopefully will be finished by November. Still, be aware of any confusing filming reports and rumors that aren’t clearly about GoT– there is another production going on in the area!
And what story will be shot in the castle? That’s not known yet. In past years, we’d see a location like this and jump right to Meereen or somewhere similar in Essos, but has Game of Thrones truly left Essos behind with Dany’s departure? The yards and the walkable walls surrounding the castle also bring to mind some of the King’s Landing scenes from earlier seasons, originally filmed on Dubrovnik’s city walls. The look is not quite the same, though, so it’s unclear what we’re looking at here.
Thanks to Javi of Los Siete Reinos for help with the translation!Like many of you, the news that long time super-utility man Don Kelly had signed a minor league deal with the Miami Marlins hit me pretty hard. Out of all the great players that have come and gone for the Tigers over the last six years, Don Kelly somehow remained a constant. Kelly only posted a mere 0.4 WAR during his tenure in Detroit, and was never a starter, but managed to play a much bigger role in the hearts of most fans.
I'm a big numbers guy, and try to stay away from most sports narratives. However, with Don Kelly, I just couldn't help but throw numbers out the window. Why? I'm not exactly sure. It could've been that I remembered seeing him as a kid at Fifth Third Field when he played for the Mud Hens. It could've been because he always seemed (and turned out to be when I met him) like a genuinely good dude who enjoyed every second of being with the Tigers. It also could've been the illusion that he always came through when the Tigers needed him to.
It's hard to put into words the exact reasons as to why I love Don Kelly. I mean, he's Don Kelly! How could you not love him? Despite all the obvious reasons such as "he isn't very good," or "he has no business batting anywhere but ninth," he still managed to become one of the most notable players in Detroit over the last few years. He's Donnie Do-It-All! He's played all positions on the field except shortstop! He's Donnie Deeds, baseball's favorite do-gooder! He has his own freaking shirt line for gosh sakes! How many other back ups in any sport have their own line of shirts?
Don Kelly is one of only eight players who has been on the active roster for all four of the last AL Central Division championships. He's never been a big time contributor to any of those teams, but he was along for the ride nonetheless. Known as a Grade-A clubhouse guy, Donnie did have a few unforgettable moments while sporting the Olde English D.
In Game 5 of the 2011 ALDS at Yankee Stadium, Tigers' skipper Jim Leyland decided to hit Don Kelly second in the lineup against Yankees' starter Ivan Nova. While many fans complained about Leyland's decision, Kelly rewarded him by doing this in the first inning of the game.
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That's right, good old Donnie Baseball got the Tigers on the board with a ding dong over the right field softball porch! Former Tigers' great Delmon Young followed suit with a solo shot to left field, and the Tigers won a nail biter 3-2 to advance to the ALCS. I remember eating dinner at my dad's house in the dining room with the audio of the TV in the living room turned up so I could hear the game. When I heard the announcer's voice raise, I ran into the room to watch the magic happen. I heard my dad yell from the other room "who hit it?" I replied enthusiastically "Don Kelly!" He asked confusedly "the Mud Hens' guy?" Former Mud Hen's guy, dad, current Tigers' legend. Legends are born in October, and Don Kelly's postseason jack was storybook material.
The following October, the legend of Don Kelly continued, only this time in walk-off fashion. I remember that 2012 day at Comerica Park fondly. Sitting far out in the left field seats at the game with one of my best friends. After surrendering the lead in the eighth inning, the Tigers came to bat in bottom half of the inning down a run to the Oakland Athletics. Delmon Young started the inning with a single, and was lifted for a pinch runner. Not just any pinch runner though...
As Donnie Hustle jogged out to first base to relieve Young of his duties, I couldn't help but smile to my friend. After a Jhonny Peralta single, an Andy Dirks bunt, and a Quintin Berry strikeout, Don Kelly found himself on third with two outs. With Alex Avila pinch hitting for Gerald Laird, Ryan Cook of the A's threw the first pitch of the at-bat to the back stop. Donnie raced home as the crowd went wild. Tie game going to the ninth.
However, the Don Kelly heroics were far from over. In the ninth inning with the bases loaded, none other than Don Kelly stepped to the plate with the game on the line. I remember specifically looking over at my friend and saying "this one's over."
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Sure enough, with one swing of the bat, Don Kelly sent a Grant Balfour fastball high and deep to right field. It wasn't a home run, but it did the job. I remember jumping up and down hugging every fan that was near me. When Jim Leyland hugged him on the field in front of the 40,684 fans, I think I even shed a tear. It was pandemonium at Comerica Park, and it was all thanks to the unlikely hero, Don Kelly.
From his one time pitching appearance, to his many highlight real defensive plays, Don Kelly played the unlikely hero in many random situations. He set an example for young baseball players everywhere by working hard and battling to stay in the pros, despite never being the most talented player. Despite being cut multiple times by the Tigers, he always persevered and made it back. He even indirectly helped me through high school baseball, as I worked hard four years for a chance, and finally made the varsity roster my senior year.
At Tigerfest in 2014, I was walking around the press box when I ran into Donnie. I was honest to god never more star struck in my entire life. I was wearing my Don Kelly shirsey, and he gladly signed it on my back and signed a baseball I was carrying. I told him he was my hero, and he gave that statement an awkward chuckle. Today, that shirsey is framed in my room, with the signed baseball right below it. Someday I'll get to explain to my (future) kids why I have a framed autographed shirsey for a random Tigers' back up, but for now it's a visual reminder of getting to meet my childhood hero. It was the coolest moment of my life, and I'll always be grateful for it
It's with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to Don Kelly. You've given me personally, and many Tigers' fans an abnormal amount of inspiration for being the twenty-fifth man on the roster for the last six years. Thank you for your class and professionalism. Thank you for your heart and hustle. Thank you for a plethora of awesome internet memes based around you. Thank you for not kicking Verlander's ass when he lit your shoe on fire. Thank you for your unlikely heroics on the field, and your genuine attitude off of it. You're the one replacement level player that can never be replaced.The Wedding Singer is a musical with music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin, and a book by Beguelin and Tim Herlihy. It is based on the 1998 film of the same name. The musical revolves around Robbie, who sings at weddings, his failed relationship with his former fiancée, and his romance with a new love, Julia.
The musical premiered on Broadway in 2006 and had several US tours starting in 2007. It was nominated for the 2006 Tony Award for Best Musical. It subsequently has had many international productions.
Synopsis [ edit ]
Act 1 [ edit ]
Robbie Hart, a wedding singer, lives with his Grandma Rosie in Ridgefield, New Jersey. He and his band play a great wedding gig ("It’s Your Wedding Day"). During his usual "warm-up-the-crowd routine," Robbie proudly announces that he will be married to his beloved fiancée Linda the next day. At the wedding gig, Robbie meets a waitress named Julia Sullivan, who can't wait to get married ("Someday"). Afterward, Robbie tries to write a sweet (eventually corny) love song to Linda, with help from Julia, whom he had just met during the previous wedding ("Awesome"). The following day, however, Linda dumps Robbie at the altar, with only a note claiming that she wants to be the wife of a rock star and not just a wedding singer ("A Note from Linda"). Meanwhile, an anxious Julia goes out to dinner with her Wall Street banker boyfriend, Glen Guglia, hoping he will pop the question, which he does ("Pop!").
Robbie falls into a deep depression ("Somebody Kill Me"), but is urged by his bandmates Sammy and George, and even his grandmother ("A Note from Grandma"), to use that intense emotion to get back on his feet. However, the angry Robbie does nothing but enrage the guests at the next wedding gig ("Casualty of Love"), and he is soon thrown into the dumpster by the groom and an angry crowd of wedding guests. With some convincing from his friend Julia, Robbie does "Come Out of the Dumpster", but changes his singing gigs strictly to bar mitzvahs ("Today You Are a Man"). After the Shapiro bar mitzvah ("George’s Prayer"), Julia convinces Robbie to help her register for her wedding, as her fiancé Glen is, as usual, busy with business-related affairs ("Not That Kind of Thing").
While at the mall, Robbie and Julia meet up with Julia's cousin and best friend Holly, who convinces the "faux duo" that Julia needs to practice her wedding kiss. Robbie and Julia awkwardly and lovingly kiss, only to be interrupted by the reality that Julia is marrying Glen. After seeing the kiss, Holly decides that she should go out with Robbie. Julia, still shocked by the kiss, hastily agrees with Holly. Much later that night, Robbie, Holly, Julia, Glen, Sammy, and George go to a club in New York City ("Saturday Night in the City"). Here Robbie finally realizes that Glen is a cheater and that he, Robbie, loves Julia. Holly realizes this too and tells Robbie that Julia is marrying Glen because of his money and security. Upon hearing this, Robbie says, "Well, I‘m in big trouble, then. But maybe I could change."
Act 2 [ edit ]
The next morning, Robbie visits Glen at his Wall Street office to get a job and learn how to be like him in order to secretly impress Julia ("All About the Green"). Later, Julia and Holly recall the events of the night before and Julia begins to question if rich men are truly better people ("Someday - Reprise"). Sammy arrives and tries to woo Holly, but is given the cold shoulder, but Holly can't help but feel that despite his flaws, there is no other man who could replace Sammy ("Right in Front of Your Eyes"). Later in the evening, a "Glenified" Robbie finds Julia at his doorstep and tries to woo her. When that doesn’t work, he accuses her of marrying Glen for his material possessions. Julia is stung and walks away from Robbie, throwing a present in his face: personalized blank sheet music. After all, Julia truly cares about Robbie and wants him to sing at weddings again, especially her own.
Robbie realizes what he's done and drinks his sorrows away at a local bar ("All About the Green - Reprise"). Sammy and George go to the bar and try to convince Robbie that staying "Single" is the right thing to do. Inadvertently, Sammy and George end up persuading Robbie into going to Julia's house to tell her how he really feels. Meanwhile, at Julia's house, Julia is with her mother, Angie, trying on her wedding dress, but is having doubts about marrying Glen because of recent events with her and Robbie. Julia's mother reassures her that Glen really is "Mr. Right" and questions why Julia would leave him for a wedding singer. But Julia still has doubts. Robbie looks into Julia's window and sees her trying on her wedding dress and smiling at her reflection. He thinks it's because she's marrying Glen, but Julia is smiling only because she's imagining being Robbie's wife ("If I Told You"). Robbie goes home drunk and dazed only to find Linda in his bed, wanting him back ("Let Me Come Home"). Before she can fully apologize Robbie falls into a deep slumber. Robbie comes across Glenn in the middle of a bachelor party. Glenn invites Robbie, but Robbie simply begs him not to cheat on Julia anymore. Glenn gets defensive and condemns Robbie. Robbie gets knocked down and Glenn fires him.
The next day, Julia goes to Robbie's house to tell him how she really feels, only to find Linda instead. This scares Julia into eloping with Glen to Las Vegas. Meanwhile, Robbie wakes up and promptly kicks Linda (the "psycho") out. At Grandma Rosie's 50th Anniversary party, Robbie finds out from Holly what happened to Julia. Only then do Robbie and Julia realize that they may never see each other again, and they may never get to tell each other what’s on their minds ("Not That Kind of Thing / If I Told You - Reprise").
With urging from his grandmother and Sammy, Robbie goes to the airport and gets on the next plane to Vegas ("Move That Thang"). With the help of a group of Vegas impersonators (Billy Idol, Mr. T, Ronald Reagan, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Nancy Reagan, and Imelda Marcos), Robbie crashes Julia's and Glen's wedding at the Little White House Chapel and sings his new song to Julia ("Grow Old With You"). Glen is outraged that Robbie and Julia still have feelings for each other and blurts out that he cheated on Julia with hundreds of women. Upon hearing this, the impersonators beat Glen up, and Robbie proposes to Julia. She says yes, on one condition: "Will you sing at my wedding?" The answer is a resounding "Yes!" Later, Mr. and Mrs. Robbie Hart are wed ("Finale").
Productions [ edit ]
US
The stage musical version of The Wedding Singer had its world premiere with a limited run pre-Broadway engagement at the 5th Avenue (Seattle): officially opening 8 February 2006 (with previews as of 31 January) the 5th Avenue engagement ended with a 19 February 2006 performance.[1]
Al Hirschfeld Theater performance review
in The New York Times 28 April 2006 Something Borrowed, Something Renewed: The Return of the 80's in 'The Wedding Singer How quickly our dreary yesterdays become bright, cute and endlessly repackageable. The 1980s, it seems, are to today what the 1950s were to the 1970s (and to part of the 1980s): a supposedly more innocent, picturesquely dopey time when people wore quaint clothes, listened to infectiously inane music and danced goofy tribal dances. Ah, how we laughed. Hence the return of big hair and shoulders to fashion's runways; the preponderance of Web sites with names like "inthe80s.com"; and animated television scrapbooks, like "I Love the 80's" on VH1, where third-tier celebrities provide snarky commentary about their favorite period bands, movies and celebrities. And now, mining the same much-plundered vein, is "The Wedding Singer," the assembly-kit musical that opened last night at the Al Hirschfeld Theater and might as well be called "That 80's Show." This transformation of a Hollywood movie into a Broadway musical, a trend that appears as irreversible as global warming, is an example of recycled recycling, or second-hand nostalgia. The film "The Wedding Singer," which became a big hit, thanks largely to its romantic leads, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, was also set in the mid-1980s, but it was made in the late 1990s. Remember the 1990s? Ah, how we laughed. Would that we could recapture the charm and innocence of how we looked at the 1980s in those days. In fairness, "The Wedding Singer" - which features songs by Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin and a book by Tim Herlihy (who also wrote the screenplay for the movie) and Mr. Beguelin - is hardly a low point in a Broadway season that has given us "Lennon," "In My Life" and "Lestat." True, it consists of little more than winks and nods and quotations. Entire stretches of dialogue are composed of titles of vintage songs, which are imitated as dutifully as copyright law allows in Mr. Sklar's pastiche score. And Rob Ashford's choreography is replete with literal-minded tributes to 1980's music videos for era-defining songs like "Thriller," "Material Girl" and "Flashdance." But the show has at least a flutter of a hedonist's pulse. And if its formulaic catering to an established public appetite feels cynical, the cast members exude earnestness and good nature. They are a personable enough lot, which is not the same as saying that they have personality. For, as so often happens when good (or even not-so-good) films turn into stage shows, the first things to be jettisoned are sharp edges and authentically quirky characters. (Decades ago, when Broadway still had a mind of its own, the same process occurred when stage shows were made into Hollywood musicals.) I need utter only three words to make my case: "Saturday Night Fever." The plot of this "Wedding Singer," directed with bland peppiness by John Rando, sticks closely to that of the movie. The title character, Robbie Hart (played here by Stephen Lynch), is a would-be rock star who makes do by fronting a band that plays wedding receptions in Ridgefield, N.J. He's good at his job because he's in love with love and the notion of happily ever after -- that is, until he is left standing at the altar by his skanky fiancée (the enjoyably trashy Felicia Finley). His only hope of salvation lies in the form of Julia Sullivan (Laura Benanti), a sweet, clumsy waitress who unfortunately already has a boyfriend, a Wall Street junk bonds whiz kid (Richard H. Blake). It's a wispy plot, even by the standards of romantic comedy. What made the movie more or less bearable was Mr. Sandler, a king of low comedy, subduing his frat-house instincts to create a surprisingly gentle portrait of a loser. Plus there was the dewier-than-daybreak Ms. Barrymore, who managed to make even vomit jokes smell like roses. (The vomit jokes, by the way, have been nixed for the stage version. The four-letter words remain.) Neither Mr. Lynch nor Ms. Benanti, though obviously gifted, shows much original presence here. Mr. Lynch is best known as a performer of self-subverting comic songs that move from conventional prettiness to shock-effect humor. This would seem to make him a natural replacement for Mr. Sandler. But while Mr. Lynch is charming as Robbie in an angry or depressed mood (he does especially well by the two oddball songs retained from the movie, written by Mr. Sandler with Mr. Herlihy), he is more often called upon to be appealingly boyish, bringing to mind a less vain, less glib Ryan Seacrest. Ms. Benanti, a dark-haired enchantress in the revival of "Into the Woods," goes Barrymore blond for "The Wedding Singer" and winds up looking like that sharp-featured beacon of on-screen efficiency, Helen Hunt. This Julia has a shrewd, calculating look that makes her less than convincing as a starry-eyed klutz. On the other hand, characterization is clearly secondary in "The Wedding Singer," which is why a supporting cast stocked with sui generis talents tends to turn into a pasteboard parade. That includes Amy Spanger (a standout in the revival of "Kiss Me, Kate") as Julia's cousin, a Madonna wannabe ; Kevin Cahoon (the Childcatcher in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang") as a member of Robbie's band and a Boy George wannabe; and Rita Gardner (the -gasp! - original Girl in "The Fantasticks") as a sweet little old grandmother who raps, break-dances and talks dirty. Despite these performers' game efforts, most of their characters feel only a hair's breadth away from the posse of celebrity impersonators (dressed up as Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Ronald Reagan and Imelda Marcos, among others) who are rounded up for the show's climax in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. Only the excellent Matthew Saldivar, as Robbie's best friend (a Van Halen wannabe), registers as a bona fide character, authentically defined by his time and place. That place, of course, is Ridgefield, which has been reconstructed with affectionate cartoon tackiness in Scott Pask's sets. (Gregory Gale's even tackier costumes should by rights single-handedly put a stop to an 80's revival in fashion.) "The Wedding Singer" makes no bones about appealing directly to nearby out-of-towners. "New York is reserved for the rich and proud,/ But here comes the bridge and tunnel crowd," sings the ensemble in a number set in a Manhattan disco. But Jerseyphilia must take a back seat to the show's broader raison d'être: to create a singing, dancing version of "Trivial Pursuit: 80's Edition." This ambition filters through sight gags (Julia's fiancé totes a cellphone with an oversized battery and drives a DeLorean with a license plate that says "XMAS BONUS") and little-did-we-know jokes about subjects like Starbucks and the New Coke. It says everything about this musical's priorities that it brings down its first-act curtain not on a suspenseful or emotional moment between Robbie and Julia but on the image of a scantily dressed woman in profile in a chair (Ms. Spanger) being doused with a bucket of water. If that image doesn't make you think "What a feeling!," then "The Wedding Singer" is probably not your show. Ben Brantley[2]
The musical opened on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on 27 April 2006 (with previews as of 30 March) and closed on 31 December 2006 after 284 performances. It was directed by John Rando, with choreography by Rob Ashford, and featured Stephen Lynch as Robbie.
The First National Tour had a preview performance on August 31, 2007 at the Phillips Center in Gainesville, FL, and opened September 4, at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, AL. After playing 31 cities, the tour closed at Harrah's in Atlantic City, New Jersey on August 31, 2008. Paul Stancato directed the tour based on the original Broadway direction by John Rando and Chris Bailey provided choreography, which was based on Rob Ashford's Broadway work. The creative team also included John Mezzio (musical supervisor/coordinator/conductor), Scott Pask (scenic designer), Brian MacDevitt (lighting designer), Gregory Gale (costume designer) and Lucas J. Corrubia, Jr. (sound designer). Merritt David Janes played Robbie.[3]
A different touring production of the show opened on September 28, 2009 in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the Walton Arts Center. It continued until March 28, 2010, ending in New Haven, Connecticut at the Shubert Theatre, having traveled throughout the US and Canada. This production was produced by Prather Entertainment Group and directed by Seth Reines, with choreography by Amy McCleary.[4][5]
UK
A UK tour opened at the Manchester Palace Theatre in February 2008 starring Jonathan Wilkes as Robbie and Natalie Casey as Julia, and toured the UK through July 2008.[6]
The Curve performance review
in The Stage 16 February 2017 Even the title promises songs: adapting the 1997 film The Wedding Singer was a natural fit for a Broadway musical. And so it proves. The amiable pastiche elisions of composer Matthew Sklar's bubblegum, intentionally retro-feeling pop score feel like an amalgam of 1980s sounds from Manilow to Boy George, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper and Tina Turner (the last three of whom turn up in a parade of Vegas impersonators). It also lends itself naturally to musical comedy, with Chad Beguelin joining the original screenwriter Tim Herlihy to adapt its plot of boy-ditched-at-altar and girl-ditches-another-boy-at-wedding-chapel into a sly if rather obvious portrait of heterosexual mating rituals. But as played with an effortlessly straight (if not always straight-faced) swagger in Nick Winston's energetic, enjoyable production, the show occupies a place somewhere between Legally Blonde and the pastiche guitar rock flavours of School of Rock. Jon Robyns lends the title character wit and vulnerability in equal measure, in which he finds himself jilted but still having to entertain happy couples celebrating their wedding day. Robyns has long been a West End stalwart but here he happily moves into a league of leading players in the Killian Donnelly mould of seemingly unassuming men who have powerhouse singing, acting and dancing credentials. He is also appealingly partnered by Cassie Compton as the woman he falls in love with, while former Brookside actor (and sometime X Factor runner-up) Ray Quinn is also maturing into playing a cockily confident love rat. As so often nowadays, the establishing of place and time depends on video projections, but a frame of large light boxes around the stage contains the action neatly. -Mark Shenton[7]
A production of The Wedding Singer helmed by director Nick Winston had its premiere run at the Curve Theater (Leicester) 9 – 18 February 2017 and is scheduled to play a total of 33 UK venues from February to October 2017. This production features Jon Robyns as Robbie, Ruth Madoc as Grandma Rosie, Ray Quinn as Glenn, Cassie Compton as Julia, Roxanne Pallett as Holly, Ashley Emerson as Sammy, Samuel Holmes as George, and Tara Verloop as Linda.[8] Lucie Jones was announced as Pallett's replacement as Holly in May 2017. Stephanie Clift will play Holly at the venues that Lucie is not.[9]
International
El Rey de Bodas, the Spanish-language version (which translates as "The King of Weddings"), played in Madrid in 2007, starring Naim Thomas as Robbie, María Virumbrales as Julia and María Adamuz as Holly.[10]
The Japanese version ran in Tokyo at the Nissay Theatre in 2008,[11]
The South Australian premiere was in 2008 at the Arts Theatre, Adelaide.[12]
The Philippine production ran at the Meralco Theater in 2010.[13] The show starred Gian Magdangal.[14]
The debut German-language production played at Theater im Neukloster in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, in 2011.[15] The first production in Germany played in 2012 at the Waldbühne Kloster Oesede |
when we’ll likely be in a hazy fog those first few weeks after meeting our girl! We’ve also found this blog series to be extremely helpful, as well as this Instagram account (so many great videos!). What are other things you’ve done that has worked for your growing families?
PS! See the update to this post right here, our experience after the stork arrived.
PPS! Items from our home can always be found on the Shop Our House page, including wall colors.16 Lobbying Groups Urge Congress to Kill Broadband Privacy Rules
The telecom industry is pushing hard to have the FCC's new broadband privacy rules eliminated. The rules, passed last year, require that ISPs are transparent about what data is collected and who it is sold too, and require ISPs also provide consumers with working opt out tools. In the collection of more sensitive data (like financial), the rules require that ISPs must have consumers opt in before collection.
Needless to say, the broadband industry has been engaged in an epic hissy fit ever since the rules were announced. After all; an informed, empowered consumer is arguably less profitable.
Said hissy fit continued this month when 16 trade and industry lobbying groups fired off a letter to Congress (pdf) (hat tip, Consumerist) urging it to do its part to kill the consumer protections.
"In adopting new broadband privacy rules late last year, the FCC took action that jeopardizes the vibrancy and success of the internet and the innovations that the internet has and should continue to offer," states the groups.
“While the FCC’s Order applies only to ISPs, the onerous and unnecessary rules it adopted establish a very harmful precedent for the entire internet ecosystem."
The telecom and advertising industries want Congress to overturn the rules using the Congressional Review Act. Under the act, Congress can review and potentially overturn recently-enacted rules from Federal agencies. The FCC's privacy rules would fall within a window allowing them to be overturned.
In a letter (pdf) of their own, consumer advocacy groups urged Congress to ignore the industry and stand up for the privacy of what's supposed to be their real constituents (you).
"The ISPs’ overreaction to the FCC’s broadband privacy rules has been remarkable," notes the letter. "Their supposed concerns about the rule are significantly overblown."
"These groups now ask Congress to create a vacuum and to give ISPs carte blanche, with no privacy rules or enforcement in place," the letter continues. "Without clear rules of the road under Section 222, broadband users will have no certainty about how their private information can be used and no protection against its abuse."
The FCC moved to create its rules after it was revealed that Verizon was actively modifying user packets to covertly track user behavior around the internet. The FCC was also prompted to action by AT&T and Comcast's interest in trying to charge users a surcharge if they want to actually protect their own privacy.A South Korean airman assigned to Osan Air Base in Korea has tested positive for the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus, a contagious pathogen that has infected at least 36 people and killed three in the Republic of Korea.
The 51st Fighter Wing public affairs office on Friday issued a release saying the airman, a chief master sergeant in the Republic of Korea Air Force is at home and not showing any symptoms of the respiratory disease.
Roughly 100 of his coworkers and acquaintances also have been asked to stay home to keep the virus from spreading, according to the release.
"The virus spreads through close personal contact, such as caring for a MERS patient or sharing utensils and drink containers," U.S. Air Force Col. Krystal Murphy, commander of the 51st Medical Group, said. "We recommend everyone exercise caution and use good hygiene practices to prevent any further spread of MERS."
According to U.S. Forces Korea officials, operations continue as normal and leadership is monitoring the situation, but they believe the risk of transmission to be low.
No U.S. troops have tested positive and none of the 100 who have asked to stay home are American, added Air Force Capt. Robert Howard, public affairs chief for the 51st Fighter Wing.
Dr. Jody Lanard, a risk communication expert who specializes in disease outbreaks, said MERS is not as contagious as influenza but has sometimes spread to persons rooms away from an infected patient.
"Close personal contact means different things for different diseases," Lanard said. "For Ebola, it means direct contact with bodily fluids. For influenza, it mostly means being near a person who coughs or sneezes. For MERS, the contact doesn't always have to be close or direct; it can even mean visiting down the hall from a MERS patient's hospital room, or coming into contact with a health worker who has treated a MERS patient and not washed their hands.
× Fear of missing out? Fear no longer. Be the first to hear about breaking news, as it happens. You'll get alerts delivered directly to your inbox each time something noteworthy happens in the Military community. Thanks for signing up. By giving us your email, you are opting in to our Newsletter: Sign up for the Early Bird Brief
"That's why it is so important to cast a very wide net when tracing and quarantining MERS contacts," she said.
U.S. troops and their family members have been urged to maintain strict standards for personal hygiene to keep the virus from spreading.
U.S. Forces Korea officials on Wednesday posted guidance on the command's website and through social media channels for staying healthy, to include:
Washing hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds;
Covering noses and mouths while sneezing or coughing and properly disposing tissues;
Disinfecting surfaces;
Avoiding close contact with ill individuals, and;
Avoiding touching one's face with unwashed hands.
Murphy said U.S. Forces Korea is working with South Korean public health officials as well as U.S.-based Defense Department personnel to monitor the situation and help contain the outbreak.
The MERS virus emerged in Saudi Arabia in September 2012 and has been traced to a case in Jordan in April 2012. It is thought to have originated in bats and was transmitted to camels before jumping to humans. Nearly 1,200 people worldwide have been infected by the virus and 436 have died, according to the World Health Organization.
The outbreak in the Republic of Korea began in May when a resident returned to the country after traveling to the Middle East region. In seeking treatment in Korea, the patient visited two out-patient clinics and two hospitals, potentially exposing hundreds to the disease.
Thirty of the 36 cases are linked to one hospital.
On May 29, China reported its first case of MERS; that patient had traveled to China from South Korea and had symptoms at the time of travel.
So far, more than 1,300 people in the Republic of Korea have been quarantined.The US secretary of state will visit Moscow on April 11-12 for talks with Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said.
“On April 11-12, US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, will arrive in Moscow on a working trip. It’s his first visit to our country as the head of the foreign policy department in the [President] Donald Trump administration,” the ministry said in statement.
Read more
The US State Department has confirmed Tillerson’s Moscow trip, saying that the issues of bilateral relations, Syria, Ukraine, North Korea and the fight against terrorism will be discussed in the Russian capital.
It’s not clear yet if Tillerson will also meet Russian President Vladimir Putin during his Moscow visit.
“Tillerson is a guest of our foreign minister. He’s coming to see Lavrov and then we can go from there,” Yury Ushakov, Russian presidential aide, said when addressed on the issue.
However, Ushakov stressed that it’s not uncommon for the Russian president to meet the visiting heads of foreign departments.
Lavrov and Tillerson held their first meeting at a G20 summit in Bonn, Germany, on February 16.
At the time, both diplomats described the talks as productive, expressing readiness to try restoring relations between Moscow and Washington, which slipped to almost-Cold War levels under the Obama administration.
After the meeting, Tillerson said that “the US will consider working with Russia when we can find areas of practical cooperation that will benefit the American people.”
US Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen have urged Tillerson to meet not only with Kremlin officials, but also the opposition during his Moscow stay.
"We feel strongly that democratically-minded Russians should know that the US supports their aspirations, and as our nation's top diplomat, you are in a unique position to communicate this message," Rubio and Shaheen, who sit on the subcommittee overseeing the State Department budget, said in letter.There are many hacking communities. More than a few are at war with each other.
Inspired by Peter's Evil Overlord List, this interesting article about Sabu, and speculation about various recent events. I'm about as likely to become a 1337 Anonymous H@xx0r as I am to become an evil overlord, but I hope this will be useful to someone.
1. I'll spend my free time honing my skillz, not having pointless arguments with people on Twitter and IRC.
2. If I desperately want to leave my house but am terrified of doing so, I won't "accidentally on purpose" get arrested just so I can go outside. Instead I'll ask a family member, friend, or local mental health services provider for help.
3. In every IRC chat, I'll assume that at least one person is keeping the chat log, and will show it to my worst enemy at the worst possible moment.
4. I'll never say something like "I am invincible! I can never be dox'd or v&!" After that, the FBI usually shows up instantaneously.
5. I'll only be anonymous when necessary. If I'm lucky enough to live in a place with freedom of speech and other guaranteed rights, I'll proudly exercise my rights under my own name unless there's a good reason not to (and cowardice doesn't count).
6. If I'm angry at someone, I'll express my anger either under my real name or anonymously, but never both. For example, I won't hack a company's website right after I rant to everyone I know about how much I hate the company.
7. I'll use different nicknames for different purposes and in different internet fora, and be careful not to reveal connections between them. Hacking high-profile websites using a nickname when I once owned a domain name in the form of nickname-dot-tld is completely out of the question.
8. It may occasionally be appropriate to find vulnerable websites first, and come up with a justification for hacking them later, but I'll use this judiciously. For example, I won't hack a local hair salon website and harass its webmaster, then try to justify this by saying I saw a cop go into the salon once.
9. I won't lie and say that I'm at Defcon when I'm not, because that's just sad.
10. Actually I'll realize that no one really cares if I'm at Defcon, so I won't go on about it either way.
11. Although I'll have many typically geeky characteristics, I'll still make some effort to stay healthy (i.e., get up from the computer once in a while, and not live on Cheetos). Hacking is easier when you have good circulation.
12. I won't use addictive drugs. Or if I absolutely must use addictive drugs, I'll be careful not to learn the dox of any fellow hackers. Because one day when I really need a hit, I'd sell out anyone to get it.
13. I won't trust druggies with any important secrets, see above.
14. I won't ever talk to the police or allow them to search my stuff without a warrant. I'll watch this video about why not to talk to the police and learn what to do if an agent is at your door.
15. If I ever get angry about something, I won't suddenly turn against all the hackers I've ever known. This just ensures that someone will get angry enough to dox me and turn me in.
16. I won't fly into a fit of rage any time someone calls me a script kiddie. Haters gonna hate, and it's easy to do something stupid when you're raging.
17. If my first choice of hacking target seems too difficult/dangerous, I won't obsess over it and keep trying and putting myself at risk. There are plenty of other targets, and I can come back to the first one later - maybe I'll have increased my skills or they'll have lessened their security.
18. I'll try hacking my own website(s) once in a while and fix any vulnerabilities I find, and make sure all plugins are up-to-date. It would be hypocritical to make fun of other people for having poor security while neglecting my own.
19. If another hacker I know starts doing bizarre/rude/risky stuff like DDOS'ing his/her own sites, picking fights with people, or acting like he/she wants to get v&, I'll immediately and permanently distance myself from that person instead of continuing to work together.
20. I'll remember that there are many good causes in the world, many different ways of fighting for them, and many sources of happiness. I'll occasionally ask myself, "Why am I doing this?", and if the answer isn't a cheery, "For the lulz!", I'll check my bearing, change tack and sail for sunnier climes. Then after a well-deserved vacation, I can return as dapper/piratical/geeky/nervy/lulzy/hackery as ever. With a new nickname.
Theodora Michaels is a US attorney at law with over twenty years of experience in the entertainment industry. This article first appeared here and is republished under Creative Commons.PROVO — A woman charged with driving drunk and crashing, killing an unbuckled infant sitting on her mother's lap in the vehicle, pleaded guilty Wednesday and was sentenced to prison.
Chelsea Fuller, 30, accepted a plea deal Wednesday admitting to automobile homicide and driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, third-degree felonies. She was sentenced in the same hearing to consecutive terms of zero to five years in prison.
As part of the deal, the automobile homicide charge was reduced from a second-degree felony while an additional infraction for failure to use a child restraint was dismissed.
Early on the morning of Aug. 4, Fuller was driving with another woman, Susanne McClellan, 39, who was holding her 4-month-old daughter, Brylee, on her lap, police said. Attempting to turn at 820 N. Oakmont Lane in Provo, Fuller's car went off the road, struck a tree and tipped over.
Fuller's blood-alcohol content at the time of the crash was.233, more than double the legal limit, according to court documents.
Brylee sustained fatal injuries in the crash, including massive head trauma, neck and spinal cord trauma, and broken bones in her skull, neck and ribs, charges state.
McClellan, who hit the windshield when the car rolled, experienced skull fractures as well as cuts and broken bones in her face.
When police arrived, McClellan told them Brylee had been in a car seat and she wasn't sure who was driving, charges state. When she learned the baby had died, however, she told police she knew she and Fuller were both drunk when they got into the car, and that Fuller was the driver.
A witness who arrived at the scene told police he had offered McClellan a car seat and a ride home, charges state.
Fuller's sentence was enhanced based on two prior misdemeanor convictions. Fuller pleaded guilty to DUI in October 2012 and pleaded no contest to impaired driving in January 2012, according to Utah court records. A police affidavit filed in 4th District Court indicates she also has a history of substance abuse.
McClellan is charged with obstructing justice, a third-degree felony, and negligent homicide, a class A misdemeanor. She is scheduled for an arraignment Jan. 24.
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Related StoriesThis article has been updated. The original stated that the PR Spring Project had been halted.
The Calgary-based company building a controversial $60-million oilsands project in Utah that has been targeted by environmentalists is slowing construction, but not because of the protesters.
US Oil Sands Inc. announced late Thursday it would slow building its 85 per cent complete PR Spring Project after a review prompted by low oil prices and delays caused by the closure of Utah-based operations of two key contractors.
“The oil industry is facing one of the most challenging environments it’s ever seen and it is prudent for us to adjust our construction plan accordingly,” said chief executive Cameron Todd in a statement.
“But the company’s value proposition remains sound. Low oil prices accentuate the need for a new approach in our industry.”
The company said it needs additional capital for commissioning, start-up and operations to validate its unique extraction technology. It plans to employ a biodegradable solvent made from citrus fruit, thus avoiding the use of tailings ponds, at the 2,000-barrel-per-day project.
It said it has not completed its previously announced US$10 million royalty financing and is looking at other options, including issuing shares.
US Oil Sands noted it has about $10 million in cash on hand, enough to survive into 2017 if oil prices don’t recover before then, adding the project cost is not expected to exceed $60 million even if there’s a lengthy delay before full construction resumes.
dhealing@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/HealingSlowlyFourth time lucky? A girly Sinead O'Connor marries online boyfriend of three months in quickie Vegas wedding
Sinead O'Connor only announced two days ago she would wed her unknown boyfriend of three months in a ceremony on Thursday.
And true to her word, the eccentric Irish singer tied the knot for the fourth time in a quickie Las Vegas wedding on her 45th birthday yesterday.
She walked down the aisle with Irish therapist Barry Herridge, who she met online, at the famous Little White Wedding Chapel in Nevada's Sin City.
Sealed with a kiss: Sinead O'Connor married boyfriend Barry Herridge at the famous Little White Wedding Chapel yesterday, days after announcing their engagement
The ceremony lasted just 15 minutes and the couple invited no guests - even Sinead's four children - apart from the cameramen.
She described the ceremony on her blog as 'Too glorious for words', and promised to tell all when she was less distracted enjoying time with her new husband.
She also posted a picture of an empty chapel, with the caption:.Photo of the celebrity guests at our wedding'.
Sinead dressed unusually girly yesterday and looked to have lost weight, looking more like her Nothing Compares 2 U heyday in the 1990s.
The tomboy wore a strapless pastel pink maxi dress and chunky pink metallic and silver heels.
But she failed to conceal her numerous tattoos, including a massive design on her chest, and is still sporting her trademark shaved head.
In love: Not much is known about Barry, a therapist she met online after a desperate plea by the singer for a decent man to come forward
Joining the group: The Little White Chapel in Las vegas has been the venue of choice for several celebrity weddings, including Britney Spears, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, and Judy Garland
Barry wore a suit over a pink shirt that matched Sinead's dress and had a red rose in his lapel that matched her bouquet.
The couple looked smitten with one another, sharing a passionate kiss for the cameras and staring into each other's eyes as they walked sown the isle after being pronounced husband and wife.
They cuddled up on a pink Cadillac - reminiscent of Elvis Presley's iconic car - before heading to a hotel in the gambling capital of America.
Sinead even shed a few tears as she sat with her new husband before they headed to a hotel for their wedding night.
She has only been dating Barry, who works as a counselor for people with addiction problems in Dublin, for three months.
Scrubbing up nice: The singer shed her usual tomboy image for this pretty strapless pink maxidress and chunky heels, but failed to cover her numerous tattoos Happy tears: The singer got extremely emotional as she sat with her new husband after the ceremony was over He replied after she wrote on her blog in September that she was'sex-starved' and asked potential suitors to apply online. 'Barry sent me this wonderful email, which just took my heart away,' she told the Irish Independent before flying out from Heathrow to the U.S yesterday. 'It had to be him... I had no intention of getting married again but Barry was extremely persuasive. He proposed to me on every single date we have had since August. He is extremely persuasive -- and other unprintable things.' The pair met up at a coffee shop and apparently 'talked for hours'. Barry revealed the contents of the email to the paper.
We did it! The newly married couple snuggled up on a pink Cadillac
'I was getting off a train at Connolly Station one morning when I saw this woman acting strangely on the platform,' he said.
'At first I didn't know what she was doing, and then I realised she was playing hopscotch. It wasn't Sinead but a business woman in a suit and in her 30s, just having a bit of fun.
'I wondered why more women that age weren't doing the same thing? And it struck me that this was exactly what Sinead was doing with her search for love, having fun, and I told Sinead about this woman in my first email.'
He added: 'I love Sinead more than anyone I have ever met, or anybody I will ever meet. I am going to look after her.'
Sinead said she didn't want a big ceremony.
'I've been married before, but I've never had my dream wedding in Vegas. I wanted to do it there because it's casual, quick, not religious and, most of all, very romantic.
'People always complain, 'you never invited me to your wedding', but I prefer casual weddings. I'm so happy.'
Pucker up baby: The couple shared several passionate kisses for the cameras and stared into each other's eyes lovingly after being pronounced husband and wife
Igniting the flame: Sinead said Barry proposed on every single date they had until she said yes The newlyweds have no time for a honeymoon as Sinead is due back in Dublin tomorrow to attend the aftershow party for a concert marking the 50th anniversary of Amnesty International. The Little White Chapel has been the venue for several celebrity weddings, including that between Britney Spears and childhood friend Jason Alexander in 2004. Other notable ceremonies include the wedding of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in 1987, that between Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow in 1966, and Judy Garland and Mark Herron in 1965. Nice ride: The car is a tribute to Elvis' pink Cadillac. Some websites claim he married Priscilla at the chapel in 1967, but they actually tied the knot at the Aladdin Hotel Still in the spotlight: The cameras were invited inside the chapel to capture every moment of the wedding Sinead announced on her blog on Wednesday she was marrying Barry in an 'undisclosed location', although reports speculated they would be walking down the aisle in Las Vegas. She wrote: 'With enormous joy myself and my beloved boyfriend Barry Herridge will be getting married tomorrow, December 8th 2011 at 'an un-disclosed location' in my absolute dream wedding ceremony.
'We will post a photo or two here on the site as soon as possible afterward. Very happy girl. : )' Just wed: The newlyweds leave the chapel and head for their hotel
Keeping occupied: The lovebirds at their hotel afterwards where Barry played with an iPad Wonder who is paying the bill? Sinead whipping out her credit card at the hotel She also posted a picture up of the couple beaming at the camera. The hitmaker kept the happy news quiet when she appeared on the Ian Dempsey breakfast radio show on Today FM the day before, telling him she had no gossip to share. But Barry rang back into the show on Wednesday morning to reveal all to the host about the wedding. Now that's taken care of: Sinead and Barry share a joke as the cameras snap away at their every move Still going at it: The couple couldn't keep their hands off one another as they smooched in the hotel Ian wrote on his Twitter page following their chat: 'So Sinead O'Connor was holding back yesterday. Boyfriend Barry Herridge got back to us today to reveal that they will wed tomorrow. 'And it's Sinead's birthday tomorrow too. Congrats to them both. And Sinead's new album is sounding great too.' The singer shocked the nation by writing a series of candid blog posts on her website earlier this year, detailing specific requirements she was looking for in a man. She wrote in September that she was in 'desperate need of a very sweet sex-starved man,' but specified that they'must be no younger than 44, must not be named Brian or Nigel, must be blind enough to think I'm gorgeous, has to be employed and he has to like his mother.'
Getting weddy for marriage: Sinead O'Connor and her fiance Barry Herridge are pictured at Heathrow airport heading to Las Vegas to tie the knot
Failed marriages: The controversial star wed third husband Steve Cooney in 2010 but less than a year later it was over
And it seems she's found her perfect partner in Barry after a whirlwind romance.
The singer has been married three times before - including to music producer John Reynolds, journalist Nicholas Sommerlad and most recently to Steve Cooney, who she wed in July last year, but divorced in April.
She has four children from various relationships.
How she was: Sinead O'Connor in her hey day in her video for hit song Nothing Compares 2 UTrailPosse For tribes, new designations are culturally monumental Obama created national monuments at Bears Ears and Gold Butte, sites with huge significance to Native Americans.
This story was produced in collaboration with The Trail Posse, which focuses on the relationship between people of color and Western public lands.
One of the great fallacies associated with the outdoors is that diverse peoples are not present in or connected to it. If people are sincere in wanting to see us there, they need only look. Even if regarding our history in the most colonial sense — picking the country’s cotton or fruit, building its railroads, or even stewarding its ancient spirit — we have had a highly visible presence outside.
What white America mostly means when it declares the absence of certain communities from the outdoors is that we tend not to be engaged in a manner consistent with mainstream recreational behavior: We usually are not the geared-up seekers of solitude in the wilderness who have banded together in longstanding green organizations to protect the right of that pursuit, as well as the state of the planet that suits us best.
We are, however, children of nature whose identities, without question, are imprinted upon the American landscape. No president has understood this better than Barack Obama.
On Dec. 28, Obama created national monuments at Bears Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada, sites with huge significance to Native Americans. He has established 25 national monuments, and expanded several others, during his eight years in office. Of those, 17 have cultural significance to disenfranchised groups.
Preserving public lands of course means shielding them from the scarring unpleasantries of civilization such as development and energy extraction. Displacement and destruction of culture are other, albeit less-considered, byproducts of urbanization and its evil twin, gentrification. These are the main weapons this country has utilized to create a legacy of disconnection between communities of color, LGBTQ and women — and their use and stewardship of public lands.
Bureau of Land Management
The Native American connection to public lands has been particularly toxic, a tendril withered by centuries of deception, conquest, forced relocation and assimilation, and the attempted extermination of culture and identity. Obama has worked hard to heal this relationship, establishing nine monuments to protect traditional tribal sites and artifacts. The latest designations, Bears Ears and Gold Butte, tackle longstanding wounds with significance, creativity and abundant symbolism.
The Hopi, Navajo, Uintah & Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni have ancestral ties to Bears Ears and joined in an inter-tribal coalition to advocate for the monument designation. Each tribe will contribute a representative and participate in the management of the national monument. They also will be guaranteed access to the land for tribal ceremonies, firewood and plant collection, as well as hunting, grazing and outdoor recreation.
Monument status adds a much-needed legal layer of protection for cultural assets at both sites. The region that includes Bears Ears has suffered from decades of looting. In 2009, the FBI and Bureau of Land Management conducted the largest Native American artifact sting operation ever in Blanding, a town on the eastern border of the new monument site. Volunteer patrols have uncovered several major incidences of looting in the area during this year alone.
Gold Butte, the monument in Nevada, has experienced similar damage to local Native cultural sites and artifacts. Nearly all federal oversight of the region ceased for two years, after an armed standoff in 2014 between BLM agents and rancher Cliven Bundy, who was arrested earlier this year while supporting the occupation by his sons of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. In the vacuum, the Friends of Gold Butte, a non-profit support and advocacy group, documented numerous incidents of vandalism of historic sites, deliberate destruction to habitat, illegal water developments and vehicle incursions, and damage to signs and fencing intended to deter illegal trespassing.
Still, supporters have characterized last week’s designations as “reparations” or “give-backs.” There is danger in this as it stirs the “take-ours-back mentality” of the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion,” already amassed against the designations, federal land control and Obama’s aggressive use of the Antiquities Act. Such characterizations also run counter to the belief of most Native American cultures that land belongs to no one and therefore to everyone.
Instead of a re-allocation, Obama’s monument designations should be viewed as a re-engagement of Native Americans and other members of underserved communities. The demographics of our country are quickly changing, and the impacts of global warming mount even more swiftly. We need everyone activated, through support and stewardship of public lands, in the fight to protect the planet from the worst of ourselves. The best path to reconnecting disenfranchised communities to public lands is improving access — not so much in the physical sense but as a construct of historically and culturally manufactured barriers.
I belong to the Next 100 Coalition of civil rights, environmental justice, conservation and community organizations that advocates for greater inclusion of diverse communities in public lands. We commonly hear that no one has barred our access. “I’ve never seen a whites-only sign at a national park,” is a common refrain. While this is true, the actual barrier is the continued conceit of white culture as the American default. The pervasive exclusion of people of color, LGBTQ and various gender backgrounds from the self-perpetuating “picture” of the outdoors is a powerful deterrent.
Relevancy is a most effective and available tool for improving access. If a young brown person can see her former selves on a butte overlooking a place like Bears Ears, she will feel attachment and inclination to protect it, and places like it. From César Chávez and Pullman to Mojave Trails and Stonewall, the Obama administration has been masterful in sewing relevancy back into the fabric of our protected public lands.
More opportunities exist in places like the Castner Range in Texas and Grand Canyon region in Arizona. America does not have to build these places for us to come. We already are there.
Just see us.
Contributing editor Glenn Nelson is the founder of The Trail Posse, which documents and encourages diversity and inclusion in the outdoors.
Get our Tribal Affairs newsletter ↓Bruce Springsteen Details Depression In Long-Awaited Memoir
At 66, Bruce Springsteen is still The Boss. Even though his legendary status in rock 'n' roll is secure, he’s not resting on his laurels. He’s still writing new music and he’s a top concert draw, putting in a touring schedule people half his age couldn’t keep up with.
It’s easy to assume that with all of his success, Springsteen would feel on top of the world, but in his new autobiography, Born to Run, available September 27, Springsteen wrote about his struggles with depression, which has haunted him for much of his life, he recently told Vanity Fair.
Much of Springsteen's working class appeal came from his ability to understand and capture the human condition in his writing. He told Vanity Fair the feeling of struggle “never leaves you. I always picture it as a car. All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?”
He may as well have been talking about his own mental health battles, because even with all the acclaim, fortune and success, Springsteen said that depression “crushed” him.
Springsteen revealed that his father, Doug, came from a troubled family where mental illness was common. Springsteen’s father drank, and was a “bit of a Bukowski character” who could be alternately distant and abusive. Seeing his father struggle, Springsteen worried that he himself could suffer a similar fate. “You don’t know the illness’s parameters,” Springsteen said. “Can I get sick enough to where I become a lot more like my father than I thought I might?”
While Springsteen has been in therapy since the early '80s and used antidepressants, he admitted he went through some bad stretches when he hit his sixties. But through it all, he still produced his acclaimed 2012 album Wrecking Ball, in which he included a song about his mental struggles titled, simply, “This Depression.”
In writing about his depression, Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, told Vanity Fair, “If I’m being honest, I’m not completely comfortable with that part of the book, but that’s OK. He approached the book the way he would approach writing a song, and a lot of times, you solve something that you’re trying to figure out through the process of writing … So in that regard, I think it’s great for him to write about depression. A lot of his work comes from him trying to overcome that part of himself.”
Springsteen also still loves to tour, which he calls the “trustiest form of self-medication.”UPDATE 5.45pm: VICTORIAN Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu is suing the Labor government over an election TV ad which he says 'gravely injured his reputation'.
A writ was issued to the Labor Party about 2pm today after the Government failed to agree to Mr Baillieu's demand to withdraw the ad by noon.
The advertisement, which began running at the weekend, focuses on the opposition leader's former position as a director of real estate company Baillieu Frank Knight, which managed the sale of some schools and a hospital in the 1990s.
In the writ, Mr Baillieu alleges "the defendants knew that the meanings conveyed by the words were false".
He says in the writ he "will continue to suffer loss and damage" as a result of the ad.
The matter is due to go to court in February next year.
Meanwhile, the Greens have been attacked for running a Bob Katter impersonator ad that "demeans and humiliates'' country people.
The outcry comes as the state's peak forest industry's lobby group warns ghost towns will pop-up across regional Victoria if the Greens win the balance of power in the state election with up to 10,000 country jobs at risk.
The Victorian Association of Forest Industries is calling on voters to put the Greens last on Saturday.
The Country Alliance attacked the Greens for producing an online video that depicts a slow-talking farmer and his wife as a disgraceful attempt to stereotype country people as slow-witted, uncouth and bigoted.
"It confirms our view that the Greens are city-based lefties with a total disregard for the sensitivities and challenges facing country people,'' Country Alliance candidates Dennis Patterson said.
He called on the Greens to immediately remove the offensive video and apologise.
But Greens MP Greg Barber rejected the call for an apology and offered for Bob Katter to come down and star in the next video.
"We outpoll the Country Alliance three-to-one even in their best seats so I think we know what country people want more than they do,'' he said.
This comes after a Galaxy poll shows more than 70 per cent of Victorians want the level of native forests harvested to remain the same or increase.
VAFI chief executive Philip Dalidakis warned up to 24,000 direct jobs, including 10,000 in regional areas, are in danger under the Greens plan for the immediate ending of logging in the catchments and high conservation value forests.
He highlighted the regional towns of Dartmoor, Heyfield, Cann River and Rosedale as facing a bleak future.
"If the Greens get their wish, these towns and many like them will have their heart and soul ripped out,'' Mr Dalidakis said.
"Our Association believes a vote for the Greens is a vote for higher unemployment and lower standards of living.''
The Galaxy poll - paid for by VAFI - also shows an amazing 28 per cent of Green voters do not support their own party's forestry policy.
Mr Dalidakis warned the Greens' plantation solution was unrealistic and highly contradictory as it takes 30 years for the trees to grow.
VAFI is calling for a new approach to develop a sustainable native timber industry for the future.
Click here to watch the video and tell us what you think below
Originally published as Baillieu sues over Labor attack adAmy Mainzer (born January 2, 1974) is an American astronomer, specializing in astrophysical instrumentation and infrared astronomy. She is the Deputy Project Scientist for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Principal Investigator for the NEOWISE project to study minor planets[1] and the proposed Near Earth Object Camera space telescope mission.
Life [ edit ]
Mainzer received a B.Sc. in Physics from Stanford University with honors (1996), an M.Sc. in Astronomy from California Institute of Technology (2000), and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles (2003).
Her research interests include asteroids, brown dwarfs, planetary atmospheres, debris disks, star formation, and the design and construction of new ground- and space-based instrumentation.[2]
She appears in several episodes of the History Channel series The Universe.[3] She also appears |
was built out of precast concrete in a reddish, sandstone-like hue, and the Italian theme continues with its surroundings, which comprise a piazza area around the building. International firm Safdie Architects and local practice DA Architects can take credit for the attention-grabbing design, as well as that of the Federal Office Tower and commercial resources that, along with the Public Library, make up Library Square in Vancouver.
30. Bodleian Library – Oxford, U.K.
The English city of Oxford isn’t short of attractive buildings, but arguably one of its most appealing is the Radcliffe Camera, which initially played host to the Radcliffe Science Library but would later come to operate as a reading room for the Bodleian Library, one of the oldest of its kind in the whole of Europe. The building is an exceptional piece of 18th-century architecture that was named for its benefactor, medic John Radcliffe, and was opened over 250 years ago in 1749. Influential British architect James Gibbs was responsible for its design, which follows the English Palladian style. The structure itself is the oldest example of a circular library in the country.
29. Abbey Library of Saint Gall – St. Gallen, Switzerland
Its wide-ranging collection of manuscripts – some of which date back to the 8th century – helps make the facility at the Abbey of Saint Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland one of the most significant monastic libraries on the planet. Along with the rest of the abbey, it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for being “a perfect example of a great Carolingian monastery.” With its areas of magnificently carved wood, paint and stucco, Austrian architect Peter Thumb’s opulent Rococo hall is said to be Switzerland’s superlative example of Baroque design. All of this makes visiting to peruse any of its 160,000-plus volumes a pleasure.
28. Cerritos Millennium Library – Cerritos, California, USA
Cerritos’ Millennium Library is pioneering in more than one way. As well as being the USA’s first building to be covered with titanium paneling, it has also been termed the first “Experience Library,” because the facility puts a spotlight on fascinating themed areas, stunning art and interesting architecture. There is a children’s library that incorporates a marine aquarium with coral and sharks, while for the more grown-up scholar, the Old World Reading Room is inspired by 19th-century European design and is outfitted with chandeliers and a fireplace. Californian architects Charles Walton Associates were responsible for the sleek and shining addition to the city, and the building was finished in 2002.
27. Harold Washington Library Center – Chicago, Illinois
While it may be a bit of an eye-catcher, the giant, ten-story public Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago was sympathetically designed by local architects Hammond, Beeby and Babka – now HBRA Architects – to echo the sensibility of other buildings in the city, like the 19th-century Rookery. The local firm combined Beaux-Arts features such as the building’s granite bottom and attractive red brick, although its decorative elements are more Mannerist in style. The library itself was completed in 1991, but two years later it was given another arresting feature through its Kent Bloomer-designed aluminum acroteria – figures of wise owls and seed pods, the latter a nod to the Midwest’s agricultural tradition.
26. University of Coimbra General Library – Coimbra, Portugal
Gilded finishes are plentiful in the beautiful, Baroque Joanina Library, which is part of the University of Coimbra General Library in Coimbra, Portugal and was completed in 1728. Its three rooms – which contain 70,000 older volumes stacked over two stories – are divided by elaborate archways, while the hard oak used for the shelving inside should keep it free from insect infestation. Other animal residents seem to be assisting with this potential problem, too: a camp of bats roosting inside the walls emerges at night to gobble up insects that might be prone to gorging on the volumes. And elsewhere, heavy walls and doors made of teak help to keep heat and humidity to a minimum, further preserving the cherished library’s treasures.
25. Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Victorian-era American architect Frank Furness was responsible for the design of the University of Pennsylvania’s stunning Fisher Fine Arts Library, which was completed in 1890 and was built in the Venetian Gothic style. Its smart red brick exterior recalls the look of Philadelphia factories of the period. Meanwhile, a touch of literary flair is added through the Shakespeare inscriptions in the windows, which were selected by Furness’ brother, a distinguished scholar of the Bard’s work. The building has received praise from none other than acclaimed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who described it as “the work of an artist.” It is now a National Historic Landmark.
24. Strahov Monastery Library – Prague, Czech Republic
Anyone who wishes to consult the Bible when in Prague should head to the Strahov Monastery. Its magnificent Theological Hall is home to thousands of editions of the holy book. Moreover, the library hall’s glorious stuccowork makes the space a real head-turner. It was completed in 1679, with the nearby Philosophical Hall – which was constructed to house books from the Louka Convent in South Moravia – joining it around a hundred years later. After communists seized the abbey in 1950, it became the Memorial to National Literature, although the library, along with other parts of the complex, was renewed and restored following the Velvet Revolution.
23. Braunschweig University of Art Library – Braunschweig, Germany
The stunning, glass-fronted cube that houses the Braunschweig University of Art’s library shows what can be done with a bit of recycling and a lot of ingenuity. Completed in 2002, the structure took materials from the Mexican pavilion at the Expo 2000 World’s Fair, which was staged in the German city of Hanover. The pavilion’s creator, AIA Gold Medal-winning Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, worked in conjunction with the Braunschweig branch of KSP Engel & Zimmermann (now KSP Jürgen Engel) to design the building, which also contains a red cube inside – tilted in relation to the exterior sheath – that accommodates its books.
22. Philological Library, Free University of Berlin – Berlin, Germany
The Faculty of Philology library at Berlin’s Free University is arguably at its most attractive by night, when interior lighting glows through its transparent partitions to create a checkerboard effect. This four-story structure is the brainchild of world-famous global firm Foster + Partners. The architects’ bulbous, aluminum and glazed-panel creation encourages light-imbued spaces – ideal for study – through the sinuous layout of its floors, which subside or expand in relation to the area above. The distinctive shape of the library, which was completed in 2005, has inspired its nickname: apparently, some call it “the Berlin brain.”
21. Edith Cowan University Library and Resources Building – Joondalup, Australia
The striking Library and Resources Building at Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University was intended to be a home away from home. Its architects, Perth-based Jones Coulter Young, have explained the premise of the design, saying, “Everyone studies differently, and if the most comfortable way to study is at home with a laptop, a coffee, a friend and a snack, why shouldn’t that be possible here?” To this end, the building – completed in 2006 – contains a coffee shop and what the designers term a “research and learning lounge,” complete with beanbags and ottomans. Elsewhere, the white and yellow louvers of the exterior not only contribute to the library’s unique aesthetic, but also in part act as a sunscreen.
20. Kansas City Central Library – Kansas City, Missouri
The enormous bookshelf that makes up part of the Kansas City Central Library was the brainchild of architects CDFM2 – now national firm 360 Architecture. The feature acts as a major focal point of the building as well as providing a big clue as to what’s inside. Named the “Community Bookshelf,” it skirts the south side of the library’s parking lot, and its 22 titles – constructed from signboard mylar and standing some 25 feet tall – were suggested by avid local bookworms. Two of its volumes even offer a nod to the area’s history. The Community Bookshelf was completed in 2004, the same year the Central Library found its current home.
19. St. Florian Monastery Library – Sankt Florian, Austria
Gorgeous aesthetics – including a breathtaking ceiling fresco – and towering stacks of books make entering the main library hall at St. Florian Monastery in Sankt Florian, Austria a treat for any bibliophile, or indeed anyone who appreciates attractive Baroque architecture. Austrian architects Jakob Prandtauer and Johann Gotthard Hayberger were responsible for the design of the library, which was completed in 1750. A significant portion of its 150,000-volume collection dates back to before the 19th century. And many of the titles inside are even older than the facility that houses them, with almost 1,000 “incunables” – items printed in Europe prior to 1501. Although the library is open to the public, given the antiquity of much of its contents, it’s understandable that it is a reference-only facility.
18. Halmstad City Library – Halmstad, Sweden
Nature was a key inspiration for the sleek City Library in Halmstad, Sweden, as Copenhagen-based architects schmidt hammer lassen designed what is fundamentally a unique open area that interacts with the surrounding foliage. Completed in 2006, its columns are intended to visually communicate with the nearby trees, with the atrium curving around a sizable chestnut on the site. The library’s transparent glass and concrete façade allows visitors a glimpse at its facilities, which include a café and exhibition space. Meanwhile, its grass roof adds to the verdure but also acts as eco-friendly insulation while minimizing drainage needs.
17. Stuttgart City Library – Stuttgart, Germany
Köln, Germany-based Yi Architects’ design for Stuttgart’s City Library is an awe-inspiring exercise in minimalism. What it lacks in gilded pillars and intricate ceiling frescos, it more than makes up for with gleaming, pristine surfaces and staircases – as well as airy, light spaces. It harks back to days gone by with a design that takes its influence from the Pantheon in Rome. And the bright white “heart” of the building – a multi-floor meeting area – has a linearity that harmonizes with the grid effect created by the many apertures in the cubic exterior. The library was opened to the public in 2011.
16. Tama Art University Library – Tokyo, Japan
In 2007 the Tokyo architecture world was privy to a spectacular new addition in the form of the library for Tama Art University, designed by local architects Toyo Ito & Associates. Its signature concrete and steel arches were haphazardly positioned but are there for good reason: in addition to providing the structure with its arresting appearance, they aim to give the sense that the slanted floor and front garden continue right into the building. Students can browse books or study beneath the arches, enjoy music or movies in the “temporary theater,” and even take shelter and read magazines while waiting for the bus that stops outside.
15. Vasconcelos Library – Mexico City, Mexico
Inaugurated in 2006, Mexico City’s Vasconcelos Library was designed by local architect Alberto Kalach in part to “[reorganize] available human knowledge” – and the result is astounding. Stacks of stark shelving grace the 409,000-square-foot “megalibrary,” slicing it into neat sections, and what was once a desolate swath of the city has been transformed into a sleek temple of learning. As well as being integrated with a botanical garden, the facility acts as a showcase for the work of some of Mexico’s artists, among them Gabriel Orozco’s Ballena, which sits in the main lobby. The sculpture is made from a whale skeleton found on a reserve, and according to Orozco, it was inspired by the building itself.
14. James B. Hunt Jr. Library, North Carolina State University – Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Oslo-based architectural firm Snohetta made its mark in Raleigh in early 2013 with the opening of North Carolina State University’s James B. Hunt Jr. Library. The designers teamed up with local architects Pearce Brinkley Cease & Lee (now merged with Clark Nexsen) to develop the glimmering wonder, which is arguably as eco-minded as it is attractive. Thirty-one percent of the materials used in the library’s construction are recycled in origin, lighting is natural or solar energy based, and the majority of the timber was taken from sustainable forests. Both the facility’s green features and design have wowed industry insiders, and the striking structure was honored with an American Institute of Architects/American Library Association Library Building Award in 2013.
13. State Library of New South Wales – Sydney, Australia
The public State Library of New South Wales holds the honor of being the oldest institution of its kind in Australia. It was originally established as the Australian Subscription Library in 1826, but it wasn’t until 1942 that its permanent home was ready. Designed in a Classical style by Sydney architect Walter Liberty Vernon and completed in 1910, the magnificent sandstone Mitchell Wing is one of the architectural highlights. Its main reading room has tall bookshelves around its perimeter and skylights that flood the space in light. The library also acts as a cultural pinnacle, for it houses an exceptional array of Australiana donated to New South Wales’ citizens by the facility’s namesake, collector David Scott Mitchell.
12. Bibliotheca Alexandrina – Alexandra, Egypt
While the fabled Royal Library of Alexandria may have been destroyed hundreds of years ago, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, inaugurated in 2002, aims to rekindle some of its scholarly spirit. Norwegian architects Snohetta’s cascading 11-level design gives the library room for eight million books, as well as four museums, the same number of art galleries, and even a planetarium. The gray Aswan granite walls are etched with 120 different scripts to pay tribute to the richness of human language, while the reading room is situated under a stunning glass roof – which is angled towards the ocean and measures almost 525 feet across.
11. Seattle Central Library – Seattle, Washington, USA
Seattle Central Library’s distinctive and gleaming geometric design ensures that it stands out in the Pacific Northwestern city. Architect Rem Koolhaas is one of the names attached to its design. Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and local firm LMN Architects sought to envelop the 11-story building with “a continuous layer of transparency,” which was orchestrated using a skin of glass and metal. The finished article houses an estimated 1.45 million tomes and other items, as well as more than 400 computers available for public usage. The building, which opened in 2004, won praise from The New Yorker, which declared it “exhilarating,” and was also included on the American Institute of Architects’ list of America’s 150 favorite structures back in 2007.
10. Mafra National Palace Library – Mafra, Portugal
The library at Portugal’s Mafra National Palace, as well as the rest of the amazing Baroque/Neoclassical complex, might never have existed – as King John V promised only to build it if his wife bore him children. Fortunately, she did and, true to the king’s word, Mafra National Palace was completed by 1730. More than 35,000 leather-bound volumes – some over 500 years old – line the walls of the lovely Rococo library, which was designed by Portuguese architect Manuel Caetano de Sousa. Interesting, these tomes are preserved by bats, which are let out at night to feed on insects that might put the library’s treasures in jeopardy.
9. Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, University of Chicago – Chicago, Illinois, USA
The University of Chicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library has been given the nickname “The Egg,” owing in part to its distinctive oval shape. Local architectural firm Murphy/Jahn came up with an innovative solution to fitting the library into an already crowded campus: it plunges 55 feet underground. There’s space for 3.5 million volumes inside the library, with one million of them contained in metal bins and archival racks as part of the facility’s state-of-the-art automated retrieval system. Meanwhile, thanks to the domed transparent glass roof, light streams through to the reading room, yet solar heat and excessive UV rays are kept largely at bay.
8. Melk Abbey Library – Melk, Austria
The library at Melk Abbey in Austria was paid tribute to by Umberto Eco in the author’s famous murder mystery novel The Name of the Rose, and given the immense beauty of the place, it’s perhaps easy to see how it could have inspired such an honor. Chief among its prettiest features is the ornate, richly colored ceiling fresco by Austrian painter Paul Troger that represents Faith. Elsewhere, wooden sculptures symbolize the tetrad of faculties, Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Theology and Medicine. Approximately 90,000 volumes are contained within the lovely-looking facility, not to mention many medieval manuscripts and 850 incunables, making it historically important as well.
7. National Library of Sejong City – Sejong City, South Korea
International firm S.A.M.O.O. Architects & Engineers designed the swooping façade of the National Library of Sejong City to evoke a book page that has been turned over. Its designers dub the four-story structure with room for over three million books an “e-brary,” to reflect its mix of digital and analog facilities. Yet while inside it’s packed with conference and seminar spaces, a dining area and masses of information, its exterior hasn’t been neglected and features sculptures, trees and a book-themed park. The innovative library opened its doors in late 2013.
6. Handelingenkamer – The Hague, The Netherlands
The Handelingenkamer library may belong to the Dutch Parliament, but its eye-catching Renaissance design – courtesy of government building architect C.H. Peters – was actually creatively influenced by the aesthetics of China. This can be seen in its red, green and gold color scheme as well as the dragonheads dotting the walls and the shapes formed by the ironwork. The library’s distinctive spiral staircase is an attractive way to access the three upper levels of books. Meanwhile, the leaded glass dome roof imbues the interior with natural light and helps ensure that whichever of the tens of thousands of books visitors peruse, they can see and read it with ease during the day.
5. Monastery of San Francisco Library – Lima, Peru
The Monastery of San Francisco in Lima adds a welcome dash of brightness and beauty to the Peruvian capital city. The monastery was finished in 1774, and although it was significantly damaged in an earthquake that struck in 1970, it remains an eye-catching instance of Spanish Baroque architecture, with an entrance carved of granite that has gone on to impact the design of other holy buildings. Around 25,000 texts of some vintage can be found in the famous library here, including a Bible that dates back to around 1571 and a copy of the earliest Spanish dictionary issued by the Royal Spanish Academy.
4. Wiblinglen Abbey Library – Ulm, Germany
If there’s anything to be taken from this list, it’s that if you want to find a truly stunning library, a visit to a monastery probably won’t disappoint. Even amid some stiff competition, the facility in the north wing at Germany’s Wiblingen Abbey is perhaps one of the most spellbinding of its kind in the world. Franz Martin Kühn’s gorgeous ceiling paintings top a brightly colored, ornately decorated space that was designed by Christian Wiedemann and is deservedly said to be renowned throughout southern Germany for its Rococo style. It was completed in 1744.
3. Mediatheque Sandro Penna – Perugia, Italy
A glance at the Mediatheque Sandro Penna may lead one to believe that an alien craft has crash-landed in the Italian city of Perugia. However, this space-age building, completed in 2004, is actually the work of Milan-based architects Studio Italo Rota. Its pink glass exterior glows at night, and its namesake – the Perugia-born poet Sandro Penna – is given a tribute through excerpts of his writings that cover the see-through panels of the façade at the entrance. Inside, there’s also a touch of color courtesy of furnishings in the children’s area and couches, while sound insulation helps create an environment perfect for reading and study.
2. Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology Library – Galway, Ireland
Dublin architects de Blacam & Meagher used a progressive technique to design the attention-grabbing building that houses the library at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in western Ireland, as the dynamic thermal modeling technology employed in its development was still in its infancy at the time. The elaborate sails on the exterior aren’t just aesthetically pleasing, but also serve a useful purpose, since they let in daylight while shielding the interior from too much sunshine. This reduces the need for mechanized climate control systems, cutting expenses and making the library – which contains 600 reader spaces – more eco friendly.
1. Admont Abbey Library – Admont, Austria
Situated on the Enns River in southeast Austria, the library of Admont Abbey, constructed in 1776, is breathtaking in its beauty. Baroque architect Joseph Hueber was tasked with developing the design for the dazzling hall. Resplendent in gold and white hues, the library is crowned with seven cupolas whose ceiling space is adorned by Bartolomeo Altomonte’s frescos representing different phases of human knowledge. It is also noteworthy for Joseph Stammel’s “Four Last Things” sculptures, which bring to life depictions of death, heaven, hell and the Last Judgment. Around 70,000 of the monastery’s approximately 200,000 volumes are stored here, and it is the largest library of its kind in the world.In classical antiquity, the cornucopia (from Latin cornu copiae), also called the horn of plenty, was a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers or nuts.
In mythology [ edit ]
Poster of cornucopia for California
Mythology offers multiple explanations of the origin of the cornucopia. One of the best-known involves the birth and nurturance of the infant Zeus, who had to be hidden from his devouring father Kronus. In a cave on Mount Ida on the island of Crete, baby Zeus was cared for and protected by a number of divine attendants, including the goat Amaltheia ("Nourishing Goddess"), who fed him with her milk. The suckling future king of the gods had unusual abilities and strength, and in playing with his nursemaid accidentally broke off one of her horns, which then had the divine power to provide unending nourishment, as the foster mother had to the god.[1]
In another myth, the cornucopia was created when Heracles (Roman Hercules) wrestled with the river god Achelous and wrenched off one of his horns; river gods were sometimes depicted as horned.[2] This version is represented in the Achelous and Hercules mural painting by the American Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton.
The cornucopia became the attribute of several Greek and Roman deities, particularly those associated with the harvest, prosperity, or spiritual abundance, such as personifications of Earth (Gaia or Terra); the child Plutus, god of riches and son of the grain goddess Demeter; the nymph Maia; and Fortuna, the goddess of luck, who had the power to grant prosperity. In Roman Imperial cult, abstract Roman deities who fostered peace (pax Romana) and prosperity were also depicted with a cornucopia, including Abundantia, "Abundance" personified, and Annona, goddess of the grain supply to the city of Rome. Hades, the classical ruler of the underworld in the mystery religions, was a giver of agricultural, mineral and spiritual wealth, and in art often holds a cornucopia.[3]
Modern depictions [ edit ]
In modern depictions, the cornucopia is typically a hollow, horn-shaped wicker basket filled with various kinds of festive fruit and vegetables. In most of North America, the cornucopia has come to be associated with Thanksgiving and the harvest. Cornucopia is also the name of the annual November Food and Wine celebration in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. Two cornucopias are seen in the flag and state seal of Idaho. The Great Seal of North Carolina depicts Liberty standing and Plenty holding a cornucopia. The coat of arms of Colombia, Panama, Peru and Venezuela, and the Coat of Arms of the State of Victoria, Australia, also feature the cornucopia, symbolizing prosperity.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels, the witch Tiffany Aching was briefly in possession of the Cornucopia which is badge of office of Summer, when she contracted avatarism as well as ped fecundis during the events of Wintersmith. This causes problems by spurting out food and animals, including a massive flock of chickens.
The motif of the cornucopia is used in the book series The Hunger Games. In the eponymous gladiatorial games described in the series, a large horn-like cache filled with weapons and equipment is placed at the starting point: this cache serves as the focal point of fighting during the games' first minutes, and is even called the "Cornucopia". In the film adaptation, the national anthem of Panem, the series' primary setting, is called "the Horn of Plenty", which is mentioned several times in the lyrics.
The horn of plenty is used for body art and at Halloween, as it is a symbol of fertility, fortune and abundance.[4]
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Anyone who was wondering what would happen to M-Audio's controller keyboard line now that Avid has sold it didn't have to wait long to find out: it's just been expanded with the launch of the Axiom A.I.R. Series.
Billed as advanced MIDI controllers, these new Axiom-branded models support the HyperControl mapping technology and come in 61-, 49-, 25- and 32-note varieties (the last model has mini keys).
Each keyboard has slightly different specs, but rest assured that pads, knobs and faders are on the agenda. Each keyboard also ships with Ignite, a new music creation application that promises a different kind of interface and a way of making music in a more 'organic' fashion.
Find out more in the press release below; the Axiom A.I.R. keyboards will be available from October, though we don't yet know how much they'll cost.
M-Audio Axiom A.I.R. press release
M-Audio introduces the Axiom A.I.R. Series, a full line of advanced MIDI keyboard controllers, which includes the Axiom A.I.R. 61, Axiom A.I.R. 49, Axiom A.I.R. 25 and the Axiom A.I.R. Mini 32.
The Axiom A.I.R. series represents the latest evolution of best-in-class keyboard controllers from M-Audio. Featuring exclusive HyperControl™ automatic control mapping technology and groundbreaking Ignite music creation software, Axiom A.I.R. controllers provide an instant, fully immersive music creation experience. Everything, from their ultra-responsive keys and pads to their multi-color buttons and long-throw faders, has been crafted to provide an unobstructed evolution of musical ideas, from conception to expression.
"M-Audio Axiom A.I.R. takes an instrument-focused approach that makes it easier than ever before to create, capture, and share your best musical ideas. With better control mapping and integration with Ignite music creation software, we're providing total control over your music tools while removing many of the barriers that slow down your creative process," said Andrew Ramm, Director of Product Management for M-Audio and A.I.R. "This, combined with the products' stylish and ergonomic designs makes Axiom A.I.R. controllers both highly desirable and uniquely capable in the world of instrument controllers."
The Axiom A.I.R. Series' name is derived from both the market-leading M-Audio Axiom product line and from A.I.R. Music Technology, the German-based developers of acclaimed, industry-standard virtual instruments and audio processing tools. The Series' name signifies an unprecedented level of integration and virtual instrument control never before achieved in a line of MIDI controllers.
Each Axiom A.I.R. controller has its own unique characteristics, giving musicians a choice between four premium music creation solutions that are optimized for different creative preferences. The Axiom A.I.R. Mini 32 is made for powerful music creation on the move, with an ultra-mobile form factor, 32 velocity-sensitive mini keys, eight trigger pads and assignable low-profile knobs; the Axiom A.I.R. 25 is a hybrid keyboard/pad controller, giving beat makers and groove creators space-efficient yet comprehensive control with 16 backlit drum pads, illuminated knobs and synth-action keys; the Axiom A.I.R. 49 provides comprehensive control over any DAW for musicians of all types with an expanded layout of long-throw faders, illuminated buttons, backlit pads and 49 synth-action keys; and the Axiom A.I.R. 61 delivers all the same expanded features as the Axiom A.I.R. 49 but with 61 premium keys featuring TruTouch™ semi-weighted action for the keyboardist who demands a satisfying and responsive playing experience.
Each Axiom A.I.R. controller will come with Ignite, a new software with a revolutionary approach to music creation. Developed by A.I.R. Music Technology, Ignite is a discrete, standalone music ideation and creation software built from the ground up to spark creative ideas and enable musicians to build songs in an organic fashion. With Ignite, musicians are set free from the rigid and stale interfaces of the past. Ignite conforms to the user's creative process and represents a fresh way of thinking about music creation—a way that complements and energizes a musician's natural workflow. Ignite helps musicians unlock creative energy and construct songs in an instinctive and satisfying way.
The Axiom A.I.R. Series will be available from musical instrument retailers in mid-October of this year. M-Audio will unveil the Axiom A.I.R. Mini 32 at booth# 800 at the 2012 Summer NAMM show in Nashville, Tennessee from July 12-14.Mumbai, March 23 (CINEWS): Deepika Padukone who opened up about her battles with misery a year ago and went ahead to dispatch the establishment “Live Love Snicker” to make mindfulness on emotional well-being in India, is taking her crusade to the following level.
The performing artist, right now shooting for her Hollywood debut, XXX: Return of Xander Cage, in Toronto, will kickstart a year-long mindfulness crusade ‘You Are Not The only one’ on March 23.
“A year ago, I talked up about my own particular battle with wretchedness as I felt I couldn’t simply look as individuals experienced what I had endured and we chose to dispatch ‘You Are Not The only one’ with a thought to bring issues to light and to empower understudies and educators to distinguish indications of uneasiness and melancholy,” the 30-year-old on-screen character said, including that the crusade will begin from her place of graduation, Sophia’s Secondary School in Bangalore, and will cover more than 200 schools.
“We trust that schools can be the principal line of barrier for enthusiastic and emotional wellness issue in our childhood. We could likewise associate the schools to directing associations and autonomous advocates on the off chance that they need such offer,” she some assistance with adding.
The crusade will start in a couple schools in Spring with a lion’s share of the projects lined up for June, when the new scholastic session begins.
“Our point is to bring the issue of psychological well-being from the shadows, of being talked about in quieted tones, to our drawing rooms,” said the on-screen character who took prescription and advising to battle her wretchedness.Mike Weber only touched the ball 15 times in his team's 58-0 romp over Rutgers on Saturday but the redshirt freshman made the most of his opportunities. The Big Ten noticed.
The conference named the Ohio State running back its Freshman of the Week on Monday morning. Weber ran 14 times for a career-high 144 yards and a touchdown and also caught one pass for three yards. He also ripped off a scoring run of 46 yards and another 49-yard jet after hurdling a defender.
The #B1G Freshman of the Week is @OhioStateFB RB Mike Weber, who had 14 carries for 144 yds & a TD against Rutgers pic.twitter.com/awx7DwhdHf — Big Ten Football (@B1Gfootball) October 3, 2016
Weber recorded his Big Ten-leading third 100-yard game against the Scarlet Knights and the 10.3 yards per carry average helped him push his season rushing total to 495 yards, second only in the conference behind Northwestern's Justin Jackson. The Wildcats have played five games already this season, however, while Weber and the Buckeyes played their fourth of the year on Saturday.
Weber's 495 yards and 7.3 yards per carry average through four games trumps 2015 Silver Football winner Ezekiel Elliott's pace in Ohio State's national championship season two years ago.NEW YORK/LONDON/CAIRO (Reuters) - Evidence now suggests that a bomb planted by the Islamic State militant group is the likely cause of last weekend’s crash of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, U.S. and European security sources said on Wednesday.
An Egyptian military helicopter flies over debris from a Russian airliner which crashed at the Hassana area in Arish city, north Egypt, November 1, 2015. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany
Islamic State, which controls swathes of Iraq and Syria and is battling the Egyptian army in the Sinai Peninsula, said again on Wednesday it brought down the airplane, adding it would eventually tell the world how it carried out the attack.
The Airbus A321M (AIR.PA) crashed on Saturday in the Sinai Peninsula shortly after taking off from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on its way to the Russian city of St Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board.
The U.S. and European security sources stressed they had reached no final conclusions about the crash.
Britain on Wednesday cited the likely possibility of an explosive device as the cause of the crash, but made no mention of any group that may have been responsible.
“We have concluded that there is a significant possibility that the crash was caused by an explosive device on board the aircraft,” Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said after a meeting of the government’s crisis response committee chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron.
Hammond’s remarks came as Britain prepares to host a visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi this week.
Egypt, a close ally of the United States and the most populous Arab country, dismissed a similar claim of responsibility for the crash by Islamic State on Saturday.
“It is believed to be an explosion but what kind is not clear. There is an examination of the sand at the crash site to try and determine if it was a bomb,” said an Egyptian source who is close to the team investigating the black boxes.
“There are forensic investigations underway at the crash site. That will help determine the cause, to see if traces of explosives are found.”
Sisi has described Islamist militancy as an existential threat to the Arab world and the West and has repeatedly called for greater international efforts to combat the militants.
Hammond said Britain is “advising against all but essential travel by air through Sharm el-Sheikh airport. That means that there will be no UK passenger flights out to Sharm el-Sheikh from now.”
Remarks earlier on Wednesday by Britain’s Cameron, who was due to hold talks in London with Sisi on Thursday, of concerns “the plane may well have been brought down by an explosive device” drew criticism from Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.
He told CNN he was “somewhat surprised” by the British statement.
“This is a matter for the investigation to clarify and we should not prejudge or take any measures that might have implications,” Shoukry said. “Implication also that the fact that a very large number of Egyptians who rely heavily on the tourist industry.”
Britain said it was working with airlines and Egyptian authorities to put in place additional security and screening measures to allow Britons in Sharm el-Sheikh to get home, but that would take time and there would be no flights returning from the resort on Thursday.
“SOMETHING STOWED” ON BOARD
A Russian aviation official said the investigation was looking into the possibility of an object stowed on board causing the disaster.
“There are two versions now under consideration: something stowed inside (the plane) and a technical fault. But the airplane could not just break apart in the air – there should be some action. A rocket is unlikely as there are no signs of that,” the Russian official said.
Security experts and investigators have said the plane is unlikely to have been struck from the outside and Sinai-based militants are not believed to possess the technology to shoot down a jet from a cruising altitude above 30,000 feet.
Any evidence that a bomb knocked the plane out of the sky would deal a heavy blow to tourism in Egypt, a pillar of the economy that is struggling to recover after years of political turmoil, and would also undermine Sisi’s assertions that Cairo has brought under control Sinai Province’s insurgency.
Sinai Province has killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police since Sisi, as army chief, toppled Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in 2013 after mass protests against his rule.
Sisi was elected president last year on promises he would stabilize Egypt and rebuild its shattered economy. Critics say his tough crackdown on Islamists will only create more radicals in Egypt, which has fought militants for decades.
REVENGE FOR RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES?
Investigators have extracted and validated the contents of the flight data recorder, one of two so-called black boxes recovered from the Russian plane, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said.
The ministry said the second black box, which contains the cockpit voice recorder, was partially damaged and much work was required to extract data from it.
Sinai Province has said it had brought down the airliner |
en and Trunks frozen solid and manages to thaw them. Potage, the planet's only inhabitant, appears and greets Monaka, and the intergalactic criminal Gryll confronts the group with his henchmen. Goten and Trunks realize Potage is in trouble, and easily defeat the henchmen, forcing them to retreat. They later reappear, holding the key to the seal of the "Superhuman Water". Goten and Trunks prepare to take the key back, but they remain still, realizing that Monaka has been taken hostage. Goten is tied up along with Trunks and Potage, as Gryll opens the seal to the Superhuman Water. Later, Goten and Trunks are being chased, while carrying Potage and Monaka, by Gryll and his henchmen, who are now purple. Trunks is then knocked down by an attack, and is attacked again, but he is saved by the timely arrival of Vegeta and Jaco, while Vegeta deflects the attack.
Trunks witnesses Vegeta easily defeating Gryll's henchmen, and being absorbed by the "Superhuman Water" and an exact copy of him is created. Trunks is about to be absorbed by Copy-Vegeta next, but Copy-Vegeta hesitates before attacking him. He is then saved by Jaco. Trunks later retreats while carrying Potage and a drained Vegeta, while Goten carries Monaka, and Jaco also retreats. In a secure spot, Potage explains the truth about the "Superhuman Water", which is actually a weapon named Commeson, and they learn that Copy-Vegeta must be defeated in order to save Vegeta's life. Copy-Vegeta later confronts the two boys, who then fuse into Gotenks and engage in battle with him. Even as a Super Saiyan 3, Gotenks cannot deal any damage to Copy-Vegeta, and is defeated by a few blows. Fallen, Goten and Trunks are about to be finished off by Copy-Vegeta, but they are saved by Goku's timely arrival. Trunks tries to inform Goku to defeat Copy-Vegeta quickly, as he is an impostor.
Trunks watches as Goku and Copy-Vegeta fight an evenly-matched battle. As Vegeta begins to instinctively cheer for his copy to win, Trunks reminds his father of the circumstances. Both Goku and Copy-Vegeta then transform into a Super Saiyan Blue, and Trunks realizes that the fight could take too long, and asks Potage if there is another way to save Vegeta. Potage answers that if the core is crushed, the copy will become weaker. Trunks takes Potage to find the core of Commeson, which was Copy-Gryll, while Goten and Jaco accompany them. They notice that the core has left the spot where Copy-Gryll was knocked into. As the Commeson core tries to attack Goten, Trunks and Jaco blast it, which passes through it. They then run away from Commeson. Trunks tells Jaco, who is worried about a copy of him being made, that he would quickly defeat his copy. Trunks begins to notice Vegeta's ki disappearing, and rushes to his father's side. As Goku and Copy-Vegeta's battle causes a bright light and a shockwave, Commeson tries to attack Trunks from behind, but Vegeta stands in-between them as his body is disappearing. Monaka casually and nonchalantly steps on the core, which destroys it, and damages Copy-Vegeta, and Goku is able to finish him off. With Vegeta's life saved, Trunks happily hugs his father. The group then say goodbye to Potage as they teleport back to Earth, where Trunks is confronted by Bulma about sneaking onto a spacecraft.
"Future" Trunks Saga
Main article: "Future" Trunks Saga
Trunks, along with Pilaf, Mai and Shu, are being taught mathematics by a private instructor at Capsule Corp. Pilaf (in a complicated manner) explains to Trunks a math equation he did not know how to solve. As they are eating lunch, Trunks sees Future Trunks' Time Machine land and inspects it, also noticing Future Trunks inside, beaten and unconscious. As Bulma lays Future Trunks in a bed, Trunks is confused on who he is, especially after Pilaf and the gang's assumptions on Future Trunks being his secret illegitimate brother and his parents being a part of a "scandal" as the two boys look very similar. When Bulma calls Goku and Vegeta and tells him about Future Trunks, Trunks is even more confused, as they are also referring to him as "Trunks". As Trunks asks who Future Trunks is, Bulma orders him to power up so Goku can lock onto his ki and teleport back to Earth. When Goku arrives back with Senzu Beans, Bulma feeds one to Future Trunks, and is surprised to see him suddenly wake up and attack Goku.
Trunks is later shocked when he learns that the older Trunks he is seeing is himself from the future. Future Trunks and Trunks greet each other. Trunks is later seen checking out the Time Machine with the Pilaf Gang as he is told by his future counterpart they really first met when present Trunks was a baby, to his surprise as Bulma confirms it. He later watches Goku and Future Trunks spar, cheering his other self on and being amazed when the latter actually pushes Goku back.
In the anime only, he witnesses the arrival of Goku Black and the latter's confrontation with Goku before he is sent back to the future though not before the villain destroys the time machine. He is shown to be somewhat jealous when Mai falls in love with Future Trunks. When the time machine is completely repaired, Trunks proudly exclaims that he helped. He then watches as Future Trunks, Vegeta and Goku travel to the future.
Later on, Trunks is laying outside as he is surprised to see the time machine return, with the beaten Goku, Vegeta and Future Trunks falling out of it. He calls for Bulma as he is greatly worried for his father and his condition. After the trio are given Senzu Beans, Trunks asks them if they were unable to defeat Black, he was quite shocked to learn from them that not only Future Zamasu was his ally and immortal but also transformed into a powerful Super Saiyan called Super Saiyan Rosé.
After Whis, Beerus, Shin, and Goku head to Universe 10 to check on Gowasu's current state, Trunks is seen confronting his future self asking him if he is sulking because he was defeated and despite that he is still calling himself Trunks. Future Trunks told him politely to leave him alone, Trunks begins to feel very disappointed of his future self and that because of his current state he is unable to protect Future Mai. He told him if he is frustrated and angry, he must defeat him in a battle with Trunks making the first move by punching his future self, he quickly orders Future Trunks to stand up as he is supposed to be a Saiyan. After a brief fight, Future Trunks finally realizes what his past self is trying to teach him: win no matter who the opponent is. He shakes hands with him and thanks him for bringing him back to his senses.
Suddenly, Beerus and the group arrives and informs them of Zamasu's demise and that the future should be safe, however, Future Trunks still feels uneasy about the situation and decides to head to the future to check things out. Trunks asks him the reason why he doesn't believe Beerus, Future Trunks responds that it's true he is himself from the future but the future he came from is from a different timeline. Future Trunks begins to explain how his life is different from his and that he never met his father as he was killed six months after his birth by Future Android 17 and Future Android 18 and that Future Goku also died due to a heart Virus, and that the first time he came to past he gave Goku the heart medicine so it would save him. Trunks asks him why Goku isn't alive in the future despite being saved in the past and that he learned from a book that if you change the past you change the future. Future Trunks told himself despite the world he came from and his world are the same, they become different worlds as the two of them are living a different life. Trunks feels convinced about his future self suspicions. He later bides farewell to his future self wishing him the best from the bottom of his heart.
Later, the time machine reappears, Trunks sees that everyone except Future trunks are inside the time machine, Trunks and the Pilaf Gang assumed that the future is safe. However to their shock, Bulma reveals that the future remained the same as it was with Zamasu and Black causing destruction of the cities and that Future Trunks acted as a shield so they could return to the past in order to find a plan to defeat their enemies. Upon witnessing Goku's critical injuries and his father's serious behavior, Trunks went to visit Goten who was asleep at the that time. After telling the situation to his best friend, Trunks and Goten decided to go the future in order to help his future self, but Bulma simply told them that they won't be of any help and that they should trust Goku to handle this situation. Soon after Chichi, Gohan, Piccolo and Krillin arrive at Capsule Corporation, Bulma tells everyone about the threats that are terrorizing Future Trunks' world. Upon learning about their enemies' increasing power and immortality and how they are hard to defeat in a head on battle, Piccolo suggested the use of the Evil Containment Wave to seal their enemies, which gives everyone hope as they found a way to save the future.
Trunks later sees Infinite Zamasu appear in the sky laughing manically but soon witnesses his destruction by Future Zeno. After Zamasu disappears, the time machine appears and he greets his parents before becoming infatuated by Future Mai. He soon sees Goku bring back Future Zeno to the present timeline. Later at dinner, he hears Whis tell Future Trunks about the possibility of going to a new timeline. After Bulma protests this since it would mean dealing with Zamasu again, Trunks asks if things would keep going like this. His pleas are calmed after Whis says he will go to that timeline and warn Future Beerus before he disappears due to the Supreme Kai's death and have take care of Zamasu. Trunks then bids his counterpart farewell, telling him to come by and visit as his other self agrees.
Universal Survival Saga
In the anime, Trunks is at his house, telling Goten his now pregnant mother is due to give birth any day and he is excited about becoming an older brother. He asks Goten to not go training with Goku for the upcoming Tournament of Power because he is bored training with Mai, Shu, and Pilaf. Goten agrees to stay but Trunks says he can't go far because of the baby. They have a quick spar when Goku unsuccessfully asks Vegeta to participate in the Zeno Expo and Trunks punches Goten who looked away to greet Goku. While recruiting members for Universe 7, Shin suggested Trunks and Goten because they have potential but Goku refuses because their rivalry would be an issue and they tend to rush into battle straightforwardly. Shortly after, Trunks is told by Vegeta to finish getting the baby's room ready. Trunks orders Goten to put the bed is different spots until Goten complains it doesn't matter where it goes. Gohan comes into the room to tell Trunks the baby has been born, much to Trunks' surprise. Because Gohan forgot to ask if the baby is a boy or girl, Goten says having a brother would mean Trunks can train with him, and Trunks favors this more. Gohan however says having a sister is fun too because she will be cute like Pan, but Trunks says he prefers training and therefore prefers a brother. When Trunks meets his sister Bulla, he is disappointed she is a girl and refuses to hold her at first but Bulma puts her in his arms. Trunks becomes soften as Bulla smiles at him and he asks Vegeta if he wants to hold her. Vegeta asks the baby to be given to him because Trunks isn't holding her properly, prompting Trunks to say Vegeta knows a lot about that. The next day, Trunks tries to change Bulla's diaper but ends up calling Vegeta for help. After Vegeta effortlessly changes the diaper, Trunks smiles and laughs with Bulla and remarks she feels better.
An hour before the tournament is scheduled to begin, Trunks questions why Frieza's picture is on the team member board. Goku tells Bulma that Trunks and Goten don't know about the tournament and Vegeta says them knowing will be a bother. Bulma lies to Trunks that everyone on the board is invited to a celebration for Bulla's birth but when Trunks points out Frieza is evil, Vegeta lies that Frieza has redeemed. Goku then asks Trunks if he wants to guard Android 17's island from poachers so 17 can attend. Trunks excitedly agrees and travels with Goten, Krillin, 18, and Marron to the island. 17 leaves with Krillin and 18 whereas Trunks stays on the island with Goten and Marron.
In the manga, as he is heading to meet Team Universe 7 after having dropped Goten and Trunks at Monster Island, Android 17 realizes he forgot to tell them about the Cell Jrs. At the same time the Cell Jrs. encounter Goten and Trunks, one attacks Trunks, prompting the two Saiyans to become Super Saiyans. A seven on two battle then breaks out until one of the Cell Jrs. notices that Trunks and Goten are wearing ranger uniforms, the fighting stops and the Cell Jrs. apologize and leave.
In the anime, Trunks reappears during the final moments of the saga, revealing Goten and himself lived up to their end of the deal and protected 17's island, only suffering minor injuries from their ordeal. Later he celebrates his baby sister's birth and then with Goten presumably is trusted to watch 17's island again as he takes his family on a cruise.
Peaceful World Saga
Main article: Peaceful World Saga
Ten years pass after Kid Buu's defeat, 18-year-old Trunks has a new younger sister named Bulla. He is forced by Vegeta to compete in the 28th World Martial Arts Tournament. Although in the original Japanese dialogue, there is no mention of a girlfriend by Trunks, in the Funimation dub, Trunks promises Goten that he would introduce him to his girlfriend after the tournament (of which his girlfriend is also watching). He ends up being paired up with Otokosuki, who manages to startle Trunks by visually flirting with him. Trunks is not seen competing in this tournament, due to Goku and Uub's leaving the competition at the end of the series. He is seen, however, holding Pan's arm in victory over defeating Goten.
Dragon Ball GT
Black Star Dragon Ball Saga
Main article: Black Star Dragon Ball Saga
Five years later, Trunks is now 23 years old. Trunks has become the President of Capsule Corporation. Although it pays quite well (so well that he can afford his own chauffeur and servants), he does not like the job and its overwhelming responsibilities, and will often slip out the window and fly away.
Forced by Vegeta, Trunks goes on a journey with Goku and Pan (who replaced Goten) in a spaceship designed by Bulma. Later, a piece of the ship falls off and Goku, Trunks, and Pan are forced to crash land on the planet Imecka to get the parts needed to repair the ship. Groups of merchants then swarm Trunks and the others to the point that they take refuge from them in the Gold Star Hotel. They then realize they are being charged every second for everything in the hotel. They escape without paying and stumble upon the house of an old couple and their children. They talk about Don Kee the ruler of the planet and how he mistreats his rule; just then his men came and repossessed the old couple's house saying they were behind payment. Goku suggests that they go and fight Don Kee but the couple says that is impossible because of his grand army. On their way back to the ship Trunks drops the Dragon Radar and it is swallowed by the small T-2006 series robot nicknamed Giru who says that he can not give the radar back to them because it is already integrated into his system. Trunks becomes furious and starts chasing after Giru.
Meanwhile, Goku notices the ship being dragged away by Don Kee's men. He tries to use Instant Transmission to teleport them to the ship but after two failed attempts realizes that he can not use it in his small body. They are forced to travel to Don Kee's palace on foot to recover their ship. Pan decides that they will use a stealth operation to recover the ship and would only result to fighting as a last resort. After briefly sneaking around, a large rock falls on Trunks' head and Giru starts making noises that alarm the guards. The guards open fire on the group. Pan jumps in the carrying car while Goku moves the ship onto the car, and Pan drives the ship out of the palace with Goku and Trunks. But while escaping, Don Kee's henchmen Gale and Sheela fire a combined Energy Wave at Goku, who deflects it back with ease towards Ledgic, Don Kee's right-hand man, who recognizes them as Saiyans.
"Man, this guy really needs to go out more."
— Trunks, after being called cute by Zoonama
Goku and the others escape but Trunks says they have to go back into town for more parts due to Pan's "reckless driving". Once they reach the town, everyone hides and Trunks finds the three of them on Imecka's most wanted list. While running from Don Kee's men they fall into the house of a nice old couple who offer them food after realizing Goku and company mean no harm. They say that Don Kee made it a law that no one is allowed to own a ship so that no one would escape the planet including the old couple. Pan gets fed up and convinces Goku and Trunks to go face Don Kee head on. They turn themselves in to the police and get brought to the palace. Once there, Goku, Trunks, and Pan incapacitate Gale, Sheela, and all of Don Kee's guards, and they make their way into Don Kee's throne-room. Don Kee sicks Ledgic on the fighters after capturing Pan in an energy chamber. Trunks charges at him a bit angry, but Ledgic moves too quick and takes him down. Worried, Goku tells Trunks to help Pan while he will take over. After a short fight, Goku defeats Ledgic, and the gang then takes down Don Kee, make him give everyone free rent and give them back their ships free of charge. Plus, Don Kee gives them the parts they need for free and they leave Imecka.
The gang then land on a planet where everything is larger than life. They find the Four-Star Ball in the tooth of a giant and they go to the next planet.
On planet Gelbo they find the Six-Star Ball in the hair of the princess of the village, Leena. Trunks asks for the ball but her fiancé Doma said that they were in a large problem already. The amphibian creature Zoonama would keep on terrifying the village, if they did not give him a wife. The villagers had agreed on Leena for his bride. Goku, Trunks, and Pan decide that they will help them out in exchange for the Dragon Ball and they agree. Pan comes up with the idea to disguise Trunks as Leena (it was originally Goku but he was too small, much to Trunks' dismay). Zoonama comes and takes Trunks to his lair. His wig then falls off, revealing himself. However, Zoonama thinks Trunks is a woman with short hair, calls him cute, and forgives him. Trunks gets Zoonama tipsy and Goku arrives with Pan and Doma. Doma cuts off Zoonama's left whisker with a huge pair of scissors and as he cuts off the left one Zoonama awakens in a drunken rage. He begins to wiggle his whiskers and an earthquake begins to come, but stops soon after, while Zoonama continues to wiggle his whisker. Pan realizes that he can not cause earthquakes, but only predict them. But, now he is so tipsy, that he did not realize that the quake was over. Suddenly a really big earthquake erupts and Goku and the others leave the cavern with Zoonama, because they are under a volcano that is starting to erupt because of the earthquake. Goku stops the huge volcano with a Kamehameha, saving the village and winning the Dragon Ball. Just as they are leaving the planet, Bon Para, one of the mysterious Para Brothers, arrives and takes the ball from Pan's hands using his telekinesis. In shock the three Z Fighters just watch as he leaves.
Trunks then jumps in the ship with Pan and Goku and they chase after the Para Brothers' spaceship. The brothers trick them onto the asteroid of Beehay inhabited by huge bloodthirsty worm-like creatures called Mouma. The Para Brothers escape and fly to planet Luud. They go to Cardinal Mutchy Mutchy who tells them that they have failed and that Trunks has another Dragon Ball on his ship that they failed to get and they must go retrieve it. They travel back to find Goku and the others and they get hypnotized by the Para Para Boogie until they are saved by the hungry Mouma. Pan goes aboard the Para Brothers' spaceship to find the Dragon Ball that they stole. She accidentally activates the auto-pilot and is brought to planet Luud. There she is captured and turned into a doll for the evil lord Dolltaki. Goku shows up with Trunks and kills Cardinal Mutchy Mutchy who reveals that he is actually two parts, the body and the whip which transforms into Mutchy and fights Goku. Trunks finishes Mutchy off with the Brave Cannon and saves Goku from Mutchy's whip-like arms.
Then Dolltaki turns everyone except for Trunks, himself, Goku, and Pan into dolls and feeds them to the machine deity called Luud. Dolltaki then awakens Luud who takes him and Pan inside of Luud's body to gain their energy. While Luud fights Goku and Trunks, Pan forces Dolltaki to tell her the weakness of the seemingly invincible Luud. Dolltaki reveals that Goku must strike the outside of Luud's mechanical heart while Pan strikes the inside at exactly the same time. After multiple tries, Goku and Pan finally succeed and destroyed Luud freeing all of the people. Trunks then takes back his Dragon Ball and they leave the planet.
Baby Saga
Main article: Baby Saga
On planet Pital, Baby possesses Trunks a brief moment. Trunks drives him out by transforming into a Super Saiyan, which removes Baby from his body. In fact, Baby only wanted to place an egg in Trunks to be later activated on Earth. As a servant of Baby, Trunks along with Gohan, Goten and Bulla helps to power him up to defeat Goku on Earth. On the reconstituted New Planet Plant, he, Goten, and Gohan try to save their new lord from Uub, who seems to overpower him. However, Baby was just playing with Uub, and blasts his slaves into unconsciousness for their interference.
Trunks is the first to be cured by the Sacred Water, and after being cured, he along with Gohan and Goten help to restore the energy of Super Saiyan 4 Goku so that he can finish off Baby. Trunks appears to have inherited his mother's fascination with technology. He gets distracted by the gadgets on the hospital planet, allowing Baby to sneak up on him. This turns out to have been a plan to lure the villain into a trap however, as Goku, Trunks, and Pan could sense Baby's ki when he got excited about hunting them.
Super 17 Saga
Main article: Super 17 Saga After the defeat of Baby, Trunks sneaks away from work to see the 31st World Martial Arts Tournament. Due to the fact that it was too late for him to compete, he observes the matches along with Gohan, Videl, and Krillin. Trunks is now 24 years old.
Much afterward, Trunks is ambushed by a brainwashed Android 17. Wounded, he goes to Chi-Chi's house to warn the group. Later, Trunks joins up with Goten, Majuub, Pan, Gohan and Vegeta to fight countless villains who have escaped from Hell: Trunks saves Goten from Yakon, they then successfully defeat Android 19. With Majuub, they successfully defeat an invasion of Saibamen. Trunks then joins the fight against Super 17, but is unable to defeat him even with the help of Gohan, Goten, Majuub, and his father Vegeta. Eventually, Super 17 is defeated by Goku (who was previously trapped in Hell) with the help of Android 18. Trunks is then taken back to Capsule Corporation by his father to recover from his injuries. After repairing Giru, they search for the Dragon Balls on Earth to repair all the damage caused on the planet.
Shadow Dragon Saga
Main article: Shadow Dragon Saga
When Black Smoke Shenron rises from the Dragon Balls to the Z Fighters, Trunks is shown attempting to calm his mother after Old Kai claimed she was responsible for Black Smoke Shenron's existence. Later, against Syn Shenron, Trunks tries to restore Goku's energy once again along with Goten and Gohan. After the dragon transforms into Omega Shenron and Super Saiyan 4 Vegeta suggests he and Goku fuse to defeat him, Trunks along with Gohan, Goten and Majuub tries to hold off Omega long enough for Goku and Vegeta to fuse. Trunks is the last person to stall Omega by performing an Explosive Wave to distract the dragon while Goku and Vegeta perform the Fusion Dance. They are successful and Goku and Vegeta form Gogeta, however Gogeta defuses before he can finish Omega off.
Later on when Goku is presumed dead by Omega Shenron, Vegeta decides the Earth's best bet is for him to try and defeat Omega Shenron while everyone else escapes. Before sending them off, Vegeta requests that Goten, Gohan, Trunks continue the fight if he fails. The three half-Saiyans say goodbye to their families and decide to go back to help Vegeta in the fight but they are all easily defeated. However they do succeed in distracting Omega long enough for Goku to charge his Universal Spirit Bomb which destroys the Shadow Dragon. Trunks is last seen telling Pan that the Dragon Balls will come back after the Earthlings have proven they can take care without them.
Film appearances
Broly - The Legendary Super Saiyan
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Broly - The Legendary Super Saiyan
Trunks is seen as a baby in the beginning of the movie, being held by Bulma at a hanami picnic with the Z Fighters.
Bojack Unbound
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound
Trunks is also seen as a baby in this movie, being held by Bulma while they watch the Intergalactic World Tournament.
Broly - Second Coming
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Broly - Second Coming
"I don't really care if you are an almighty Super Saiyan... you're still a jerk!"
— Trunks in the final battle against Broly
Trunks takes one of the main roles as he and Goten battle the awoken, enraged Broly. Despite putting up an impressively decent fight against Broly in his Super Saiyan form, Trunks is eventually defeated along with Goten, only to be saved by Gohan. The two learn from Gohan about his dealings with Broly and how he was thought to have been defeated seven years ago by Goku.
During the final struggle, Trunks plays a small but important role: using the last of his strength, he throws an energy blast that blocks Legendary Super Saiyan Broly from powering up his Omega Blaster, allowing Goten, Gohan, and Goku to defeat the fiendish warrior with the Family Kamehameha.
Bio-Broly
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly
Trunks and Goten once again team up to battle the cloned version of Broly, Bio-Broly. The two young Super Saiyans and Krillin eventually defeat the clone by using the ocean water to dissolve him and a Multiple Kamehameha, finally putting an end to the monstrous Saiyan.
Fusion Reborn
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn Trunks and Goten team up yet again to stop the evil villains that had returned from Hell. They most notably battle The Dictator.
Wrath of the Dragon
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon
Trunks befriends the hero named Tapion. Later in the battle against Hirudegarn Trunks fuses with Goten to form a Super Saiyan 3 Gotenks, who manages to hurt the monster using Continuous Die Die Missile. Soon after, Hirudegarn attacks Gotenks so hard it causes him to split in two. Later Trunks assists Goku in attacking the monster, by slicing his tail using a sword. Once Goku defeats the evil monster Hirudegarn, Tapion gives Trunks his sword, even saying it was always meant for him, (in reference to Future Trunks' swordsmanship). This sword is then later seen in the opening of Dragon Ball GT, but it was never used in any episodes.
Battle of Gods
Main article: Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods
Four years after Kid Buu's defeat, Trunks is at his mother's birthday party with his family and friends. When the Pilaf Gang turned into children sneak into the party in order to steal the Dragon Balls, Trunks develops a crush on Mai and claims that she is his girlfriend just to boast to Goten. Everyone takes it seriously and Mai gets shy. Soon, Trunks and Goten fuse into Gotenks to battle the God of Destruction Beerus along with the other Z Fighters, but he is easily defeated. Later, Trunks and the other Saiyans help Goku to reach the Super Saiyan God form. Sometime later that day, Bulma's party is continued and Trunks and Mai are in a tree.
Broly
Main article: Dragon Ball Super: Broly Trunks calls Bulma to inform her that the six Dragon Balls that she had collected in her lab have been stolen. Trunks sends the surveillance footage through the watch, which reveals that the thieves were wearing Frieza-style armor. The adults instantly recognize what is going on, but none of them say anything until Bulma ends the call with Trunks.
Other Dragon Ball stories
Buu's Fury
During the search for the Dragon Balls in the Majin Buu Saga, Trunks goes to the Thieves Den to obtain a Dragon Ball, disguising himself as a bandit using a bandanna, however a monkey steals the bandanna and so Trunks is forced to fight his way out, defeating the Bandit King. Trunks then goes to Pilaf's Castle to retrieve another ball, encountering Pilaf - who sends his guardian to deal with the intruder, however Trunks defeats it and takes the Dragon Ball. Trunks and Goten then go to the Mega-Fortress XJ-5 and defeat the Warlord to obtain his Dragon Ball, leaving as the fortress self-destructs. Trunks then heads to the Kyodai Pyramid, saves Dr. Challenger's men from the undead horde and defeats Pharaoh Totenhotep, he is then gifted a Dragon Ball by Challenger.
Online
Main article: Dragon Ball Online Trunks and Goten open their own martial arts school based on swords in Age 805, the Kikoukenjutsu Sword School. The school teaches the principle of channeling ki energy through swords to increase strike power. Their discipline has become one of the most praised disciplines on Earth as of Age 1000. Trunks has shown interest in swords since he was young, as in Age 774 (in Wrath of the Dragon), a hero named Tapion gave his sword to Trunks. Trunks and Goten's Kikoukenjutsu Sword School help in defeating the remnants of the Frieza Force who attacked Earth in Age 820.
Xenoverse
Majin Buu Saga
Trunks is encountered in Age 774 during the Majin Buu conflict, with him retrieving the Dragon Radar while Super Saiyan 3 Goku fights Majin Buu who is empowered with Villainous Mode (presumably by Demigra as Towa was planning to send Mira to fight both of them thus it would make little sense to empower him). Mira tries to join the fight so he can defeat both of them (Towa herself is implied to want revenge for Majin Buu killing her brother Dabura) though he is stopped and his body destroyed by the Future Warrior who aids Super Saiyan 3 Goku fight Dark Innocent Majin Buu and his clones, while Trunks manages to retrieve the Dragon Radar like in the original history thus the correction is successful.
However Demigra's Mirage is sent to Kami's Lookout where he takes control of Piccolo and Super Buu with Dark Magic granting them Villainous Mode. He has Dark Piccolo attack Goten and Trunks to prevent them from fusing while Dark Super Buu fights Ultimate Gohan before having Dark Super Buu destroy Earth with a Super Vanishing Ball altering history which Demigra's Mirage is doing to weaken the barrier keeping the real Demigra imprisoned inside the Crack of Time which had been weakened previously by Towa and Mira's alterations to history allowing Demigra to send his Mirage to create more distortions in order to free himself while using the Future Warrior to eliminate Mira whom Demigra saw as a competitor and obstacles to his plan. This forces the Time Patrol to send the Future Warrior back in order to foil Demigra's plan to escape. The Future Warrior must defeat Dark Piccolo to remove the enchantment as Demigra's Mirage reveals that defeating him will not dispel it. Piccolo is freed and the Future Warrior buys Goten and Trunks time to fuse when Super Buu appears allowing them to fuse into Gotenks. Eventually their fusion runs out forcing Piccolo and the Future Warrior to hold off Dark Super Buu until Ultimate Gohan appears and takes over for Piccolo, joining forces with the Future Warrior to defeat Dark Super Buu.
Unfortunately Dark Super Buu is forced to transform into Dark Kid Buu who destroys the Earth, though Goku, Vegeta, Mr. Satan, Dende, and Bee escape thanks to Kibito Kai thus the correction is successful and Dark Kid Buu is defeated by the Tandem Super Spirit Bomb used by Goku and the Future Warrior.
Battle of Gods Saga
In Age 778 (in the Battle of the Gods film timeline), Trunks and Goten are playing with a ball during Bulma's birthday party at the Capsule Corporation. Though Vegeta manages to save one of the Pudding cups for Beerus who is about to enjoy it (in contrast to the original timeline) Demigra's Mirage uses power to take control of the ball which he uses to knock the pudding cup out of Beerus' hands, angering him (which ironically restores the correct flow as Beerus never go to eat the pudding). Demigra's Mirage tries to use Dark Magic to take control Beerus but the gods is shown to be quite resistant to it. Trunks and Goten fuse into Gotenks but are defeated as per the original history along with the other Z Fighters while the Future Warrior holds their own.
Trunks joins in the Super Saiyan God ritual and Goku becomes a Super Saiyan God and fights Beerus alongside the Future Warrior. It is eventually revealed that Beerus is immune to Dark Magic though he pretends to be under its control to lure out Demigra's Mirage to punish him for blasphemously trying to control a God of Destruction. Demigra's Mirage is defeated but he escapes being destroyed by the Future Warrior thanks to his intangibility and retreats.
Later Demigra's Mirage revives Frieza, Cell, and Kid Buu with the Dragon Balls in Age 778 after his failed attempt to control Beerus. In addition to reviving the villains he took control of Vegeta, Gohan, Goten, and Trunks. He has the boys perform fusion into Villainous Mode Gotenks who utilizes a Villainous Mode enhanced version of Super Saiyan 3. However the Future Warrior and Goku manage to free them all after defeating the revived villains. However Demigra is freed and attacks Toki Toki City in Age 850 though he is ultimately defeated thanks to efforts of Goku and the Future Warrior.
A history change occurs in Age 774 of Broly - Second Coming timeline, during which Demigra's Wormhole appears as part of a time released spell that triggers after Demigra is killed during the Demigra Incident. This causes Legendary Super Broly to be empowered with Villainous Mode power-up. This forces the Time Patrol to send the Future Warrior to protect Videl, Goten, and Trunks from Dark Broly until Gohan shows up. Gohan and the Future Warrior manage to defeat Dark Broly but he is swallowed up by Demigra's Wormhole forcing the Future Warrior to return to Age 850 as Trunks: Xeno works to track both Broly and Bardock (who had been abducted previously from Age 737). Trunks and Goten are shown after the battle wonder where the Future Warrior went, though Trunks assumes they must have headed into Natade Village to eat and both boys decide to head into the village to get something to eat as well. Trunks: Xeno later returns Broly to Age 774 of his timeline and the original history of that timeline is restored when Chronoa puts the scrolls together thus the events of the film play out as normal (as the alterations disappear when Chronoa puts the scrolls together following a successful correction).
GT Saga
In Age 789 of the GT Timeline, Tuffle parasite Infected Trunks is empowered with Supervillain power-up by Demigra's Wormhole. Under the influence of Dark Magic, Dark Infected Trunks targets Pan as she is essential to helping Golden Great Ape Goku regain control over himself so he can achieve Super Saiyan 4, thus she is a threat to Great Ape Baby Vegeta achieving victory |
of the region.
Historically, the population of Tibet consisted of primarily ethnic Tibetans. According to tradition the original ancestors of the Tibetan people, as represented by the six red bands in the Tibetan flag, are: the Se, Mu, Dong, Tong, Dru and Ra. Other traditional ethnic groups with significant population or with the majority of the ethnic group reside in Tibet include Bai people, Blang, Bonan, Dongxiang, Han, Hui people, Lhoba, Lisu people, Miao, Mongols, Monguor (Tu people), Menba (Monpa), Mosuo, Nakhi, Qiang, Nu people, Pumi, Salar, and Yi people.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition published between 1910–1911, total population of Tibetan capital of Lhasa, including the lamas in the city and vicinity, was about 30,000, and the permanent population also included Chinese families (about 2,000).[36]
Most Han people in the TAR (8.17% of the total population)[37] are recent migrants, because all of the Han were expelled from "Outer Tibet" (Central Tibet) following the British invasion until the establishment of the PRC.[38] Only 8% of Han people have household registration in TAR, other keep their household registration in place of origin.[34]
Tibetan scholars and Tibetans in exile claim that, with the 2006 completion of the Qingzang Railway connecting the TAR to Qinghai Province, there has been an "acceleration" of Han migration into the region.[39] The exile Tibetan Administration of the Dalai Lama in north India, claims that the PRC will swamp Tibet with migrants in order to alter Tibet's demographic makeup.[40]
Religion
The main religion in Tibet has been Buddhism since its outspread in the 8th century AD. Before the arrival of Buddhism, the main religion among Tibetans was an indigenous shamanic and animistic religion, Bon, which now comprises a sizeable minority and which would later influence the formation of Tibetan Buddhism.
According to estimates from the International Religious Freedom Report of 2012, most of Tibetans (who comprise 91% of the population of the Tibet Autonomous Region) are bound by Tibetan Buddhism, while a minority of 400,000 people (12.5% of the total population of the TAR) are bound to the native Bon or folk religions which share the image of Confucius (Tibetan: Kongtse Trulgyi Gyalpo) with Chinese folk religion, though in a different light.[43][44] According to some reports, the government of China has been promoting the Bon religion, linking it with Confucianism.[45]
Most of the Han Chinese who reside in Tibet practice their native Chinese folk religion (神道; shén dào; 'Way of the Gods"). There is a Guandi Temple of Lhasa (拉萨关帝庙) where the Chinese god of war Guandi is identified with the cross-ethnic Chinese, Tibetan, Mongol and Manchu deity Gesar. The temple is built according to both Chinese and Tibetan architecture. It was first erected in 1792 under the Qing dynasty and renovated around 2013 after decades of disrepair.[46][47]
Built or rebuilt between 2014 and 2015 is the Guandi Temple of Qomolangma (Mount Everest), on Ganggar Mount, in Tingri County.[48][49]
There are four mosques in the Tibet Autonomous Region with approximately 4,000 to 5,000 Muslim adherents,[41] although a 2010 Chinese survey found a higher proportion of 0.4%.[42] There is a Catholic church with 700 parishioners, which is located in the traditionally Catholic community of Yanjing in the east of the region.[41]
Human rights
Towns and villages in Tibet
"Comfortable Housing"
Beginning in 2006, 280,000 Tibetans who lived in traditional villages and as nomadic herdsmen have been forcefully relocated into villages and towns. In those areas new housing was built and existing houses were remodelled to serve a total of 2 million people. Those living in substandard housing were required to dismantle their houses and remodel them to government standards. Much of the expense was borne by the residents themselves often through bank loans. The population transfer program, which was first implemented in Qinghai where 300,000 nomads were resettled, is called "Comfortable Housing". which is part of the “Build a New Socialist Countryside” program. Its effect on Tibetan culture has been criticized by exiles and human rights groups.[50] Finding employment is difficult for relocated persons who have only agrarian skills. Income shortfalls are offset by government support programs.[51] It was announced in 2011 that 20,000 Communist Party cadres were to be placed in the new towns.[50]
Economy
The Tibetans traditionally depended upon agriculture for survival. Since the 1980s, however, other jobs such as taxi-driving and hotel retail work have become available in the wake of Chinese economic reform. In 2011, Tibet's nominal GDP topped 60.5 billion yuan (US$9.60 billion), nearly more than seven times as big as the 11.78 billion yuan (US$1.47 billion) in 2000. Economic growth since the beginning of the 21st century has averaged over 10 percent a year.[32]
While traditional agriculture and animal husbandry continue to lead the area's economy, in 2005 the tertiary sector contributed more than half of its GDP growth, the first time it surpassed the area's primary industry.[52][53] Rich reserves of natural resources and raw materials have yet to lead to the creation of a strong secondary sector, due in large part to the province's inhospitable terrain, low population density, an underdeveloped infrastructure and the high cost of extraction.[32]
The collection of caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps sinensis, known in Tibetan as Yartsa Gunbu) in late spring / early summer is in many areas the most important source of cash for rural households. It contributes an average of 40% to rural cash income and 8.5% to the TAR's GDP.[54]
The re-opening of the Nathu La pass (on southern Tibet's border with India) should facilitate Sino-Indian border trade and boost Tibet's economy.[55]
In 2008, Chinese news media reported that the per capita disposable incomes of urban and rural residents in Tibet averaged 12,482 yuan (US$1,798) and 3,176 yuan (US$457) respectively.[56]
The China Western Development policy was adopted in 2000 by the central government to boost economic development in western China, including the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Lhasa Economic and Technological Development Zone
Tourism
Foreign tourists were first permitted to visit the Tibet Autonomous Region in the 1980s. While the main attraction is the Potala Palace in Lhasa, there are many other popular tourist destinations including the Jokhang Temple, Namtso Lake, and Tashilhunpo Monastery.[57] Nonetheless, tourism in Tibet is still restricted for non-Chinese passport holders and Taiwan citizens, and presently the only way for foreigners to enter is via Tibet Entry Permit. The permit can only be obtained through a travel agency in Tibet, and travel in Tibet must be arranged in a group tour, in which the group must be accompanied by a licensed tour guide at all times. Those traveling into Tibet must specify every location they want to travel within the TAR, and thus cannot travel anywhere not specified in the application. Before entering on a train, plane, or road leading into Tibet, anyone without a Chinese passport must present the Tibet Entry Permit, or they will otherwise be denied entry. People barred from obtaining the permit are journalists, diplomats, professional media photographers, and government officials.[58]
Transport
Airports
The civil airports in Tibet are Lhasa Gonggar Airport,[59] Qamdo Bangda Airport, Nyingchi Airport, and the Gunsa Airport.
Gunsa Airport in Ngari Prefecture began operations on 1 July 2010, to become the fourth civil airport in China's Tibet Autonomous Region.[60]
The Peace Airport for Xigazê was opened for civilian use on 30 October 2010.[61]
Nagqu Dagring Airport is expected to become the world's highest altitude airport by 2014 at 4,436 meters above sea level.[62]
Railway
The Qinghai–Tibet Railway from Golmud to Lhasa was completed on 12 October 2005. It opened to regular trial service on 1 July 2006. Five pairs of passenger trains run between Golmud and Lhasa, with connections onward to Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Xining and Lanzhou. The line includes the Tanggula Pass, which, at 5,072 m (16,640 ft) above sea level, is the world's highest railway.
The Lhasa–Xigazê Railway branch from Lhasa to Xigazê was completed in 2014. It opened to regular service on 15 August 2014. The planned China–Nepal railway will connect Xigazê to Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, and is expected to be completed around 2027.[63]
The construction of the Sichuan–Tibet Railway began in 2015. The line is expected to be completed around 2025.[64]
See also
References
Further reading
Hannue, Dialogues Tibetan Dialogues Han, travelogue from Tibet – by a woman who's been travelling around Tibet for over a decade, ISBN 978-988-97999-3-9
, travelogue from Tibet – by a woman who's been travelling around Tibet for over a decade, ISBN 978-988-97999-3-9 Sorrel Wilby, Journey Across Tibet: A Young Woman's 1900-Mile Trek Across the Rooftop of the World, Contemporary Books (1988), hardcover, 236 pages, ISBN 0-8092-4608-2.
, Contemporary Books (1988), hardcover, 236 pages, ISBN 0-8092-4608-2. Hillman, Ben, ‘China’s Many Tibets: Diqing as a model for ‘development with Tibetan characteristics?’ Asian Ethnicity, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2010, pp 269–277.[ ISBN missing ]
Media related to Tibet at Wikimedia CommonsXIAMEN, China (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that imposing tougher sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear missile programme would be counter-productive and said threats of military action could trigger “a global catastrophe”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to a speech during the Dialogue of Emerging Market and Developing Countries in Xiamen in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Sept. 5, 2017. REUTERS/Mark Schiefelbein/Pool
Putin, speaking after a BRICs summit in China, criticised U.S. diplomacy in the crisis and renewed his call for talks, saying Pyongyang would not halt its missile testing programme until it felt secure.
“Russia condemns North Korea’s exercises, we consider that they are a provocation... (But) ramping up military hysteria will lead to nothing good. It could lead to a global catastrophe,” he told reporters.
“There’s no other path apart from a peaceful one.”
Putin was speaking after South Korea said an agreement with the United States to scrap a weight limit on its warheads would help it respond to the North Korea threat after Pyongyang conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test two days ago.
Russia, which shares a border with North Korea, has repeatedly joined China in calling for negotiations with Pyongyang, suggesting that the United States and South Korea halt all major war games in exchange for North Korea halting its testing programme.
U.S. APPROACH “RIDICULOUS”
While describing additional sanctions as “the road to nowhere”, Putin said Russia was prepared to discuss “some details” around the issue, without elaborating.
The Russian leader also lashed out at the United States, saying it was preposterous for Washington to ask for Moscow’s help with North Korea after sanctioning Russian companies whom U.S officials accused of violating North Korea sanctions.
“It’s ridiculous to put us on the same (sanctions) list as North Korea and then ask for our help in imposing sanctions on North Korea,” said Putin.
“This is being done by people who mix up Australia with Austria,” he added.
The United States has floated the idea of requiring all countries to cut economic links with North Korea to try to strong-arm Pyongyang into changing its behaviour.
In Moscow’s case, that would mean stopping using North Korean labourers, tens of thousands of whom work in Russia, and halting fuel supplies to Pyongyang. Russia has so far refused to contemplate doing either.CHICAGO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A day after President Donald Trump’s stunning dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, protesters gathered in Washington, Chicago and other cities to urge an independent investigation of alleged collusion between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign.
Waving signs and chanting outside the White House and at Senate constituency offices in other states, demonstrators said Trump’s move had compromised the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe.
“I still don’t have any love for Comey,” said Cody Davis, 29, among a small group of protesters near Chicago’s 96-story Trump International Hotel and Tower. “I’m not here to defend him. You could easily argue he lost the election for Hillary.”
Comey has been criticized by Democrats for his handling of an investigation surrounding 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
“The reason I’m here today is not that he was fired but because it was so clearly because Trump was afraid of something,” Davis said.
White House officials have denied any political motivation behind the firing and Trump said Comey had not been doing a good job and had lost the confidence of everyone in Washington.
Critics at various protests compared the Comey dismissal to the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, in which President Richard Nixon fired an independent special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.
MoveOn.Org and a coalition of liberal groups hastily organized protests at senators’ offices in more than a dozen states including New York, Kentucky, Arizona, California and Florida.
“Donald Trump just fired the one man in America who was leading the most thorough and long-lasting investigation of Donald Trump,” Jo Comerford, campaign director for MoveOn.org, said in a statement.
The issue also was discussed at town hall meetings being held by members of Congress across the country.
For some Trump supporters the controversy was overblown.
Denny Herman of Wamego, Kansas, said Comey deserved to be fired and the Russia investigation would not turn up wrongdoing. He said there was no need for a special prosecutor.
“It’s just liberal crap,” he said while relaxing at a bar. “We got bigger fish to fry.”
Slideshow (5 Images)
But in downtown Chicago, several dozen people banged pots and pans, waved signs reading “You can’t fire the truth” and chanted “Investigate Now!”
Several hundred people also gathered outside the White House and called for a special prosecutor.
“I feel like what happened yesterday was truly shocking, and the Republicans won’t stand up and do what they should without somebody pressing them,” said demonstrator Kelli Rowedder, a 34-year-old teacher from Washington.In Part I of this series on floats, I wrote about how Berkshire Hathaway has been able to create less-than-free float from its insurance operations — a key reason for the company’s stupendous success. I also listed a few “general principles” on floats and showed how high-quality floats can become “unencumbered sources of value.”
In Part II, I expanded the discussion on Buffett’s attraction towards floats in a variety of business situations encountered by him in his long career, ranging from floats enjoyed by American Express and Blue Chip Stamps in his early years, to recent structured derivatives contracts created by him.
In this concluding part, I will shift focus away from Buffett (although I will use his thoughts on the subject) to other businesses that enjoy attractive floats.
Hindustan Unilever (HUL)
Let’s start with HUL. Take a look at the company’s summarised balance sheet as on March 31, 2012.
Take a few moments to observe the above statement. I’ll wait for you.
Notice that HUL is debt free. Why? Let’s try to answer this question by reorganising the company’s balance sheet.
Each side of the HUL’s balance sheet — assets as well as liabilities — totals to Rs 11,407 cr. That’s not a co-incidence by the way. 🙂
Let’s focus on the asset side for now. Of the total assets, let’s segregate financial assets. These would be non-current investments (Rs 70 cr.), current investments (Rs 2,252 cr.), and cash and bank balances (Rs 1,996 cr.). These total to Rs 4,318 cr. So the total breakup of financial assets and operating assets is as under:
Financial Assets: Rs 4,318 cr.
Operating Assets: Rs 7,089 cr. (balancing figure)
Total Assets: Rs 11,407 cr.
Now, let’s look at the liability side of the balance sheet which shows how the total assets are financed. Here’s the breakup:
Equity: Rs 3,680 cr.
Debt: Rs Nil.
Float: Rs 7,727 cr. (balancing figure)
Total Liabilities: Rs 11,407 cr.
“Float?” Yes, float. Other People’s Money (OPM) which carries no interest. Hindustan Lever is debt-free because it has access to free money provided by other people. It does not need to borrow any money to finance its operations. That becomes rather obvious by re-looking at the following two figures:
Operating Assets: Rs 7,089 cr.
Float: Rs 7,727 cr.
Since this float, which is cost-less, is more than operating assets, can we infer that all of the company’s operations are financed with free money? Yes!
How could HUL achieve this feat? Let’s find out by quantifying the main contributor of the company’s float. Of the total float of Rs 7,727 cr., trade payables alone are worth Rs 4,844 cr, an amount which is more than sufficient to finance inventories and receivables aggregating to Rs 3,524 cr. Here’s the breakup:
Inventories: Rs 2,667 cr.
Receivables: Rs 857 cr.
Total: Rs 3,524 cr.
Trade payables: Rs 4,844 cr.
What does this mean? It means that HUL obtains trade credit from its vendors which is more than sufficient to finance its investment in receivables and inventory. That is, HUL operates on negative working capital, which is the key source of the company’s float.
How should we determine the importance of this float to HUL’s stockholders? By doing a thought experiment. Just like the importance of the person is realized when he/she is no longer there, let’s figure out the importance of HUL’s float by imagining that it’s not there. Let’s make the float of Rs 7,727 cr disappear. Poof! It’s gone!
But hang on a second. HUL still needs to have Rs 7,089 cr of operating assets, which need to be financed from somewhere and it’s source of free money — float — just evaporated. So, HUL needs to find alternate financing. There are only two sources: Debt and Equity. If HUL had to employ debt to replace float, then at current interest rates of 10% p.a. it would have to pay about Rs 700 cr. as interest, which if we consider, would have reduced its pretax profits from Rs 3,621 cr in FY12 to Rs 2,921. That’s a reduction of 19% in HUL’s pretax earnings.
Alternately, HUL could replace its float by issuing additional shares. Assuming it did so, at its current stock price of Rs 500, then in order to raise Rs 7,089 cr, HUL would need to issue 14 cr additional shares to its existing 216 cr shares. That’s an addition of 6% to its equity capital which would have resulted in no incremental earnings.
Either way we look at it, we can see that presence of float is quite important for HUL’s stockholders. Float prevents the company from the burden of interest-bearing debt. It also prevents the need to dilute equity.
Nesco
Now’s lets look at another company — Nesco Limited — about which I had written a few years ago. Take a look at Nesco’s balance sheet as on 31 March 2012.
You’ll notice that just like HUL, Nesco too a debt-free company. Why? To answer that question, let’s reorganise Nesco’s balance sheet — just as we did in HUL’s case.
Each side of the Nesco’s balance sheet — assets as well as liabilities — totals to Rs 381 cr.
Let’s focus on the asset side for now. Of the total assets, let’s segregate financial assets. These would be current investments (Rs 210 cr.) and cash and bank balances (Rs 4 cr.). These total to Rs 217 cr. So the total breakup of financial assets and operating assets is as under:
Financial Assets: Rs 214 cr.
Operating Assets: Rs 167 cr. (balancing figure)
Total Assets: Rs 381 cr.
Now, let’s look at the liability side of the balance sheet which shows how the total assets are financed. Here’s the breakup:
Equity: Rs 290 cr.
Debt: Rs Nil
Float: Rs 91 cr. (balancing figure)
Total Liabilities: Rs 381 cr.
Nesco’s operating assets of Rs 167 cr. are financed to the extent of Rs 91 cr. by OPM, which carries no interest. Was this float not available, Nesco would necessarily have to raise this money from debt and/or equity. Either alternative would have reduced earnings per share, as was the case in HUL discussed earlier.
So, how could Nesco obtain this float? Let’s find out by quantifying its main contributors. Of the total float of Rs 91 cr., advances & security deposits from customers alone are worth Rs 57 cr and trade payables are worth Rs 8 cr. These two items, which total to Rs 65 cr. are more than sufficient to finance inventories and receivables which total to Rs 13 cr. Here’s the breakup:
Inventories: Rs 5 cr.
Receivables: Rs 8 cr.
Total: Rs 13 cr.
Advances & security deposits from customers: Rs 57 cr.
Trade payables: Rs 8 cr.
Total: Rs 65 cr.
Nesco has three businesses each of which use float. Exhibition organizers who book Nesco’s exhibition center pay the company advance money to book space for various exhibitions. They also pay security deposits. Similarly, for occupying its commercial buildings, Nesco’s tenants pay security deposits to the company. Finally, for its manufacturing business, the company enjoys trade credit. Moreover, neither the exhibition business nor the commercial building business has any receivable or inventories, so the aggregate of trade credit and advances & security deposits exceed the aggregate investment in inventories and receivables.
Just like in the case of HUL, Nesco too, then, enjoys a negative working capital which is the key source of the company’s float. The only difference between the two situations is that while in HUL’s case, trade credit provided the float, while in Nesco’s case advances & deposits from customers primarily provide the float.
The Relative Attractiveness of Floats
We’ll come back to a more detailed discussion about trade credit and customer advances & deposits. For the time being let’s recall how Warren Buffett thinks about float as an attractive source of financing. A key lesson from Buffett on this is:
If you get access to an enduring and free (or less-than-free) float — whether it comes from insurance underwriting, derivatives contracts, trading stamps, travelers’ cheques, stored value cards, deferred taxes or any other source — then assets financed with such a float will become “an unencumbered source of value” for your stockholders. This will happen because (1) the assets financed with such a float would still be valued on the basis of their expected future earning power; but (2) the true value of the liability represented by the float will be far lower than its carrying value, provided the float is both costless and long-enduring.
Those two factors — cost and duration — determine how attractive a float it. The lower the cost approaches zero, and the longer the duration approaches eternity, the more the float resembles a perpetual, zero coupon bond which, as I discussed in Part I, will be worth almost nothing as a liability which is really cool because assets financed from the float could be worth a lot, just as happened in the case of Berkshire Hathaway.
Conversely, the higher the cost approaches the cost of alternate financing, and the lower the duration of the float, the less attractive it becomes. Under such circumstances, liabilities which are source of float should be valued fully on the balance sheet of company having access to that float.
Costless and long-enduring floats, then, are a very attractive form of financing — more attractive than debt, and more attractive than additional equity. We saw this in our HUL “thought experiment” above. Buffett agrees with this line of thinking. When asked about the relative attractiveness of low-cost floats vs other forms of financing, he said:
“Our insurance companies have had a terrific experience on cost of float‚ and we’d like to develop it just as fast as we can. Right now we’ve have no interest in issuing a bond because we have more money around than we know what to do with, and it comes from low-cost float. But if a time came when things were very attractive and we’d utilized all the money from our float and retained earnings and we still saw opportunities, we might very well borrow moderate amounts of money in the market. It would cost us more than our float was costing us, but it would still provide us with incremental earnings. But we would try to gain more float under those circumstances, too.”
Float = Leverage
The correct way to think about floats, then, is to think of them, simply as a form of leverage. Leverage, however, is traditionally associated with interest-bearing debt. But a free float is also a form of leverage, isn’t it? After all, it’s OPM and that’s what leverage means. Just like low-cost debt can lever up the return on invested capital, a free, or low-cost float can lever up the return on operating assets and that’s what Buffett meant when he wrote:
Any company’s level of profitability is determined by three items: (1) what its assets earn; (2) what its liabilities cost; and (3) its utilization of “leverage” — that is, the degree to which its assets are funded by liabilities rather than by equity.”
“Funded by liabilities rather than equity.” He used the word “liabilities” and not “debt. That’s key. The more of an asset that you can fund with a free float, the less the need to fund it with expensive debt or equity becomes.
Role of Negative Working Capital
Why, then, do businesses ever borrow money to fund their operations? Why don’t they just use free floats? The obvious answer to this question is that most businesses do not operate with a negative working capital. They simply don’t have free floats.
Recall that negative working capital arises when money tied up in inventories and receivables are more than offset by funds provided by customers by way of advances & deposits and also by trade credit. Let’s now return to the discussion of these two important contributors of free floats: Trade credit and advance payments & deposits from customers.
Trade credit is given to a firm by its vendors. Advance payments & deposits are given to a firm by its customers. Why, as was the case with HUL, would a firm enjoy substantial trade credit which more than finances its inventories and receivables? And why, as was the case with Nesco, would a firm get paid in advance by its customers and also receive substantial deposits from them, which, when taken together, more than offset its investment in inventories and receivables?
Market Power
The answer to both these questions is “Market Power” — the power of a firm over its vendors (who give it large amounts of trade credit) and its customers (who give it large amounts of advance payments & deposits) in quantities large enough to ensure that the firm can operate with negative working capital, as we found in the case of Nesco. The super powerful ones can operate with negative net operating assets (where float exceeds investment in inventories, receivables, and fixed assets), as we found in the case of HUL.
Where does this “market power” come from? It primarily comes from two sources: (1) shortages; and (2) moats.
Shortages Don’t Produce Enduring Floats
We have little interest in floats produced from shortages-derived market power. That’s because such floats are likely to be temporary, fair weather friends. To see how, think of a shipping company during a shipping boom when freight rates are sky high and every shipper is drowning in cash. The freight rates are high because of shortage. This shortage delivers market power to the ship owners, who can demand, and obtain, not only high freight rates, but also advance payments from their customers. These advance payments from customers, will temporarily reduce working capital requirements because receivables will turn into advance payments received.
Alas, such a happy environment is unlikely to last. The entry barriers in shipping are low, even though the gestation period is high. It’s only a matter of time when the supply of new ships will create a glut. Such a glut will have two consequences. One, freight rates will fall. And two, power will shift from shipping companies to their customers, who will now refuse to make advance payments and will insist on very lenient credit terms. For shipping companies, advance payments from customers will disappear, and will be replaced by receivables from customers. There will be dire consequences so far as working capital requirements are concerned: When its float disappears, a shipping company will typically find it hard to stay afloat unless it replaces the free source of finance with debt, or equity. This is happening now in global shipping industry.
This kind of power shift in a value chain is not limited to the shipping industry. You will find it in automobile industry, in textiles, in chemicals — in fact, you’ll find it in any commodity industry having low entry barriers.
In such situations, being impressed with temporary low-cost float during good times, could be a costly mistake. The lesson for long-term investors is clear: Beware of floats derived from shortages in commodity-type industries having low entry barriers. Recall, this lesson is consistent with Buffett’s belief that a float is attractive only if its cheap and enduring and a float produced from temporary shortages is anything but.
Moats & Floats
Let’s now talk about the second source of market power — one which is cheap and enduring, and one which should interest us a lot: Moats.
Buffett uses the metaphor of a “moat” to illustrate a business’s superiority “that make life difficult for its competitors.” A truly great business, says Buffett, must have an enduring moat around its economic castle that protects its excellent returns on invested capital. He writes:
“What we’re trying to find is a business that for one reason or another — because it’s the lost-cost producer in some area, because it has a natural franchise due to its service capabilities, because of its position in the consumer’s mind, because of a technological advantage or any kind of reason at all – has this moat around it. And you throw crocodiles and sharks and piranhas in the moat to make it harder and harder for people to swim across and attack the castle.”
Finally, we have reached the point which I wanted to make at the very beginning of this long series! Professors are rarely known for their brevity 🙂
The point is this: Floats and Moats go together.
Think about it. What kinds of companies can operate with negative working capital (e.g. Nesco) or even negative net operating assets (e.g. HUL)? What power do such companies possess over their customers and suppliers, who happily (or even unhappily) finance their working capital (Nesco), or even the entire capital (HUL) employed by the business?
The answer, of course, is companies which possess enduring moats. While, HUL’s moat is derived from the company’s brands and distribution network, Nesco’s moat in its exhibition center business is derived from scarcity.
How Floats Lever Returns
HUL’s moat is much more powerful than Nesco’s and that’s reflected in its negative net operating assets. All of HUL’s operating assets are financed by its float, while only part of Nesco’s assets are. Nevertheless, float in both cases levers up return on invested capital for both the companies.
To see how floats lever up returns on invested capital, consider that one of the consequences of a solid moat is that it enables a business possessing such a moat to earn excellent returns on its invested capital. Earning excellent returns on invested capital, in fact, is a pre-requisite for spotting a moat, according to Buffett. He writes:
“A good moat should produce good returns on invested capital. Anybody who says that they have a wonderful business that’s earning a lousy return on invested capital has got a different yardstick than we do.”
Notice, he used the term “invested capital” which is the capital provided by investors — debt as well as equity — and does not include funds provided by floats. He did not use the term “total assets” although most great businesses possessing enduring moats will have good returns on assets and on invested capital.
How can a business earn excellent returns on invested capital? There are only two ways to do it: (1) maximise the numerator i.e. returns; and/or (2) minimise the denominator i.e. invested capital.
A moat (whether derived through pricing power or a sustainable low-cost advantage) can help the business achieve (1). A free, or a low-cost float (derived, of course, from an enduring moat) can help it achieve (2). How so? Let’s see how this happens in case of HUL and Nesco.
For FY12, HUL earned pre-tax profits of Rs 3,500 cr. On total assets of Rs 11,407 cr., this translates into a return on assets of 31%, which is fantastic. But, when we recognize that out of total assets of Rs 11,407 cr., float contributed Rs 7,727 cr., leaving only the balance 3,680 cr. to be financed by equity, then the pre-tax profits on equity get levered up to 95%.
Similarly, for FY12, Nesco earned pre-tax profits of Rs 97 cr. On total assets of Rs 381 cr., this translates into a return on assets of 25%. But, when we recognize that out of total assets of Rs 381 cr., float contributed Rs 91 cr., leaving only the balance Rs 290 cr. to be financed by equity, then the pre-tax profits on equity get levered up to 33%.
Think of it this way. A business may employ a large amount of assets, but such a business — because it has an enduring moat may enjoy significant market power over its vendors and customers. The business exercises its power over its vendors by insisting on, and getting away with, very lenient credit terms from them. In addition, power is also exercised over customers by insisting upon, and getting away with, receiving advance payments & deposits from them. The vendors and customers don’t have a choice. They have to adhere to the terms dictated by the business because for them, there is no other alternative. This market power, exercised in the manner described, results in the ability of the business to operate with negative working capital which reduces, or sometimes even eliminates, the need for stock and bond investors to invest anything in the firm’s operating assets. Invested capital (the denominator) is minimised, which results in a jump in return on that capital.
Let me give you another example — this time from USA.
Amazon.com
Each side of the Amazon.com’s balance sheet — assets as well as liabilities — totals to $25 billion. The breakup of asset side is as under:
Financial Assets (Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities): $10 billion
Operating Assets: $15 billion (balancing figure)
Total Assets: $25 billion.
Here’s the breakup of the liability side:
Equity: $8 billion
Debt: $ Nil
Float: $17 billion (balancing figure)
Total Liabilities: $25 Billion.
Amazon.com enjoys a float of $17 billion even though it employs only $15 billion of operating assets! No wonder it’s a debt-free company. But, how does it get so much float?
The main contributor towards Amazon.com’s float is accounts payable of $11 billion, which, when compared with inventories of $5 billion and accounts receivable of $3 billion result in a negative working capital of $3 billion. By keeping inventories low, by ensuring customers pay amazon.com quickly, and by taking longer to pay its vendors, Amazon.com has been able to build a huge float. In addition, the successful Amazon Prime service and sale of gift certificates enables the world’s largest online retailer to collect funds from customers in advance.
In 2011, amazon.com pre-tax earnings were $934 million, which when compared with total assets of $25 billion translate into a return of only 3.7%, but when compared with Equity of $8 billion, gets levered up to 12% ROE. Considering the prevailing low interest rates in USA, that’s not bad at all.
Amazon.com is a wonderful example of a situation where return on assets is mediocre, but return on equity is good, simply because the company has access to large amounts OPM on favourable terms. It’s the float which makes amazon.com profitable and it’s the float that keep the company debt-free. If you were to value amazon.com, you’ll have to think very hard about two questions: (1) How likely is it that amazon.com’s float is truly costless; and (2) How long will it last?
A Pattern and A Few General Principles
if you look carefully at the worlds’s debt-free companies (e.g. look at BHEL, BEL, EIL, Wipro, Infosys, Intuitive Surgical, and Apple) a pattern emerges. Many of these companies will, apart from being debt-free have the following |
stripped their victim and shaved his head before Fleming walked him home, punching and kicking him on the way.
After the jury’s majority verdicts, Fleming’s solicitor advocate, Ray Singh, said the sexual activity was consensual and his client had been cleared of one of the offences.
Mr Singh accepted that an immediate prison sentence was inevitable. He said Fleming’s previous conviction arose out of a prank that went too far.
Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC made a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for ten years banning Fleming from having any future contact with his victim, or any unsupervised contact with children under 16. He accepted that Fleming and the girl became Facebook friends because of their shared interest in music. She was “articulate, intelligent and mature.” But Fleming lied about his age and he knew the girl was 14 because her mother told him.
Judge Durham Hall said Fleming had fought the case very determindly. A guilty plea would have shown some degree of remorse.
He described his previous conviction as “troubling.”
MORE TOP STORIESWith a Wave of the Hand A vending machine company based in Wisconsin is about to introduce a revolutionary technology in the United States. No, it’s not a new kind of vending machine, but it may be the future of purchasing vended goods, among other things. Last week, Three Square Market (32M) announced via a press release that they will begin offering microchip implants to all of their employees as of August 1. “Employees will be implanted with a [Radio-Frequency Identification] chip allowing them to make purchases in their break room micro market, open doors, login to computers, use the copy machine, etc.,” according to the statement. Essentially, implanted employees will be able to do things like buy coffee with a wave of their hand —like a Jedi.
Each RFID chip is as small as a grain of rice and will be implanted under the skin between the thumb and the forefinger. The chips each cost about $300 — an expense the company is covering — and while getting the implant is optional, 32M says it expects more than 50 of its employees to volunteer to be chipped. The implants are being created by BioHax International, a company based in Sweden, which is also home to Epicenter, the first company known to have implanted microchips in their employees. Questions of Privacy and Security While these implantable chips sound futuristic, merging technology with the human body isn’t exactly a new thing — prosthetics and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are two better known examples. Generally, these pairings have some sort of medical purpose, though, aiding in the restoration or improvement of ailing body parts or helping a person regain movement lost due to injury. The kind of implant 32M is offering, however, isn’t exactly in the same league. The RFID chips are designed to carry information, usually personal, that would grant employees access to certain services. As such, these devices are prone to potential security and privacy problems or could even cause health issues.
“Companies often claim that these chips are secure and encrypted,” Alessandro Acquisti, IT and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, told the New York Times. However, “encrypted” is “a pretty vague term,” he added, “which could include anything from a truly secure product to something that is easily hackable.” Anticipating such concerns, 32M prepared an FAQ list where it guaranteed that the chips aren’t trackable and don’t even have GPS capabilities. According to this list, the chips only contain the information employees choose to link to them. Still, Acquisti urges caution as the functionality of the chips could change after implantation. “It’s very hard to predict or stop a future widening of their usage,” he asserts. Clearly, while this technology promises an exciting future, employees should carefully consider all angles before committing to it.Quick question: Who has been the most impactful third-party presidential candidate of the past 100 years?
I got to asking myself that question in the wake of two new polls that show likely Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson registering 10 percent of the vote in a hypothetical general-election contest with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
It’s an early but surprising show of strength from a party that has never exceeded 1.1 percent of the vote in a presidential race.
If you simply looked back at popular-vote totals, the answer would be easy enough. In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot drew 19 percent, and nearly 20 million total votes, in a three-way contest with Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton.
But Perot didn’t win a single state that year, and finished higher than third in only one (Utah).
If you’re looking for someone who altered the electoral map, your best bet would be George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama, who carried five Southern states and ended up with 46 electoral votes.
The correct answer, however, would focus on a candidate who received less than 3 percent of the vote and didn’t come close to carrying any states. That’s because Ralph Nader picked the right year to be a marginal candidate.
With 97,488 votes in Florida, the Green Party nominee easily siphoned enough progressives away from Al Gore to allow George W. Bush to carry the state by a chad-thin margin of 537 votes. For good measure, Nader cut off an alternate victory route for Gore by drawing 22,198 votes in New Hampshire, which Gore lost by 7,211.
The point is that if you’re an independent candidate, it’s not how many votes you get, but when and where you get them.
That’s why Johnson’s recent surge in the polls is noteworthy. Under no scenario (not even a Hillary Clinton indictment or a Trump debate rant about his penis size —sorry, that already happened) will the former New Mexico governor finish any higher than a very distant third in November. And it’s worth remembering that he’s not yet guaranteed the nomination of his party.
But Johnson, like Nader, could register just enough support to alter the math in some key swing states (think Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Nevada). What we don’t know yet, however, is whose slice of the pie he’ll cut into the most.
The obvious answer would be Trump. Movement conservatives who are turned off by Trump’s loose-cannon pronouncements and his iffy commitment to conservative principles might want to send a never-Trump message by voting for Johnson.
On the other hand, if bitter Bernie Sanders devotees are looking for an alternative to Hillary, they might get a natural high from Johnson’s support for the legalization of pot, his non-interventionist foreign policy and his outsider status.
“At the moment, I think Johnson is pulling from Republicans,” said John Wilford, the state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Texas. “We saw an explosion right after (Texas Sen.) Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican race. But I expect to see the exact same thing on the Democratic side if Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the nomination.”
Back in 1992, a popular assumption was that Perot — a fiscal conservative who bemoaned the growing federal debt — pulled most of his votes from George H.W. Bush, the Republican incumbent.
Exit polls later revealed, however, that 38 percent of Perot voters said they would have voted for Clinton in a two-way race, while an identical 38 percent said they would have voted for Bush. In other words, Perot’s presence was a wash, except for one key factor: His anti-incumbent message put Bush on the defensive, and his willingness to defend Clinton for skirting the Vietnam-era draft took all the steam out of Bush’s strongest debate attack line.
If history is any indication, Johnson’s numbers are likely to drop between now and November. Perot was running first with 39 percent of the vote in early June of 1992, but started fading as voters gave him a closer look.
The same thing happened to Wallace in 1968, with his poll numbers dropping in the final months from 20 percent to the low teens. But in a year when the two major-party nominees will bring unprecedented negatives to the dance, Johnson’s strongest selling point is sure to endure: His name is neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton.
ggarcia@express-news.net
Twitter: @gilgamesh470By inserting one simple word into his 2016 federal budget proposal, President Barack Obama has revived the long fight to end marijuana prohibition in Washington, D.C.
On Election Day, voters in the nation's capital overwhelmingly approved a measure to legalize the possession and use of marijuana inside its borders. But Congress undermined the results of the referendum just a month later, writing language into the 2015 federal spending bill that would block the local government from enacting the new law.
President Obama's $4 trillion budget request for 2016 was released early Monday morning. It took a few hours, but by early afternoon Tom Angell from the Marijuana Majority had eyed the clever new wording. Obama's budget proposal bans only "federal" funds from being used to enact a law to legalize marijuana. By not qualifying "funds," the Congressional language prohibited all money, even from the district's own tax base.
Like the congressional bill from December, the new budget will be subject to revisions from Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate. As the Washington Post reports, it is likely that Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican, will try to edit out the White House's new language.
But this time, the debate will occur over the course of months and not, like in December 2014, with a government shutdown looming. With more important legislation in the works, Republicans might not want to expend precious political capital on an issue with such overwhelming support in Washington, D.C., where a number of lawsuits are pending and Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has already vowed to go forward in spite of Congress' efforts.
Initiative 71, which passed by a 69.4% to 30.4% margin in November, would make it legal for anyone 21 and older to possess up to two ounces of marijuana and grow no more than six plants. Sales are forbidden, but growers would be allowed to share their bud.
The White House has sent mixed messages to the millions of Americans fighting to end marijuana prohibition. It has directed the Department of Justice not to enforce federal bans in states like Colorado and Washington that have legalized weed through popular votes. But federal prosecutors are still trying to get tough sentences for people allegedly caught growing marijuana in defiance of state law. Just last week, new attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch told senators she did "not support the legalization of marijuana" and believed it to be more dangerous than alcohol.
Common sense and the public disagree with her on the latter point. But for today at least, the White House is doing its best to keep Republicans in Congress from blocking the will of the people.Thrown incorrectly, the high cut with the longsword can leave you terribly exposed. Here are some suggestions to make the high cut a but safer and more effective. (And yes, I do realize that #4 and 5 are contradictory. If the masters agreed, we’d only need one manual.)
Step with your cut so you remain balanced. (di Grassi) Step with your cut so you cover more distance with your blow. (Cod.44.A.8) Step offline with your cut so he can’t counter you with a thrust by simply by extending his blade straight forward. (di Grassi) Don’t lean forward as it exposes your head. (di Grassi, Ringeck’s illustrations) Lean forward over your front foot to extend your range and present a threat. (Meyer’s illustrations) Cut into longpoint so that if you miss you can immediately thrust into the face or chest. (MS I.33, Talhoffer) Don’t cut into a low guard as it will expose you for a counter attack. Alber is called the fools guard because you have to be a fool to assume it. (Meyer) Learn to cut by rotating your wrists rather than your shoulders. This will make you faster. (do Grassi) Don’t make an attack without the intention of making at least three more. Even if your first two or three miss, as long as you keep the offensive your opponent (Liechtenauer, Meyer, etc)
A lot of people are in love with the leaping oberhau, where they launch themselves at their opponent. Apparently it works in tournaments, but if you don’t win that first strike it leaves you in a rather compromised position. So I’m very much against using it expect under the most unusual of circumstances.
AdvertisementsIt may be difficult to imagine today, but in 1939 the corner of Military Road and Hertel Avenue was a center of neighborhood life and activity. At the intersection of the Grant and Hertel streetcar routes, a small hamlet of shops, surrounded by factories, had emerged. Here is the scene, looking north along Military Road toward the intersection with Hertel Avenue. At the southeast corner is a streetcar barn of the International Railway Company. At the northwest corner, a still extant wedge-shaped building houses a Deco restaurant, to the north which is John Krajanowski’s grocery, Casper Lesniak’s ice cream parlor, and the J. M. Grill, operated by John Mitulski. At the northeast corner, the barber pole and window sign of the Don & Phillips Gold Star Barber Shop is visible, as is a pole sign to the north for an Amoco filling station. At a time when Buffalo had about 575,000 residents, most of whom did not yet possess a motor vehicle, the economy was organized on the scale of a short walk or streetcar ride, rather than the 20-minute drive.To understand masculinity, you have to look everywhere.
I. Happy Hunting, Happy Haunting
In the last two decades, scholars in the fields of gender and sexuality studies—along with genderqueer pop stars, increasingly mainstream gay films, and even the latest brand of “no homo” advertising—have challenged the notion that masculinity either is, or at least should be, only the purview of straight, cisgender men. For the most part, these discourses arose in the 1990s from the integration of men’s studies into the broader field of gender studies, a newly burgeoning field which—for those of us just joining the class—was largely the result of feminism’s far-reaching impact on the academic playing field.
As Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble bothered the seemingly inviolable (if inevitably failing) logics equating one’s sex with one’s gender, and one’s gender with one’s sexuality, the assumptions about identity which sustained the political discourses of the time gave way to the realization that no, not all boys grow up to be the Marlboro Man, and not all girls grow up to be Betty Draper. Quite to the contrary, some women end up with a gender styling more akin to the former, and some men (though, quite frankly, not enough of us) the latter. Accordingly, academic trailblazers like Judith Halberstam questioned the conspicuous absence of dialogues about masculine-identified women, transfolks, and gay men in courses and anthologies of essays on masculinity studies.
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The idea for my own course last fall, then, was to take these developments in the field of masculinity studies as the starting point for my students’ inquiries into masculinity. This seemed advantageous for a few reasons. First and foremost, it became clear to me early in my thinking about the course that there were a number of lines of investigation that would not contribute to intellectually constructive (or even pleasant) discussion.
As Sally Robinson argues in her illuminating essay “Pedagogy of the Opaque,” a number of paradigms have come to govern contemporary discourses about masculinity. Chief among these is the “oppressor/oppressed” paradigm, whereby either women are the victims of ongoing patriarchal power structures from which men inevitably (ambivalently?) profit, or men are the castrated and condescended victims of an aggressive feminist uprising from which women inevitably (ambivalently?) profit.[1] While this sort of thinking makes for catchy sloganeering (what the kids these days call “trolling,” I believe), it’s nothing if not reductive. Moreover, as Robinson points out, “The oppressor/oppressed paradigm limits what can be learned about masculinity because it sets up a binary relation between the empowered and the disempowered that reproduces the same narrative regardless of historical or cultural context.”
Playing into easy narratives of men in crisis, feminisms that have lingered on past their use-by dates, and even tried-and-still-untrue bullshit about Mars and Venus at cosmic war, these old approaches don’t leave much room for telling (or reading) other stories about masculinity.
Similarly, Robinson finds problems with a simplified (if more pluralistic) model of studying “alternative” (read: “good”) models of masculinity set against “traditional” (read: “bad”) masculinities. While this second paradigm acknowledges that there are as many types of masculinity as there are masculine subjects—or simply performances of masculinity, identities be damned—it nevertheless leads to an “attack/applaud” mode of thought that is both prescriptive and simply doesn’t push things far enough; so, it still maintains a binary of either/or masculinities.
For Robinson, as for me, the problem with both of these ways of thinking and teaching masculinity is that they lead to a pedagogical experience in which
students come to feel that, for feminism, the only way to reconstruct masculinity is to destroy it altogether. Understanding that masculinity is in some sense a “problem” to be studied, students imagine that such a course might offer a cure for what ails men, but as anyone who attends to the growing American concern with the problem of masculinity can attest, there is a great deal of disagreement about whether feminism is the cure or part of the disease.
Such frameworks thus both misrepresent the richness of thought—feminist, queer, or otherwise—on masculinity, and fail to offer a way to consider it apart from knee-jerk political reactions and identity claims. Playing into easy narratives of men in crisis, feminisms that have lingered on past their use-by dates, and even tried-and-still-untrue bullshit about Mars and Venus at cosmic war, these old approaches don’t leave much room for telling (or reading) other stories about masculinity. And so, I found some new ones. I went hunting.
For stories, that is. It turns out that maybe the “cure for what ails” modern masculinity isn’t simply to throw out or demonize old stories about masculinity—many of which are as compelling and sympathetic as they are reprehensible—but simply to tell more stories, about more kinds of people who gives us more ways to think about masculinity, and who find it worth incorporating into their own understandings of how best their gender might be rendered. That some of these “more kinds of people” are women, transfolks, and gay men—people who have, as the historical story goes, been at odds with the sorts of power and privilege which masculinity usually confers—goes a long way toward disrupting not only the assumptions we make about who is masculine, but also about why and how masculinity is such a persistent, historically flexible, and sometimes even downright attractive cultural phenomena—not just in spite of its flaws, but also sometimes for them.
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Accordingly, my working thesis for my course—though not necessarily my students’—might go something like this: Despite its usual associations with subjects whom we might crassly and easily group together as “men,” masculinity is in fact most apparent from its margins[2]; when it is embodied, practiced, and desired by subjects whose relationship to masculinity mark their performances of it as intriguing, troubling, irrelevant, hyper-stylized, unconvincing, more-than-real, counter-intuitive, or any other emotional shorthand for “mixed up.” What this means, I think, is that masculinity might be best described not in the cultural venues where is thought most glamorously to “succeed”—Super Bowls, cozy family sitcoms, Wall Street bankers in pin-striped suits—but in those instances when it is made culturally legible by those subjects whose performances of masculinity are not spectacular, but spectral; those moments which uneasily and beautifully haunt the means by which we come to recognize masculinity as a cultural form in the first place.
In other words, if masculinity was ever conceived as the unproblematic purview of the “manly man”—indeed, if such a “manly man” ever existed outside the nostalgic mode, which seems to be the preferred frame of vision for American culture’s latest bout of willful amnesia—then the last two decades of work on masculinity have thoroughly killed the relevance of such a notion. My course would be about masculinity’s surprisingly rich afterlife.
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Needless to say, perhaps, the grand narrative of my course was one of mixed emotions.By Subir Bhaumik
BBC News, Calcutta
Laxmi Oraon says her humiliation did not end with her stripping and beating A tribal woman who was stripped and assaulted in India's north-eastern state of Assam is to contest the parliamentary elections. Laxmi Oraon has been nominated by the regional Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF). She was stripped by locals when she took part in a rally in 2007 demanding better tribal rights. Pictures of Ms Oraon running naked across a market in Assam's capital Guwahati caused outrage in India. Ms Oraon had joined the rally in November 2007 along with thousands of Adivasi tribespeople, who mostly work as labourers in Assam's 800 tea gardens. The rally turned violent and the Adivasis started vandalising shops and beating up policemen and locals before they were overwhelmed by a huge number of local people. Ms Oraon was stripped and beaten before an Assamese man took off his T-shirt, covered her and dragged her to safety. 'Taunted and teased' Nearly 16 months later, Ms Oraon has been offered a ticket to contest the Tezpur parliamentary constituency. "She is a symbol of Adivasi exploitation, of minority exploitation in Assam. We want her to contest the parliament polls on our ticket and she has agreed," AUDF general secretary Hafiz Rashid Choudhury said.
Outrage over Assam woman assault Ms Oraon said while accepting the nomination: "I may not win but I want to make a point. That the Adivasis will no longer take the exploitation lying down." The AUDF is a Muslim-dominated party but claims to represent other minorities in Assam - among them the Adivasis, whose ancestors were brought from central India to work in Assam's tea estates by the former British rulers. Assam's ruling Congress party claims to represent minorities fairly, but the AUDF has increasingly sliced into the Congress area of influence among the minorities, especially the state's 30% Muslim population. "Our party has been set up to represent the interest of all minorities, so we cannot ignore the exploitation of the Adivasis," Mr Choudhury says. "And Laxmi is a living symbol of this exploitation." After her humiliation, Ms Oraon has often appeared in the media - particularly in the state of Jharkhand, where her ancestors came from. She was an honoured guest at the launch of a book by the leader of the Jharkhand Disom party, Salkhan Murmu, in Jharkhand's capital Ranchi last April. Ms Oraon also finished her school leaving examinations last year. "My humiliation did not end with the stripping and beating. It followed me to the examination centre, where I was taunted and teased," she told journalists. Ms Oraon and her family have accused the ruling party of trying to "bribe" her to stay quiet after the stripping episode. Congress firmly denied the charge. It says it handled the issue fairly, setting up a judicial inquiry commission to identify the culprits and punish them.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe man behind a video of a TTC bus driver running a red light says he regrets publicizing the incident. “It became something far bigger than we imagined,” Nicholas Roy said, in the latest twist on the story of the driver, who no longer works for the TTC.
Speaking with the Toronto Star on Wednesday, Roy said he never wanted the operator, a single mother of two, to lose her job. “The woman took the hard way. She’s going to work every day, she’s not trying to collect the (social assistance) cheque,” he said. While the TTC workers’ union has said it won’t contest the driver’s dismissal, it issued a news release Wednesday quoting Roy on his disagreement with the decision to let the operator go.
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“Sure, she should be counselled and maybe suffer some penalty, but taking away her job is far too harsh. There are other jobs in the TTC she could do,” said Roy. “If I had thought that this would have resulted in the driver losing her job, I would have buried that video so deep that the devil wouldn’t have seen it,” he added. On Tuesday, the union published the bus driver’s letter to TTC management, in which she takes responsibility for “an unacceptable lack of judgment.” In it, she explains that she didn’t see the light had changed until it was too late to stop safely at the intersection. But the operator, who doesn’t want to be named out of embarrassment, says she was aware at the time there was a pedestrian approaching the curb and she swerved to ensure that the person wouldn’t be hit if she stepped into the road. Calling it a “split-second decision,” the driver, said she “would never intentionally run a red light just to make time.”
Roy said the bus incident was too frightening not to report. He contacted the TTC but its online forms don’t allow video attachments. So he had his son, Steven Taylor, who also witnessed the bus run the light, upload the video online so they could refer the TTC to the link. “When the TTC didn’t get back to me, I just figured nobody cared,” said Roy, who later sent it to a TV station.
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TTC spokesman Brad Ross confirmed an email “commendation” form from Roy arrived at 4:46 p.m. that day. It indicated that no reply was required and a link to the YouTube video was included. Because it came in as a commendation, “clearly the urgency wasn’t there when we received it,” said Ross. “We commit to acknowledge within five business days, and investigate with a response within 15 days. If the customer doesn’t indicate they want to receive a reply, we do not send them an acknowledgment or response,” he said. The TTC has a separate email address that allows the public to send documents or other material, but they have to contact the customer service centre by phone or email to get that address.Two more weeks until the new administration begins!
I wonder if President Donald Trump will stick to his campaign promises -- like reducing immigration and slamming consumers by imposing a 35 percent tariff.
Hope not.
But it could have been much worse.
Bernie Sanders wanted to make college free, even though professors say classes are filled with privileged students who party and just kill time.
Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton promised a higher minimum wage and a thousand other new commandments that would do more harm than good.
Every Republican candidate vowed to increase defense spending, even though the U.S. is going broke and already spends more than the next seven biggest nations combined, while half the democratic world freeloads off America's armed forces.
I'm relieved that many of Trump's promises were vague or contradictory. That allows me to hope that he'll only do things that I like.
At this point, I'm in somewhat of an infatuation period, like that afflicting a teenager excited about a new boyfriend or girlfriend.
No, I'm not infatuated with Trump. His magical thinking scares me. What gives me optimism are many of Trump's appointments. He's surrounded himself with people who "get it," who understand the harm done by overregulation and the benefits created by economic growth.
Larry Kudlow as economic advisor?! Paul Atkins, Andy Puzder and Betsy DeVos in important positions?! Who would have thought that?! Not me.
I bet Mitt Romney wouldn't have appointed them.
I also celebrate waking up and realizing that our new president-elect is not Hillary Clinton. We don't have to suffer through more years of progressive sanctimony.
So what will Donald Trump's presidency bring? Will America be "great again"? Will we "have win after win" until we "get sick and tired of winning"? I doubt it.
It would be easier to judge progress had the Libertarian Party candidate won. We could measure whether the party kept its promise to shrink government, cut spending, lower taxes, decrease overseas military commitments, deregulate and butt out of people's private lives.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, sounding like the Founders of our nation, often answered reporters' grandiose questions by saying, "I'm not running for king." Unlike Donald Trump, a narcissistic bully who often tells us he's "in charge," Johnson understood that decision-making power is best left in the hands of individual citizens.
Libertarians also respect Friedrich Hayek's insight: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design."
Will such modesty carry weight in Trump's administration? I'm still hopeful. So are stock market investors. But none of us knows enough to be sure.
I assume 2017 will be about the same as the years before, even with someone as unusual as Trump in the White House.
He talks about "draining the swamp," but we've seen how quickly he can pivot back to business as usual.
Many Iowa voters love the federal government's ethanol subsidies (even though they're cruel and expensive to most of America), so during Iowa's Republican primary, Trump joined the ethanol-praising club. In fact, he said regulators should force gas stations to increase the ethanol they use.
It was a pander to try to take votes from Trump's main Iowa rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who courageously said the ethanol mandate should be phased out.
Trump is a businessman, so I assume he knew that the ethanol mandate is a special interest scam. But in Iowa, Trump just said, "Ethanol is terrific."
I fear that 2017 will bring us more of the same: politicians doing what they think will make the loudest voters happy.
They want us to think we can have it both ways -- that we can reduce deficits while boosting spending on infrastructure and defense and not touching entitlements, etc. That's what Donald Trump has promised.
I hope he breaks many of his promises soon.
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DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COMAlthough adjuvant chemotherapy (ACH) is widely used in clinical practice for the management of muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), a consensus has yet to be established on which ACH regimen is the most effective for improving postoperative survival. In this study, we aimed to systematically assess the optimal ACH regimen for improving survival outcomes in patients treated with radical cystectomy (RC) for MIBC. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in the PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases for all articles published until December 2016 in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The study end-points were progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). A direct pairwise meta-analysis was conducted by pooling the studies that compared RC with ACH and RC alone, and the results are presented as a pooled hazard ratio (HR) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). A Bayesian network meta-analysis was adopted for indirect comparisons among various ACH regimens, and the outcomes are presented as HRs with 95% credible intervals (CrI). The eleven randomized controlled trials ultimately selected for the current analysis comprised of 1,546 patients with 49 to 327 subjects per study. Based on the pairwise meta-analysis, the use of ACH showed significantly better PFS (HR, 0.64; 95% CI, 0.49–0.85) and OS (HR, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.68–0.92) than RC alone. In the network meta-analysis, the gemcitabine/cisplatin/paclitaxel (GCP) combination was the only ACH regimen associated with significant improvement in both the PFS (HR, 0.38; 95% CrI, 0.25–0.58) and OS (HR, 0.38; 95% CrI 0.22–0.65). ACH following RC for MIBC may therefore contribute to improved PFS and OS. In particular, the GCP combination may be the optimal ACH regimen for improving postoperative survival outcomes. Additional well-designed, large scale, prospective, randomized trials are still required to establish the optimal ACH regimen in MIBC patients.
To improve the survival outcome of MIBC patients by eradicating micrometastatic disease, the use of perioperative (neoadjuvant or adjuvant) systemic chemotherapy in conjunction with RC has been intensively investigated. The survival advantages of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACH) have been proven by several randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses, which have reported a 5% improvement in OS and a 9% improvement in disease-free survival [ 5 – 8 ]. Therefore, depending upon the current international guidelines [ 3 ], the use of cisplatin-based NACH is recommended as level of evidence I in patients with non-metastatic MIBC (cT2-T4a). In light of the observed survival benefits of NACH, several clinical trials and meta-analyses investigating the use of adjuvant chemotherapy (ACH) after RC in advanced bladder cancer have been conducted [ 9 – 16 ]. However, the evidence supporting the utility of ACH for the management of MIBC remains inadequate due to study limitations; these limitations include the difficulty of designing prospective studies with a small sample size and patient dropouts due to poor general condition and diminished renal function postoperatively [ 2, 16 ]. Consequently, there is no evidence-based consensus regarding which ACH regimen should be used clinically.
These low survival outcomes in locally advanced MIBC may be due to systemic occult micrometastases at the time of RC, which cannot be detected by preoperative imaging studies [ 3 ]. Also, distant recurrence of bladder cancer is more frequent than locoregional recurrence [ 1, 4 ]. These findings suggest that RC alone may be insufficient to completely control the disease and that theadditional use of systemic therapy should be considered in the majority of patients with locally advanced MIBC.
Muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), which accounts for 20% to 30% of all bladder cancers at the initial diagnosis, is primarily treated with radical cystectomy (RC) combined with bilateral pelvic lymph node dissection (PLND) [ 1 ]. A substantial number of patients with localized MIBC may be completely cured by RC alone, with a 5-year recurrence-free survival (RFS) rate of more than 80% [ 1 ]. However, in spite of this potentially curative surgical treatment, some MIBC patients experience locoregional or distant disease recurrence postoperatively. In cases of locally advanced MIBC, including pT3–4 tumor or lymph node positive (N+) disease, the 5-year RFS and overall survival (OS) rates after RC are 35 to 60% and 25% to 50%, respectively [ 1, 2 ].
Figure shows the network meta-analysis results of OS. Compared to controls, only the GCP regimen (HR, 0.38; 95% CrI 0.22–0.65) was significantly associated with better OS. As for OS benefits, rankograms depicted in Figure indicate that the GCP regimen had a higher probability of being ranked first than any other ACH regimen; the GC and MAVC regimens were likely to be the worst ranked, showing an inferior rank to controls. Similar results are presented in Supplementary Table 2 and Figure.
The results for network meta-analysis of PFS are described in Figure. Among the ACH regimens examined, the CMV (HR, 0.46; 95% credible interval [CrI] 0.23–0.92) and GCP (HR, 0.38; 95% CrI 0.25–0.58) regimens significantly correlated with favorable PFS compared with controls. There were no significant PFS differences between other regimens (cisplatin, CAP, GC, MVAC, and CM) and controls. Figure shows the ranking results of 9 different ACH regimens (including controls) in terms of PFS benefit. The GCP and CMV regimens had a high probability of being ranked first or second, respectively; the GC regimen was most likely to be the worst ranked, and it was inferior to controls. The rankings of these ACH regimens are similarly presented in Supplementary Table 1 and Figure.
We could find no strong evidence suggesting publication bias by graphical inspection in the pairwise meta-analyses of both PFS and OS. Funnel plots for publication bias for PFS and OS demonstrated a certain degree of symmetry ( Supplementary Figure 1 ). Moreover, the Begg's and Egger's tests revealed that there was no statistical evidence of publication bias in the pairwise meta-analysis of PFS and OS (all p-values > 0.05; Supplementary Figure 1 ).
A total of 9 studies including 1,111 patients, were available for the meta-analysis of progression-free survival (PFS). The pooled analysis of PFS indicated that ACH was significantly associated with better PFS outcomes than controls (hazard ratio [HR], 0.64; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.49–0.85; Figure ). Significant heterogeneity among the included studies for PFS was observed (p=0.004; I 2 = 64%). The pooled analysis of OS was based on ten publications involving 1,219 patients. The pooled HR (95% CI) was 0.79 (0.67–0.92), which suggested favorable OS outcomes for patients who received ACH compared to controls (Figure ). There was no significant heterogeneity among included studies for OS (p = 0.10; I 2 = 39%).
Details concerning the treatment characteristics of the eligible studies are summarized in Table. In general, RC involved complete extirpation of the entire bladder, prostate, and seminal vesicles in men and removal of the anterior |
I can't even imagine what that would look like with high tariffs’ & ‘the world would definitely fall into a recession.” (March 10, 2016) Heather Long, CNN Money: “But business leaders and economists from both sides of the aisle warn Trump's idea to slap hefty fees on Chinese and Mexican imports would be disastrous for the economy. Experts warn his plan to ‘fix’ trade deals could cause an economic war that leaves Americans even worse off.” (March 15, 2016) Jim Tankersley, Washington Post: “U.S. economy would be 4.6 percent smaller by the end of 2019 if America levies tariffs on China and Mexico and those countries respond, compared to where it would be with no tariffs. It forecasts U.S. employment would be 7 million jobs lower than it would have been, and that the unemployment rate would hit 9.5 percent in the middle of 2019. The federal budget deficit would grow to be 60 percent larger than it would have been.”(March 25, 2016) Jonathan Soble and Keith Bradsher, New York Times: “It’s interesting that despite the two-decade stagnation of the Japanese economy, Trump is now reviving the idea of Japan as an economic rival robbing America of jobs.” (March 8, 2016) Jude Webber, Financial Times: Blackrock CEO Larry Fink says that protectionism “’would put the global economy into a recession.’” (March 12, 2016) Meg Whitman, CEO HP, CNN Money: “His plan to put on a 35% tariff on goods imported would sink this company into a recession. It would penalize global companies that are trying to be competitive globally.” (March 4, 2016) Nicole Sinclair, Yahoo! Finance: “[Former-NSA and CIA Director General Michael] Hayden said this rhetoric and discussion are worrisome. ‘It’s a tremendous danger. We are a very competitive society. We’re actually being fairly successful…because we are open to global trade. So when you talk about slopping on tariffs that look a bit like Smoot Hawley back in the '20s that everyone agrees deepened the Great Depression, it’s really scary stuff.’” (March 18, 2016) Paul Wiseman, Associated Press: “[Trump] probably would ignite a trade war that would raise prices for Americans and cause diplomatic havoc. Economists recall that the 1930 Smoot-Hawley legislation, which raised tariffs on imports, inflamed trade tensions and worsened the Great Depression.” (March 13, 2016) Richard Katz, Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump’s tariffs would amount to a tax on American companies and households equal to 1.5% of GDP. A hit of that size could cause a recession…while [Trump’s threats] would damage the U.S. economy, perhaps sending it into recession, that damage would be dwarfed by the havoc created among U.S. friends such as South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.” (March 29, 2016) Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, Washington Post: “Trump’s trade rhetoric is ‘deeply irresponsible’ because isolating the U.S. economy could devastate businesses and hurt consumers.” (March 13, 2016) Tim Mullaney, MarketWatch: “‘It would cost Mexico a significant amount, but it would cost us as well, a lot more than $10 billion, to get in a trade war with Mexico. It’s just wrong.’” (March 16, 2016) Tom Donohue, President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bloomberg: “[A 45% tariff on goods from China] would mean they’d probably impeach Donald Trump when they figured out what they really meant. And–that’s overstatement. I’m just trying to make it very clear, if you double the price of something we’re buying from China, the citizens that go to Wal-Mart and Target and go to their stores and people that buy components – they’re going to pay for this.” (March 18, 2016)
Think TanksLast month, a Georgia-based media group with several papers and magazines in Alaska misled readers with a controversial editorial. In a leaked corporate memo, a vice president at Morris Communications told papers it owns–including the Juneau Empire and Peninsula Clarion–to run a pre-written editorial, and represent it as a local staff opinion.
On Oct. 14, media blogger Jim Romenesko published a leaked corporate email from Morris Communications Company, which owns two dailies in Alaska, along with weeklies like the Chugiak-Eagle River Star, Homer News and Alaska Journal of Commerce.
The email is about an editorial the company’s CEO instructed local papers to run. (The memo is signed only “Mr. Morris,” which could refer either to William Morris III, or his son William Morris IV; both are cited as CEO on the company’s site, although the younger Morris officially took over the position on July 31 of this year.)
The piece in question, titled “Reckless Endangerment,” argues the Obama administration’s decision to raise the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. is “a potentially destructive act.” It was published in the Juneau Empire and Peninsula Clarion on Sept. 24. And though it gives the appearance of having been penned by local editors in either Juneau or Kenai, the words are exactly the same.
The first line in the Empire version reads, “Don’t tell us America isn’t compassionate.” The Clarion opener is exactly the same: “Don’t tell us America isn’t compassionate.”
The pieces are identical throughout: Same overall argument, same numbers, even a lot of the same rhetoric, including what one person interviewed called “rough language,” such as saying the administration’s immigration policy is, “A step bordering on suicidal,” that Syrian refugees come from “intractably retrograde cultures” that are “fundamentally at odds with freedom-loving Western society.”
In the leaked memo from Sept. 21, Morris’s Vice President for Audience Robert Gilbert told 33 editorial editors and executive editors,”You should run it as your own editorial (not a column or op-ed), or produce your own editorial BUT MAINTAIN THE SAME POSITION.”
Nationwide, 10 of 11 Morris’s daily papers printed the piece between Sept. 21 and 26 (though titles varied somewhat). The only one that did not reprint it verbatim was the Florida Times-Union, which changed the prose and structure, but maintained the same argument, and cited nearly identical figures to make the case.
Gilbert did not return multiple requests for comment. Nor did anybody else at Morris, although a receptionist for the senior vice president in charge of ethics violations said all questions must be directed to Mr. Morris, adding that she was not authorized to give out his contact information.
Of the many Morris employees, both current and former, contacted for this story, all but one said they were unwilling or unable to speak on the record about the company.
Peninsula Clarion news editor Will Morrow said the corporate memo was an extremely rare case, but characterized running it as a “straightforward” decision case that did not receive much discussion.
“The editorial space generally reflects the views of the management and ownership of the paper,” Morrow said by phone Monday, “and, in this case, it came from a little higher up in ownership than our normal local editorials.”
Asked whether he thought the paper had misled its readers, Morrow said he would not comment.
Morris Communications has used local editorial pages to make a political point in the past. In 2013, William S. Morris III wrote an op-ed calling for a set-net ban right as all of the company’s Alaska-based papers started running a five-part series on salmon stocks. In that case, however, the author was clearly identified by the byline.
Morris Communications is a privately held media company, and it’s their legal right to publish this kind of editorial. But to do so while passing it off as a local opinion piece strongly runs against the grain of journalism ethics.Our mission with Ubuntu is to deliver, in the cleanest, most economical and most reliable form, all the goodness that engineers love about free software to the widest possible audience (including engineers :)). We’ve known for a long time that free software is beautiful on the inside – efficient, accurate, flexible, modifiable. For the past three years, we’ve been leading the push to make free software beautiful on the outside too – easy to use, visually pleasing and exciting. That started with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and is coming to fruition in 12.04 LTS, now in beta.
For the first time with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, real desktop user experience innovation is available on a full production-ready enterprise-certified free software platform, free of charge, well before it shows up in Windows or MacOS. It’s not ‘job done’ by any means, but it’s a milestone. Achieving that milestone has tested the courage and commitment of the Ubuntu community – we had to move from being followers and integrators, to being designers and shapers of the platform, together with upstreams who are excited to be part of that shift and passionate about bringing goodness to a wide audience. It’s right for us to design experiences and help upstreams get those experiences to be amazing, because we are closest to the user; we are the last mile, the last to touch the code, and the first to get the bug report or feedback from most users.
Thank you, to those who stood by Ubuntu, Canonical and me as we set out on this adventure. This was a big change, and in the face of change, many wilt, many panic, and some simply find that their interests lie elsewhere. That’s OK, but it brings home to me the wonderful fellowship that we have amongst those who share our values and interests – their affiliation, advocacy and support is based on something much deeper than a fad or an individualistic need, it’s based on a desire to see all of this intellectual wikipedia-for-code value unleashed to support humanity at large, from developers to data centre devops to web designers to golden-years-ganderers, serving equally the poorest and the bankers who refuse to serve them, because that’s what free software and open content and open access and level playing fields are all about.
To those of you who rolled up your sleeves and filed bugs and wrote the documentation and made the posters or the cupcakes, thank you.
You’ll be as happy to read this comment on unity-design:
I’m very serious about loving the recent changes. I think I’m a fair representative of the elderly community ………. someone who doesn’t particularly care to learn new things, but just wants things to make sense. I think we’re there! Lance
You’ll be as delighted with the coverage of Ubuntu for Android at MWC in Barcelona last week:
“one of the more eye-catching concepts being showcased” – v3
“sleeker, faster, potentially more disruptive” – IT Pro Portal
“you can also use all the features of Android” – The Inquirer
“I can easily see the time when I will be carrying only my smartphone” – UnwiredView
“everything it’s been claimed to be” – Engadget
“Efficiency, for the win!” – TechCrunch
“phones that become traditional desktops have the potential to benefit from the extra processing power” – GigaOM
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future of computing” – IntoMobile
Free software distils the smarts of those of us who care about computing, much like Wikipedia does. Today’s free software draws on the knowledge and expertise of hundreds of thousands of individuals, all over the world, all of whom helped to make this possible, just like Wikipedia. It’s only right that the benefits of that shared wisdom should accrue to everyone without charge, which is why contributing to Ubuntu is the best way to add leverage to the contributions made everywhere else, to ensure they have the biggest possible impact. It wouldn’t be right to have to pay to have a copy of Wikipedia on your desk at the office, and the same is true of the free software platform. The bits should be free, and the excellent commercial services optional. That’s what we do at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, and that’s why we do it.
Engineers are human beings too!
We set out to refine the experience for people who use the desktop professionally, and at the same time, make it easier for the first-time user. That’s a very hard challenge. We’re not making Bob, we’re making a beautiful, easy to use LCARS ;-). We measured the state of the art in 2008 and it stank on both fronts. When we measure Ubuntu today, based on how long it takes heavy users to do things, and a first-timer to get (a different set of) things done, 12.04 LTS blows 10.04 LTS right out of the water and compares favourably with both MacOS and Windows 7. Unity today is better for both hard-core developers and first-time users than 10.04 LTS was. Hugely better.
For software developers:
A richer set of keyboard bindings for rapid launching, switching and window management
Pervasive search results in faster launching for occasional apps
Far less chrome in the shell than any other desktop; it gets out of your way
Much more subtle heuristics to tell whether you want the launcher to reveal, and to hint it’s about to
Integrated search presents a faster path to find any given piece of content
Magic window borders and the resizing scrollbar make for easier window sizing despite razor-thin visual border
Full screen apps can include just the window title and indicators – full screen terminal with all the shell benefits
… and many more. In 12.04 LTS, multi-monitor use cases got a first round of treatment, we will continue to refine and improve that every six months now that the core is stable and effective. But the general commentary from professionals, and software developers in particular, is “wow”. In this last round we have focused testing on more advanced users and use cases, with user journeys that include many terminal windows, and there is a measurable step up in the effectiveness of Unity in those cases. Still rough edges to be sure, even in this 12.04 release (we are not going to be able to land locally-integrated menus in time, given the freeze dates and need for focus on bug fixes) but we will SRU key items and of course continue to polish it in 12.10 onwards. We are all developers, and we all use it all the time, so this is in our interests too.
For the adventurous, who really want to be on the cutting edge, the (totally optional) HUD is our first step to a totally new kind of UI for complex apps. We’re deconstructing the traditional UI, expressing goodness from the inside out. It’s going to be a rich vein of innovation and exploration, and the main beneficiaries will be those who use computers to create amazing things, whether it’s the kernel, or movies. Yes, we are moving beyond the desktop, but we are also innovating to make the desktop itself, better.
We care about efficiency, performance, quality, reliability. So do developers and engineers. We care about beauty and ease of use – turns out most engineers and developers care about that too. I’ve had lots of hard-core engineers tell me that they “love the challenges the design team sets”, because it’s hard to make easy software, and harder to make it pixel-perfect. And lots that have switched back to Ubuntu from the MacOS because devops on Ubuntu… rock.
The hard core Linux engineers can use… anything, really. Linus is probably equally comfortable with Linux-from-scratch as with Ubuntu. But his daughter Daniela needs something that works for human beings of all shapes, sizes, colours and interests. She’s in our audience. I hope she’d love Ubuntu if she tries it. She could certainly install it for herself while Dad isn’t watching 😉 Linus and other kernel hackers are our audience too, of course, but they can help himself if things get stuck. We have to shoulder the responsibility for the other 99%. That’s a really, really hard challenge – for engineers and artists alike. But we’ve made huge progress. And doing so brings much deeper meaning to the contributions of all the brilliant people that make free software, everywhere.
Again, thanks to the Ubuntu community, 500 amazing people at Canonical, the contributors to all of the free software that makes it possible, and our users.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2012 at 12:45 pm and is filed under design, free software, ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.A.Ron and Jim from Bald Move
at the 2016 "Red Wedding."
Rocket City NerdCon (RCNC) 2018 is a celebration of all things nerdy. If your fanaticism for pop culture, comic books, movies, tv, books, games, collectibles, crafting, cosplay, LARPing, etc. borders on obsessively nerdy, this is the place for you! Come meet other people who geek out over similar subjects, and let your inner nerd flag fly.
When: Saturday, Nov. 3, 9:00am-9:00pm and Sunday, Nov. 4, 9:00am-5:00pm.
Saturday, Nov. 3, 9:00am-9:00pm and Sunday, Nov. 4, 9:00am-5:00pm. Where: Downtown Huntsville Library, 915 Monroe Street, Huntsville, AL 35801
Downtown Huntsville Library, 915 Monroe Street, Huntsville, AL 35801 Tickets: $15 in advance or $20 at the door; children 10 and under are free with ticketed adult.
Tickets are now available! Tickets are good for the whole weekend, and you must have a ticket to enter panel rooms and workshops. The library will be open to the public during normal library hours (Saturday, 9:00am-5:00pm, and Sunday, 1:00-5:00pm), but only ticket holders will be allowed in the library on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. See our store to purchase tickets: https://store.hmcpl.org//
Follow the con on Facebook to make sure you don't miss any announcements! Questions can be sent to nerdcon@hmcpl.org.
Saturday Schedule:
9:30 AM- Disney Singalong 2018 part I- Sing along with your favorite Disney and Pixar songs, and after the initial sixty minute set, stick around for songs by request!
9:30 AM- Mr. Rogers Raised Me- Come talk about all things Neighborhood and relive the best childhood memories.
10:30 AM- Cosplay 101- Cosplay made easy! Where to start when the start seems so far away.
11:30 AM- North Alabama’s Next Top (Gundam) Model- See how an armada of giant robots becomes a shelf-full of detailed models! Our Gunpla grades are High to Perfect!
11:30 AM- Mini Marvel Maniacs- Marvel meetup for kids and families to talk movies and heroes, play games, and do activities.
12:30 PM- Keep Watching the Skies: A Subjective History of American Science Fiction Films, 1950-1980- A very subjective history of modern American sci-fi movies from the Cold-War to the 1980s with the incredible success of Star Wars
1:00 PM- Meet our special guest Kenneth Spivey and hear more about him and his work.
2:30 PM- 3D Printing– Curious about 3D printing and how you can start printing for yourself? Join David Cantrell of 3D Printing Huntsville as he introduces you to the amazing world of 3D printing!
2:30 PM- Cosplay Contest- Show off your costumes and battle it out for some cool prizes! Check the rules on page 10 of your program and be sure to register by noon!
4:00 PM- Cosplay for Elders: Costuming Over 50- Presentation and inspiration for costuming directed at 50+ years. Discussion of issues particular to older cosplayers.
4:00 PM- Sunshine Start-O Dance Now!- Come and watch Sunshine Start-O perform songs from the anime "Love Live! School Idol Project!"
5:30 PM- Crossing Mediums in Fiction-Learn about crossing into different mediums with your creative work. Hear about the pros and cons of the process.
5:30 PM- Quidditch in the Rocket City- Have you ever wanted to be like Harry Potter and play quidditch? Come find out if quidditch is right for you! Come meet Rocket City Quidditch Club and give it a try!
6:30 PM- I'm Your Bad Guy This Time!- Explore the evolution of the most nefarious villain types, as we trace a few lines of influence through history.
7:00 PM- Our special guest Isaac Marion will be introducing his latest book The Living reading excerpts and answering questions.
8:00 PM- Doki Doki Literature Club- Doki Doki Literature Club is an interesting game. Let's talk about it, come meet the president of the club!
Sunday Schedule:
9:30 AM- Disney Singalong 2018 part II - 60 more minutes of Disney’s best songs (with additional songs by request afterwards)
9:30 AM- The Winston Science Fiction Series- How the future began, the early days of science fiction as seen in the pages of the Winston SF series.
10:30 AM- RCNC special guest Isaac Marion is hosting a viewing of the film Warm Bodies based upon his book of the same name
11:30 AM- Self-Publishing- Interested in writing and publishing a book? Let’s our panel of self-published authors tell you how they did it!
1:00 PM- VR for iPhone Users - Learn to get VR on the iPhone. Mirroring your PC is the answer.
1:00 PM- RCNC special guest Kenneth Spivey will be leading a propmaking workshop.
2:00 PM- Mastery of the Game- Answering questions about running games, creating content, and being a DM, for all levels of experience.
3:00 PM- Robots in Outer Space (A FIRST Tech Challenge Overview)- Are you interested in learning all about robots? In this panel you'll learn what it takes to be a part of a robotics team.
3:30 PM- Intro to K-Pop- Curious what this whole K-Pop is about? Join a fan as she walks you through a recent history of K-Pop in music videos! Already a fan? Stop by anyway to enjoy some great videos from Girls Generation, Shinee, BTS, EXO, and more!
3:30 PM- Meet our special guest Isaac Marion for a short Q & A session.
RCNC 2018 wants YOU! We are looking for nerdy folks to lead panel discussions, how-to workshops, singalongs, dance sessions, etc. If you're a Trekkie expert, cosplay master, enthusiast of all things robots, or just burning with the need to discuss the latest superhero film, use the panel submission form below to tell us about your idea for an awesome panel!
All panel submissions are subject to review by the RCNC Committee for subject matter and content. Panels for mature audiences are not prohibited but are subject to approval on a case-by-case basis. 18+ panels may be required to be held after Library Hours are over to insure audience suitability.
Rocket City NerdCon 2018 Call for Presentations are now closed! Thank you for submitting a panel. You should be contacted shortly regarding the panel schedule and details. If you didn't get your idea on the schedule this year, we hope you try again in 2019!
Please send any questions regarding Panel Presentations to nerdcon@hmcpl.org and be sure to include your name and contact information so we can get back to you!
Rocket City NerdCon 2018 Vendor Applications are now closed! Thank you for your interest and if you didn't get a spot this year, we hope to see you in 2019!
All vendor applications are subject to review by the RCNC Committee for convention suitability. Applicants that are found to to be unsuitable for the convention will be denied. Vendors are asked to refrain from selling or displaying merchandise intended for mature audiences as RCNC is a family-friendly convention. Please note that the Vendors Area is open to the public during regular Library Hours. Vendors are encouraged to sell their merchandise to both congoers and non-congoers alike. Payment for vendor booths are due no later than two weeks before the convention. Vendors will be invoiced through PayPal at the email provided on their application. Vendors who do not wish to remit payment through PayPal must email nerdcon@hmcpl.org and make an appointment with a RCNC 2018 Committee Chair to remit their payment in person. Vendors who fail to follow these instructions are not guaranteed a vendors booth.
Please send any questions regarding Vendor Applications to nerdcon@hmcpl.org and be sure to include your name, vendor name, and contact information so that we can get back to you!Jim Campano was 18 when Boston tore his neighborhood down. The Jewish and Italian bakeries, the Polish church and the synagogues, the tenements and rowhouses — gone. Street corners bustling with teenagers, the Campano family’s sunny sixth-floor apartment on Poplar Street — erased by a government that called the West End a slum.
“Nobody believed they would do it, that they would take a whole neighborhood,” Campano recalls. “Then the cranes came in, and the bulldozers.” The first demolition hit like an earthquake: “The whole block was swinging back and forth.”
In 1958, in one of the most infamous acts of America’s urban renewal era, the Boston Redevelopment Authority seized nearly all of the working-class West End, evicted its last 7,500 residents, and razed it all to make way for new middle-class apartments. “It felt like they took part of you when they took your neighborhood,” says Campano, who co-founded the West End Museum to commemorate his lost piece of Boston.
Last September — 57 years later — came a historic postscript to the story. Brian Golden, the director of the BRA, spoke at the West End Museum’s opening of an exhibition on urban renewal. Before a crowd of 50, the head of the agency that demolished the old West End made amends.
“The BRA of today does not condone the destruction of neighborhoods and the displacement of residents that happened in urban renewal’s wake,” Golden said. “And I want to offer my heartfelt apology on behalf of the agency to the families of the West End.”
Campano, now 75, stood and acknowledged the historic moment. “That’s the first time I ever had a formal apology from the BRA,” he says. “I think they were sincere.”
But Golden had another motivation besides facing history’s wrongs. His speech was part of an intense campaign to keep the special urban renewal powers that the powerful BRA has exercised in parts of Boston since the 1950s. Those powers, which were set to expire this spring, include a bundle of revitalization tools used in many other American cities. But they also include eminent domain, the same power to seize private property that a previous generation of city leaders abused.
Boston officials argued that it’s a new day; that the city’s ugly history of eminent domain abuse is now decades in the past, and that today’s urban renewal can be a powerful tool to encourage and preserve affordable housing. Yet Golden and his boss, Mayor Marty Walsh, asked City Council to hand the BRA a blank check for another 10 years — and not in the most struggling parts of today’s Boston. Instead, the $50 million agency asked to retain its powers over most of the same neighborhoods the city declared blighted a half-century ago, including places transformed by Boston’s real estate boom, where home sale prices have soared far past $1 million.
That request sparked an intense debate about the future of redevelopment in the booming city, home to one of the nation’s strongest urban economies. It’s a debate that is relevant to other cities, particularly those searching for tools to help ensure that the benefits of economic growth are felt in all quarters.
Can urban renewal powers — infamous for harming neighborhoods and their most vulnerable residents — finally be used in a way that is fair for all communities?
Or are they outdated, still prone to abuse, and likely to give powerful bureaucracies a way to perpetuate themselves?
“Most of the legacy of urban renewal in Boston, at least in the public consciousness, is very negative,” says Boston City Council President Michelle Wu. “It’s a story of displacement and government overreach.” Though skeptical of urban renewal, Wu forged a compromise in March: The council gave the BRA six more years to use its special authority, but with new oversight that nudges it to wind it down. The biggest reason for the long ramp, says Wu, is to give the agency time to figure out how to roll back its powers in a way that preserves existing affordable housing agreements.
“Will there be a day that an agency will ask to eliminate some of its powers?” Wu asks. “I hope the answer would be yes. But I know it will take significant outside pressure and oversight.”
In other words, it takes extraordinary effort to rein in extraordinary power.
Progressive Intentions, Vast Authority
Brian Golden works in a corner office on Boston City Hall’s top floor, nine stories up. From tall glass windows, he gazes down on Revolutionary-era Faneuil Hall, redeveloped in the 1970s as a BRA project, and across downtown to the Long Wharf, where ferries sail out to the Boston Harbor islands. On one wall, he’s put up a classic Boston poster from a reelection campaign for James Michael Curley, the city’s political boss of the early 20th century. “The Mayor of the Poor,” it reads. “Humane, Experienced Leadership.” It’s the perfect symbol of progressive intentions crossed with vast authority.
As BRA director, Golden has the most powerful job in City Hall besides the mayor’s. The BRA, founded in 1957, isn’t just an urban renewal agency. It’s also Boston’s planning department and economic development corporation, and it approves or rejects all large-scale development proposals in the city. During Mayor Tom Menino’s 20-year reign, critics claimed Menino used the BRA to personally control what was and wasn’t built in the city. The agency used urban renewal to help luxury and nonprofit projects alike: a W Hotel downtown, the Whittier Street Health Center in lower-income Roxbury, and Kensington Place, a 27-story, mostly high-end apartment tower erected in Chinatown despite neighborhood opposition and in another unpopular move, used its power to raze a historic theater. Walsh, who succeeded Menino, ran for the job on a promise to reform the agency.
Golden became director when Walsh took office in January 2014. Since then, he’s been on a mission to convince Bostonians that the agency is changing.
“The destruction of people’s homes and neighborhoods is not something people got over easily, nor should they,” Golden says. “There’s no one at this agency who thinks the approaches taken in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were appropriate. [And] the political reality of Boston in the 21st century would never permit that.”
Golden’s September talk at the West End Museum was just one stop in a yearlong campaign to convince Boston not to let the BRA’s urban renewal powers expire. “In recent decades,” he argues, “this agency has used these tools in a far more nuanced manner, that has yielded far more good for the people of Boston than not.”
Urban renewal zones, he notes, give the BRA more power to create affordable housing requirements on land it sells. That’s a key goal in Boston, where the poor, working class and middle class alike are in danger of getting priced out of the city. Those restrictions — land disposition agreements, or LDAs, for short — stay with the property, and the BRA can use them as leverage decades later. A housing nonprofit recently replaced its aging apartment complex in Boston’s Allston-Brighton neighborhood — a product of 1960s urban renewal — with a new apartment and condo development, thanks to a land swap the BRA helped negotiate with Harvard University. Golden says the BRA can even use urban renewal tools to extract funds from a luxury project to benefit an affordable housing project. For instance, affordable housing requirements attached to a high-end residential and office tower project near Boston’s North Station were used to help subsidize a middle-class housing development nearby. (In Boston, developers are so focused on building high-priced homes that city officials don’t just look for ways to encourage affordable housing for the poor, but also “workforce housing” — homes that people who work in the city can afford.)
Golden says the BRA hardly ever uses eminent domain to take an occupied home or a place of business anymore: “It’s an extraordinary rarity.” Boston’s most notable recent takings, in 2011, were nothing like the West End. The city forced two businesses in Roxbury’s Dudley Square, a high-poverty neighborhood, to relocate to make room for a new Boston Public Schools headquarters, and a few blocks away, it wrested a neglected historic home from its owner to hand it over to a preservation group. More often, say Golden and his staff, the BRA uses eminent domain in even smaller, surgical ways: for a temporary construction easement, to enlarge a sidewalk, to let a developer install an awning above a public right-of-way.
A lone remaining rowhome is surrounded by high-rises on Lomasney Way in the West End neighborhood. The area saw mass urban renewal in the 1950s.
The BRA has other special powers inside the city’s urban renewal zones that help solve the dilemmas of building new in an old city. It can more easily buy and sell land, assemble and combine parcels from different owners, and clear a property’s title — especially important in Boston, says Golden, where some parcels’ histories go back to the 1600s. Developers can do that on their own, but it’s more difficult. With urban renewal tools, Golden says, “we can make really significant problems go away.”
The way Golden describes it, modern urban renewal in Boston sounds progressive — enlightened, even. But there’s a problem. The BRA only has these powers in places where, long ago, it found blight. So why don’t the powers move out of now-rich neighborhoods as the city changes?
The answer is rather embarrassing for the BRA. It has lost track of those LDAs it created. It doesn’t even know how many there are — several hundred, maybe. Figuring it out will take intense dives into old paper documents. But many LDAs were set to expire along with the urban renewal zone they’re in, so ending the program in a zone would have consequences the BRA can’t explain.
What’s more, “we could not easily identify everything we own,” says Golden. Even the BRA’s database of land it still owns has gaps.
“Why have all these things been neglected?” Golden asks. “I don’t know. I wasn’t in a decision-making capacity.” (He joined the BRA in 2009 and got the top job five years later.) “But it’s crystal clear, the agency did not focus itself on the task of preparing for urban renewal after the expiration.”
The BRA says it may take two years to finish a complete inventory — and until then, it can’t plan to shrink the city’s urban renewal zones. That stymied urban renewal’s critics on the city council, who had hoped to do just that. By acting as if urban renewal would go on forever, the bureaucracy succeeded in keeping its extraordinary powers. That’s made the agency’s many angry critics even angrier.
“It’s All About How We Use It”
Steve Fox strolls along a red-brick sidewalk in Rutland Square, next to a block-long procession of 5-story brick rowhouses, the signature architecture of Boston’s South End, their identical bowed fronts united into one unbroken wall.
“This unit with the red doors, that’s a duplex,” Fox says. “It’s owned by one person who rents out the bottom unit.” The rowhouse’s value in Boston’s overheated real estate market: about $5 million.
It wasn’t always this way. The South End, the country’s largest urban Victorian neighborhood, spent a century as a home to working-class immigrants and African-Americans, drawn there from the nearby Back Bay train station after migrating from the South. A plaque on one Rutland Square rowhouse honors a former owner: Butler R. Wilson, head of Boston’s NAACP branch from 1916 to 1936.
Fox bought his home on the square 30 years ago, in the early, prospecting wave of gentrification, for $280,000. Now, he says, not only do bidding wars drive rowhouse sales into the millions, prospective tenants also outbid each other to snag rentals.
So the South End Forum, a coalition of small neighborhood groups, decided last year to ask the city council to end the BRA’s urban renewal powers there. “The entire South End is part of an urban renewal zone,” says Fox, the South End Forum’s president. “They never bothered to shrink it.”
Urban renewal swept into the South End in the 1960s. The BRA seized blocks it deemed blighted and demolished rowhouses. Residents fought back. On West Newton Street stands a former church, now the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts. A mural shows a giant pair of hands lifting a sea of Hispanic faces up above the neighborhood’s past: an eviction notice, a building on fire, broken windows, and a banner that reads, “No nos mudaremos de la Parcela 19” — “We won’t move from Parcel 19.”
Beyond the old church, Victorian brownstones give way to short, angular 1970s townhouses — Villa Victoria, the affordable housing complex built by the Puerto Rican activist group that resisted eviction. Here, the story of urban renewal gets complicated. Fox stands amid the complex and looks north and south at places the street grid was erased, evaluating the altered landscape with a historic preservationist’s lament. “Although this is a very vibrant and important community,” he says, “it could be just as vibrant if rules of the game had not been abused.”
Residents from Villa Victoria try to beat the heat in Plaza Betances. Villa Victoria is an affordable housing complex built by a Puerto Rican activist group.
To Boston’s Puerto Rican community, Villa Victoria is a source of community pride, and their accounts of urban renewal tend to balance anger at eviction with frankness about the poor living conditions it replaced. Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, CEO of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, the nonprofit that runs Villa Victoria, says longtime residents talk of unsafe conditions and subpar heating in winter, while photos from the era show buildings boarded up and destroyed by arsonists. She says she doesn’t hear |
limited textual Daoism was being propagated in academic institutions and a rudimentary beginning was made in the study of the religious, social, and historical aspects of Daoism through the work of Maspero, Needham, Creel, Girardot, Wing-tsit Chan, and others. Thus the primary influence of Daoism in the west was through texts and translations, not through the study of religious rituals or alchemical practices which remained largely obscure and unknown. Further, these texts were composites based on generations of redaction and application to religious life and not simply the unedited philosophical texts of individual masters. This literary bias, based on a western orientalist textual paradigm, has obscured much that is esoteric and magical within living Daoism, both in the past and in the present. The 5,000 texts of the Daozang are filled with esotericism of the most diverse and complex kind, written in special languages, with hundreds of symbolic, alchemical drawings, mandalas, maps, diagrams, and instructions for internal alchemical transformations. The Chinese terminology for the various esoteric traditions has a highly complex etymological and semantic history (the 1915 Chinese-German dictionary gives 46 different meanings for the term Dao). While the Daodejing has over 200 translations in 17 languages, the inner teachings of Daoist esotericism still remains obscure in the popular context. [28] Nevertheless, Daoist thought has impacted both European intellectual traditions and American transcendental thought and popular culture in significant and enduring ways. [29] Early Western Esoteric Interests In Germany, the first German translation of the Daodejing (1870) was introduced as a theosophical work of “ancient esoteric wisdom” (~prisca theologia). [30] The theme of “ancient wisdom” (coupled with a developing interest in the “exotic east”) attracted some western esotericists to explore Chinese Daoist texts as resources for the development of their own systems. The range of intersection between the two is a fascinating melange of cross-cultural comparison, systemic parallelism, and synthetic integration. Daoist Five Element (wuxing) cosmology is based in a theory of correspondences very similar to theories developed in the Greco-Roman world and subsequently passed onto Medieval Europe. The many diagrams of the various Daoist correlative systems, distinctive within the various Daoist schools, resemble in many ways the correlative symbolism of European Renaissance esotericism in synthesizing the elements (in Daoism five: in the four directions, water (N), wood (E), fire (S), metal (W), and earth in the center), with seasonal, astrological, herbal, mineral, animal as well as with colors, human organs, and spirit correlations. Equilibrium is found by balancing the Five Agents through meditative (neiguan), symbolic processes of internal alchemy (neidan), based in what Isabelle Robinet calls a “double syntax” of balanced polarity and creative ambiguity. [31]
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The Five Agents are a product of the deeper Yin-Yang dynamics which originated as a relationship between Yang (light, breath, movement, male heaven) and Yin (darkness, bodily stillness, female earth) in the midst of which emerged the Human (jen) realm of mediation and synthesis. This tripart division of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth each have their correspondent rulers, spirits, and powers. The interactive dynamics of Yin-Yang integration emerges from the Primordial Breath (yuanqi or taiji), the creative energy of Being, which is itself is born of wuqi (Highest Non-Energy). These correlations, which are many and highly diverse within various Daoist systems, were further correlated with the eight trigrams and the sixty four hexagrams of the Yijing, accompanied by multiple Daoist commentaries, associated with many diverse deities, and strong emphasis on astral influences of the Big Dipper constellation (Thunder Magic). All of these associations were tied to ritual and magical practices carried out by trained Daoist masters who were experts in the esoteric lore and visualization techniques of Daoist alchemy and ceremonial invocation. [32] This correlative approach is highly congruent with the western Hermetic tradition rooted in a similar correlative cosmology based in early Greco-Roman alchemy, based on five elements (earth, water, air, fire and aether) transmitted through Islamic alchemical traditions in the form of alchemical and Hermetic cosmological texts which were translated into European languages during the Italian Renaissance. The Hermetic texts were primary sources for western esoteric theories of the prisca theologia and the philosophia perennis and were clearly an early, comparative resource for the esoteric reading of translated Daoist texts. [33] Renaissance correlative cosmology was highly visual (graphic arts) and imagistic in mapping the body, for example Robert Fludd’s microcosmic “atmospheric” depiction of the body or various Kabbalistic theories of the body, in ways more detailed and elaborate but similar to Daoist theories of the “landscape of the body” which contains a multitude of sacred beings, astrological energies, and a tripart division of upper, middle and lower chambers, each with its ruling spirits and cosmological correlations. [34] Renaissance esotericists also used number schemas to elaborate their cosmological symbolism encoded in archetypal patterns of three, seven, nine and twelve, as do many of the Daoist masters, particularly using schemas of three, five, nine, and twelve. Western esotericism has many hierarchical systems in organizing its cosmology as do the many Daoist schools where various planes correspond to specific orders or powers or deities, linked through correlative relationships forming a “chain of being” between the different orders, as illustrated in ~Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533) and similar to many Yuan dynasty Daoist texts. [35] However, Daoists have tended toward a less rigidly structured hierarchy and have been tolerant of diversity among the various Daoist esoteric schools. [36] Many texts on Daoist alchemy share resonances with Western esoteric, hermetic practices including the refinement of material substances through various stages of transformation, a search for an immortal elixir or “cinnabar pill”, use of an hermetic vessel or cauldron, occult animal and talismanic (fu) symbolism including special magical scripts, the use of mineral, vegetable and pharmacological substances, secret or orally transmitted instructions (later written down), the use of esoteric visualization (tsun), breath and movement techniques, reclusive withdrawal from the world, fasting and asceticism, the significance of dreams and a general visionary epistemology, as well as the elusive search for varying degrees of immortality, a particular goal of Daoist practice. Magical practices, with invocations, sacred circles, geomantic inscriptions, carried out with magical implements like the staff or sword, with incense, bells, and chanting are also common aspects of both Daoist and Western esoteric techniques. [37] It was the religious and magical techniques of Daoism that strongly attracted the interests of certain western esotericists, much more than the strictly philosophical texts of early classical Daoism. Mythical stories and imagery, dragon bones and water fairies, the golden peaches of immortality from the gardens of Hsi Wang Mu (Queen of Heaven), as well as the reputed occult powers and abilities of the Daoist masters or “immortals” (xien), both embodied and disembodied, resonate well with the imaginative worlds of western esoteric, magical thought. The Daoist emphasis on “internal” (neidan) alchemy or the distillation of the "Golden Elixir" (jindan) based on ritual, meditation and breath techniques for personal spiritual transformation, as compared to the more “external” (waidan) laboratory practices, also resonated well with late 19th century magical society practices that emphasized personal transformation while the mingling of both alchemical aspects was common in western esoteric traditions. [38]
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Israel Regardie tells the story of how, in the late 1920’s, he watched Aleister Crowley of Golden Dawn fame “operate the sticks” for the oracular use of the Yijing in Crowley’s apartment in Paris in order to “obtain some augury for the ensuing period.” [39] Crowley at that time had “written a poetic interpretation” of the 64 Yijing hexagrams which Israel Regardie observed him using in oracular fashion. After Crowley obtained his Hermetic revelation from Aiwaz, the messenger of Horus in Egypt in 1904, he then traveled to China (1905) and in 1907 established his own magical order, Argenteum Astrum (AA/Silver Star) in which he integrated rewritten Golden Dawn rituals with “yogic and oriental materials of his own.” By 1925, Crowley, a high standing member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) German magical order, became the international leader of the OTO. [40] It was in this magical ritual context that Israel Regardie, later a prominent member of the Stella Matutina (a late division of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), went to Paris in 1928 where he was introduced to the transliterated “Daoist” texts of Crowley as his secretary. Crowley, like Jung, took a serious interest in the Yijing and published in the 1930s, Shih Yi; A Critical and Mnemonic Paraphrase of the Yi King and Khing Kang King, The Classic of Purity (a paraphrase of the Daodejing). [41] At the very least, Crowley seems to have learned something of the Daoist oracular use of the Yijing and of the importance of the classic Laozi text as fundamental to Daoist occultist practices. Crowley mixed a magical brew of east-west esoteric symbolism, oracular divination and spirit invocation, reminiscent of Daoist religious techniques, without any exposure to genuine Daoist religion. [42] In 1932, Regardie also referenced yin-yang and Daoist theory in his classic work on Stella Matutina magical Kabbalah. [43] An~other follower of Crowley, Louis Culling, who in the early 1930s joined the magical gnostic order of the GBG founded in America by C. F. Russel (a disciple of Crowley) and who became head of the southern California section of the GBG Order, studied the Yijing for many years as intrinsic to the GBG gnostic magical path. Culling became the expert on magical interpretation of the “pristine” Yijing which he believed was hidden beneath the “barnacles” of historical text transmission. He eventually published (1966) a written version of the text, The Pristine Yi King, as used in the GBG starting in the late 1930s. The casting of the divination sticks (or wands or coins) fell according to a “Supraconscious Intelligence” working through the operator of the sticks. The 64 hexagrams were memorized as a Magic Square by members of the GBG and drawn on a white cloth for the oracular casting. In developing his magical use of the Yijing, Culling demonstrates familiar with Daoist terminology and the symbolism of the bagua prognostic chart of the eight primary trigrams. He rejected the Yijing translations of Wilhelm and Legge and claims to have “recovered” the original text based on the eight bagua (trigrams) of Fushi, the original (mythic) author of the Yijing. Culling created a table of correlations for each of the eight bagua consisting of a trigram, a symbol, a specific meaning, a quality, and “sigil” or geomantric graphic image of an element--for example, “Khien” (three solid yang lines), symbol of heaven or sky, the meaning is projecting strength or power, the quality is will or creation, the sigil is a large T symbolizing the lingam (Sanskrit), the male sexual organ. [44] This is all a strange mix of Daoist and east-west magical symbolism. From this table of correspondences, Culling then develops a system of interpretations of the position of each of the bagua in 64 combinations and gives the magical application of the hexagrams as related to a magical circle very similar to actual Daoist ritual practices related to the hour, day, season and so on. He then gives only a single line “translation” for each hexagram, coupled with his own original commentary based on his primary table of correspondences. Subsequently, this oracular technique was taught by Culling to the GBG members. While the writings of C. G. Jung and Mircea Eliade on western alchemy set the stage for even greater interest in possible parallels with Daoist alchemy, perennialists such as René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt, and Julius Evola were also strongly attracted to Daoism as an esoteric expressions of philosophia perennis. [45] Whereas earlier writers, as noted above, drew parallels between Daoism and Kabbalah, these neo-traditionalists drew parallels between Daoism and Islamic Sufism. By "perennialists" I mean a coterie of European intellectuals committed to sophia perennis, or a “perennial wisdom” that they claimed as the authentic, inherent core of all “true” religious traditions, epitomized by Frithjof Schuon as a “transcendental unity” inherent to all religions, a claim still made under the term “primordial tradition” in America by such scholars as Huston Smith and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. [46] The link with Daoism was made through the circuitous route of identifying an inner core of teachings reflecting a universal and transcendent, esoteric spirituality supposedly free of all cultural and hermeneutic influences. Daoism was eventually assimilated into this esoteric ideology through comparisons drawn between various mystical texts and initiatic traditions, which came to include the “pristine” teachings of the Laozi and Zhuangzi.
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John-Gustaf (Ivan) Agueli, a Swedish painter and Swedenborgian living in Paris in 1905, was a member of the Paris Theosophical Society. In 1907, while on a second visit to Egypt, Agueli was initiated by a Sufi sheikh strongly interested Islamic “universalism” (philosophia perennis), 'Abd al-Rahman 'Illyash al-Kabir, head of one branch of the Shadhili Sufi Order. Abd al-Rahman initiated Agueli and confered upon him the title of moqaddem, one who has the authority to initiate others into the order. Agueli was possibly the first European traditionalist sanctioned to give esoteric Sufi initiations. In the same year, 1907, Agueli also wrote an article for the journal La Gnose on the universal and esoteric similarities between Daoism and Islam. Agueli’s understanding of Daoism came from Albert Puyon, Comte de Pouvourville, “who had been initiated into a Chinese Daoist secret society” (c.1907) where he took the name Matgioi. [47] In 1907, René Guénon had started publishing La Gnose, as an esoteric journal, which he continued for about five years. As an esotericist, Guénon helped to organize the Spiritualist and Masonic Congress of 1908 where he met Fabre des Essarts, ‘the Gnostic patriarch’ (or ‘Synesius’) who initiated him as a “bishop” into the Masonic brotherhood founded by Encasse (Papus) where he assumed the name ‘Palingenius’. During this same period he was also initiated into the Primitive and Original Swedenborgian Rite, and given the title (or name) Chevalier Kadosch, and, supposedly, in 1912, Agueli initiated Guénon into the Shadhili Sufi order. The Daoist Puyon, the Sufi Agueli and the Traditionalist Guénon were friends and collaborators on La Gnose, thus creating a context for an orientalist reconstruction of “Daoism” along the lines of a traditionalist ideology. [48] Guénon also references another French esoteric source, a small work entitled "Les Enseignements Secrets de la Gnose," which discusses the various esoteric aspects of the gnostic revival, such as in Kabbalah and Freemasonry, and the gnostic connection with Daoism. [49] From this initial introduction, Guénon went on to develop an enduring interest in Daoism as a manifestation of sophia perennis, even though he eventually migrated to Egypt where he was fully initiated into Sufism. Significantly, Guénon’s first book, published in 1924 was entitled Orient et Occident (East and West) and touches on Daoist ideas as part of his development of an esoteric, traditionalist paradigm. In his Symbolisme de la Croix (1931), which was composed in part for La Gnose, he writes extensively on the concept of jingyong (unchanging middle) and on the yin-yang symbol and its universal significance for all religious and esoteric traditions, specifically quoting many times La Voie Métaphysique written by the Daoist “initiate” Puyon (Matigoi) who cites the Yijing. Guénon also compares the Sufi “primordial man” with the kabbalist Adam Cadmon and the Daoist “wang” (Emperor) quoting the Daodejing. [50] In later works such as La Métaphysique Orientale (1939) and particularly in La Grande Triade (1946/1994), Guénon focuses on the Daoist ternary-- Heaven, Man, Earth -- while referencing other traditions, as an “inescapable feature of all spirituality,” a triad whose symbolic structure, according to Guénon, offered guidance for inner development and spiritual transformation. Guénon continued this comparative and analogical analysis of Daoism in relationship to Sufism and other traditions until the end of his life, particularly as epitomized in his work, Insights into Islamic Esoterism & Taoism (Aperçus sur l'Esotérisme Islamique et le Taoïsme, 1973). [51] The Italian hermetic and magical baron, Giulio (Julius) Evola, was a keen follower of Guénon and wrote a book on his life among his many other esoteric works. While Evola, as a "philosopher-visionary", sage, esotericist, painter and mountaineer applied the traditionalist and perennialist ideology to political matters, he also had a strong interest in Daoism. Evola borrowed from Daoist, Buddhist and Tantric texts to formulate his magical theories of correspondence. Recently, Evola’s thoughts on Daoism have been published in Taoism: The Magic, the Mysticism (1995). [52] Evola, whose interests centered on an “aristocracy of the spirit” epitomized by heroic, kingly figures and ascetic, mystical “men of knowledge,” understood Taoism as a paradigm of the “primordial Eastern tradition.” Lao-tzu, whose teachings are described as “mysterious, elusive, and bewildering,” became a “super-temporal being” after his death (a reference to the divinization of Lao-tzu in the later Han period), and was an initiator of “real men” though his visionary appearances to various Chinese masters. This initiatic element reflects a universal esoteric current “strictly associated with the royal function” meant to guide elect human beings to higher knowledge. Evola regarded the Tao Te Ching as an esoteric text of the great “primordial tradition” centered on the Dao, or Way, manifest in two aspects: the great principle of primordial unity (transcendence) and the active principle (immanance) of spiritual virtue or law (de).
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He rejects, as did other traditionalists, the religious (daojiao) aspects of Daoism, focusing on the “impersonal” philosophical teaching (daojia) of the text as “characteristic of the Far Eastern Weltanschauung, its superhuman purity...and what may be called its ‘immanent transcendentalism’.” For Evola, Daoism reflected a prefect integration of both immanence and transcendence, actualized through the virtue of emptiness (wu), in order for these two aspects of the Dao to initate the “eternal development of the world.” However, somewhat at odds with his rejection of religious Daoism, he theorized that virtue (de) is a magical power whose efficacy was not based on a “moralizing theology” (Christian) but was an expression of a “superior influence uncaring about individual human existence.” This virtue was a magical power of presence that “real men” manifested through their spiritual perfection, a presence that did not require them to act, but only to be “real” in order for that magical efficacy to impact others and the world at large. The “men of Dao” undergo a profound transformation “beyond form” that results in their being true men of spirit (shenren), “illumined by a great light” and beyond all rudimentary forms of change or horizontal existence. The term “real men” for Evola reflects an ontological state of spiritual perfection that he borrowed from Guénon as a “purified and subtle doctrine of the ‘superman’.” Such “real men” are rare, aristocrats of the spirit concerned with “transcendental inner life and not external social conduct.” [53] The Daoist concept of spontaneity (po) is interpreted by Evola as not “animal-like innocence” but a state hinted at in the myth of the Golden Age as the “naturality of the supernatural” in certain individuals. The perfected “real man” of Dao does not act but bends, withdraws, gives in, in order that the principles of yin-yang may manifest the will of the Dao in harmony with him who is truly in accord with the Dao. Such an individual is an “impenetrable type of initiate” whose similar type can be found, according to Evola, in western Hermeticism and in Rosicrucianism, as well as in Sufism, as an antinomian “real man” who dismisses current values and norms as insufficient for true spiritual life. Such an individual has the magical traits of invulnerability, spiritual charisma, and a transcendent detachment that reflects his royal ontological status (as wang or king). He is a true “sovereign” and mediator between heaven and Earth, a custodian of doctrine, a natural leader and “royal man” who is not passive but active through his magical presence. Evola sees an “Olympian” quality in Daoist political teachings: the initate leader who acts with supreme detachment and whose subtle, invisible, and immaterial influence, based on his attunement with Dao and De, is superior to any type of force or coercion. Detached from every human feeling with “impersonal impassibility,” utterly neutral before good or evil, he fosters “primordial simplicity” in the common folk, in order for the Dao to act with perfect freedom and efficacy. For Evola, this uptoian, kingly ideal was realized in the “ancien regime” in Europe (King Arthur, the Grail, and so on). [54] The decline of Daoism from its utopian ideals is evident, according to Evola, in the rise of popular, folk religious Daoism (daojiao), “surviving only as a cult practiced by monks and wizards.” However, operative Daoism survived in the form of an esoteric alchemy whose adherents sought immortality (xien) through the formation of secret initiatic schools. Daoist immortals, in Evola’s view, attain immortality through the transformation of the physical body using techniques of “fixing the breath” and practicing the “coagulation of subtle ethereal substances” in order to avoid the loss of connection with the One/Dao (and the fall into rebirth and loss of all spiritual knowledge). Immortality consists, then, in sustaining consciousness while undergoing the crisis of radical changes of state (at death) through training in esoteric techniques similar to initiatic traditions of the west. The formation of the “immortal embryo” is the esoteric alchemical technique by which one forms an enduring identity, one consonant with a “real man” (immortal) of the Dao. Consciousness then is transferred to an embryo or immortal body, or into a “pure form” analogous to the Forms of Platonic scholasticism, a teaching that Evola regards as beyond the understanding of the ordinary non-initiate. Further, these immortal forms reflect an esoteric hierarchy of higher and lower types manifesting the degree and intelligence of the individuals thus transformed. Finally, Evola references Matigoi (Puyon) as a European who had direct training in esoteric Daoism and who was clearly a source of information for Evola’s interpretation. [55] Another less dogmatic traditionalist and esoteric writer, Titus Burckhardt, was also influenced by Daoism, particularly by Daoist aesthetic theories as seen in Chinese painting. Burckhardt, a close intellectual compatriot and friend of Frithjof Schuon, espoused a universalist Sufi wisdom (sophia perennis) and wrote on alchemy and gnosis. He also wrote at length on the Daoist idea of “creative spirit” in painting, which he identified in Daoism with “the rhythm of cosmic life.” The flow of brush and ink, like the appearing and dissolving of a snowflake, reflected the dynamic reality of the Dao underlying static, perishable physical phenomena. Burckhardt saw in the Daoist perspective, a less individual or “homocentric” emphasis, which expressed an inner calm of contemplation that revealed a hidden, timeless harmony normally veiled by “the subjective continuity of the mind.” He accurately grounds this deeper harmony in the Daoist concept of wuqi (non-being or void) as a primordial, transcendental truth. He also references the importance of Daoist concepts of “wind and water” (fengshi), sacred geography (mountain and water), simplicity, naturalness, and spontaneity, all basic to classical Daoism. [56] In a similar spirit, Toshihiko Izutsu, a scholar at McGill University, published his perennialist work, Sufism and Taoism (1967) comparing the mystical writing of Ibn ‘Arabi (Fusus al-Hikam) with the Zhuanzi and Daodejing, which became highly popular among traditionalists and esotericists supporting philosophia perennis.
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Chinese Daoist Teachers and Western Esotericism By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Daoism in the west had entered a new phase. Scholarship was producing new translated texts for study, historical interpretations were moving beyond the old paradigms, and Daoist studies were moving increasingly away from a simplistic interpretation of a few classic texts. [57] Increasingly, Daoism was differentiated from western models of mysticism and spirituality in an attempt to elucidate its unique cultural and historical aspects. The “immanent” aspects of Daoist spirituality were emphasized in contrast to Christian “transcendence” and the religious and magical aspects of Daoism were increasingly regarded as normative features of the religious traditions--there was no true split between “philosophical and religious” Daoism. Instead there was only an increasing complexity and interweaving of diverse sources, as more ethnography was published and more texts from the Daozang have become accessible. [58] Starting in the 1970s, American-Chinese authors also began to publish translations on Daoism, beyond the normative texts, such as Lu K‘uan Yü’s (Charles Luk) The Secrets of Chinese Meditation (1964) and his more influential Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality (1970) which gives a translation of the Xin Ming Fa Jue Ming Zhi (“The Secrets of Cultivating Essential Nature and Eternal Life”) written by an late 19th century Daoist master of internal alchemy, Zhao Bi Chen. This work and its useful Chinese-English alchemical glossary has become highly referenced by contemporary esotericists and by many Chinese Daoists in America. In the 1970s, authors like J. C. Cooper (1972), began to write popular but short overviews of Daoism, published (like Charles Luk) by Western esoteric presses, which covered the subject in a way that demonstrated familiarity with more diverse aspects of the esoteric tradition. [59] Fritjof Capra also published his very popular work, The Tao of Physics (1975), which explored parallels between modern physics and “eastern mysticism” and has a chapter on Daoism. Capra draws heavily on the Zhuangzi and on the Daodejing and Yijing but applies the ideas to the physics relativity paradigm, to holistic transformation, and to wu-wei, or non-action, as intellectual ideas precursory to quantum physics and a “dynamic transformative view” of the universe, with an emphasis on flow, change, and the integrated polarity of the Dao. Such a work helped to give credibility to Daoism by aligning it with science (following Joseph Needham’s earlier work) and with a detheologized metaphysics. [60] Even more popular were two outstanding authors who were very influential in making Daoism accessible to westerners, John Blofeld and Alan Watts. Both Watts and Blofeld have associations with western esotericism simply because they helped to popularize Daoism at a time when “eastern religions” were part or an emergent “new age” paradigm that was impacting many currents within American and European esotericism. [61] While both authors had strong interests in Buddhism, Blofeld’s work was largely based on his actual meeting with Daoist masters and practitioners during his 17 years in China. Blofeld, an English gentleman, was a world traveler, an outstanding réconter, and a gifted writer who got along well with practitioners of many diverse esoteric schools, particularly among Daoist hermits. Following the publication of his own translation of the Yijing (1966), he published a work on Daoist “mysteries and magic” (1973) based on the Daoist classics (using reputable English translations), Charles Luk’s previously mentioned works, and a reconstruction of his “wanderings” in the mountains and hermitages of China (1930s) where he met and conversed with as “many different kinds of Daoists as possible.” [62] Blofeld clearly states that there is little or no distinction among practicing Daoists between philosophical and religious Daoism. He draws parallels between Daoism and Sufism, western mystics and esoteric writers, and tells many a remarkable and entertaining tale embedding Daoism in its proper Chinese cultural milieu. [63] This is not scholarly or textual Daoism, but a living representation of the foibles, ritual practices, magical techniques, and remarkable accomplishments of real Daoists. Following Luk, Blofeld also discusses Daoist yoga or meditation and Daoist sexual techniques, a theme which has attracted some contemporary esotericists. In Blofeld’s other major Daoist work (1978), he draws extensively on the Dao Jia Yu Shen Xian (Daoist Philosophy and Immortality) of Zhou Shau Xian based on selections from the Daozang canon. Blofeld describes this expanded overview as “a first comprehensive sketch of Huang-Lau Daoism” and discusses popular Daoist religion as well as three chapters on Daoist alchemy, with an appendix tabulating a variety of wuxing correspondences. This work is one of the first, very readable, overviews of Daoist religion. [64]
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Alan Watts, an English emigrant to America, had an early interested in Buddhism and its Zen variations, and toward the end of his controversial and somewhat eccentric life, wrote a book exclusively on Daoism. Being a great popularizer of “Eastern religions” through public lectures, Watts (author of 25 popular books melding Eastern and Western thought) was a member of the English Theosophical Society and was friends with D. T. Suzuki and Krishnamurti (the promised “Avatar” of the Theosophical Society). Interested in Zen “enlightenment” and Daoist yin-yang principles of spiritual transformation, Watts eventually migrated to America in the mid-1940s and embraced the perennialist view (influenced by Aldous Huxley) of the universality hidden in all spiritual traditions. [65] After leaving the Episcopal ministry and rejecting institutional religion, Watts “embraced insecurity” based on his “Daoist” interpretations of individual freedom, the immediacy of experience, and the abandonment of all creeds and dogmas. [66] By the late 1950s, Watts was on the lecture circuit to about 100 American cities, had a radio program, and his own televised education special (“Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life” a 24-part series on NET). Watts, more than any other individual, popularized “eastern religions” to the American public and rode a wave of enthusiaum for his books throughout the 1960s and 70s. His book on “nature, man, and woman” (1958) had very strong Daoist influences and from this point onward, his interest in Daoism deepened. A friend of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Das), Watts became a charismatic “guru” to many younger people, influencing them to practice meditation and take an interest in eastern teachings. By the late 1960s, he became increasingly identified as “the American Daoist” through the publication of Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (1968) and his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975), published two years after his death. [67] Watts was also involved in the human-potential movement, centered in the California Esalen Institute where he met and gave seminars with Al Huang, a popular Chinese Tai Ji teacher, calligrapher, dancer, and organizer of his own Daoist institute, the Living Tao Foundation. Al Huang, a close friend of Watts, helped complete his final Daoist book after Watts’ death and illustrated it with his own gracious and flowing calligraphy. Watts also read and supported Huang in the writing of his popular Tai Ji book, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain (1973). Huang teaches “Watercourse Way Tai Ji” (not Tai Ji Quan), a popular improvisational form of Tai Ji and dance movements, and seeks to “represent Dao without the ism” through improvisational classes designed specifically for Westerners. Using Daoist concepts such as yin-yang, wuxing, and Yijing bagua symbolism, his work represents a mediating East-West cultural synthesis that bridges the normative gap between academic scholars and popular writers and Chinese Daoist teachers. [68] During the 1970s, in China, a popular wave of interest in Tai Ji reanimated cultural inquiry into Daoism and Chinese Daoist teachers began to immigrate to America (and Europe). Eva Wong, PhD, came to America in the 1960s as a member of the Daoist Fung Loy Kok temple and eventually became director of studies at Fung Loy Kok Taoist Temple in Denver CO. which offers various Daoist activities, including scripture study, meditation, classes in qi-gong, retreats, chanting, and training in traditional Lion Dance. Dr. Wong, who grew up as a Daoist in China, has translated many Daoist texts and contributed to a growing interest in Daoist religious practices. [69] In the 1970s, Lily Siou, who began her studies in Daoism at the Dai Xuan monastery in China on the “dragon and tiger mountain” of Long Hu Shan and was eventually initiated and confirmed as the 64th generation Master of the Zheng Yi (Lingbao) Daoist school, opened her own school in Hawaii (Tai Hsuan Foundation College) where she teaches Daoist theory, magic, and Tai Ji to many American students. [70] In 1974, Jwing-Ming Yang, PhD, came to American as a Qi Gong, Wushu, and Tai Ji teacher and eventually formed the Oriental Arts Association (Boston) where his students have won outstanding international awards for excellence in Tai Ji. Dr. Yang mixes science, martial arts, and Daoist internal alchemy with vocabulary drawn from English esotericism and European alchemcial thought. His eclecticism typifies a willingness to synthesize and accommodate his American students common to many Chinese Daoist teachers. [71] In 1978, Michael Saso, a Western scholar fluent in Pinyin and classical Chinese as well as in Japanese, published his excellent Taoist Master Chuang about the life and esoteric practices of a Zheng-Yi Daoist master then living in Taiwan. Saso lived with Master Chuang in Taiwan and studied with him over a period of years. He writes, “Daoism is an esoteric religion” and he observes that Daoist masters draw a clear distinction between “common doctrines” and the “secret teachings of the highly trained specialist” which he then describes in a detailed, though introductory fashion. [72] From the mid-1970s on, “esoteric Daoism” based in wuxing (correlative cosmology) and neidan (internal alchemy) became increasingly accessible through texts and ethnographic descriptions. While these resources have proliferated, it has been the Western students of Chinese teachers that have introduced Western esoteric ideas into a Daoist context. These ideas in turn have initiated dialogues that have resulted in publications by Chinese teachers (and by their students) that meld Western esotericism and Chinese esotericism into a variety of systemic comparisons and a rich vocabulary of teachings and practices. The mediating language of this comparison, in America, Canada, Britain, and Australia, has been English in translations, ethnography and in Daoist writings. Subsequently, it is the English vocabulary of esotericism that is most commonly used and assumed by these writers. Thus there is a certain amount of “matching terminology” (ge-yi) between systems of Chinese and English esotericism, simply assumed as normative by both Chinese teachers and their American students.
40
The most prolific of all the Chinese teachers in America is Hua Jing Ni. He is a 74th generation Daoist master who dates his school back to the Han Dynasty. He was educated in the Daoist spiritual traditions by his family and was then chosen to study with Daoist masters “in the high mountains of mainland China.” After more than 30 years of training, he was acknowledged and empowered as a master of traditional Daoism. Master Ni arrived in America from Taiwan in 1976 and has since written many books (over 30) related to the practice of traditional Chinese medicine and Daoist |
. The Post referred to this demographic as "Hillary Clinton's firewall." But on Election Day, 45 percent of college-educated white women voted for Trump, giving him an unexpected edge.
The demographic that played such a key role in Trump's victory is full of women who grew up listening and dancing to Madonna's albums while pursuing an education and a career. Apparently, many of these voters ranked gender consideration behind character traits. How does Madonna feel about that?
"Women hate women. That's what I think it is," she told Billboard. "Women's nature is not to support other women. It's really sad."
As a conservative woman -- precisely the kind of Trump supporter Madonna is railing against -- gender has never been a consideration for me when assessing someone politically. I am, however, sensitive about someone's candidacy being shoved down my throat on the basis of superficial considerations.
Disregarding a candidate's gender and focusing solely on his or her political platform should be as easy as disregarding a singer's political whining and focusing solely on his or her art (just as I did this morning while listening to Madonna tunes during my morning workout).
Madonna ranks among the best-selling artists of all-time, alongside the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. She's not on that prestigious list just because she's a woman. Record sales are gender-agnostic. As a woman who came from humble beginnings and succeeded as a result of ambition, work ethic, talent, adaptability and intelligence, Madonna should respect the choices of similarly self-made women.
Madonna had the right idea in promoting a quote about courage from a legendary female trailblazer. Still, the post was removed after some fans complained.
Madonna has much more in common with the self-made Thatcher -- who struggled against establishment classism and sexism to ascend to Britain's highest political office -- than she does with Hillary Clinton, who rose to political prominence as a result of being married to a U.S. president. However, the notion of political sisterhood and women backing other women only seems to be acceptable if it's in support of women on the left.
Madonna certainly didn't go to bat for the sisterhood in 2012, when her "MDNA" world tour included a giant video screen that showed French National Front leader Marine Le Pen with a swastika superimposed on her forehead.
In France, Le Pen represents a growing anti-establishment movement that has increasingly come to transcend right-vs.-left considerations. Madonna has always been a trailblazer, a rebel who's never followed the rules. She has far more in common with Le Pen and Trump than with establishment figures such as Clinton. Time to get with the new paradigm, Madge.
Meanwhile, we can only hope that someday the left will stop promoting division through superficial traits like gender and focus instead on the character considerations that unite those of us with common values.Armenian ambassador to Tehran said his country is willing to make investments in the Iranian Jewelry industry, Mehr News Agency reports.
Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to the Islamic Republic of Iran Artashes Tumanyan made the remarks during a meeting held in the Iranian capital with Head of Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture Masoud Khansari.
The Armenian official said Yerevan is a pioneer in area of jewelry turning adding “Armenian traders are also eager to participate in Iran’s IT industries.”
He also noted that Aremenia’s Central Bank holds proposals for monetary and banking ties between the two countries.
Tumanyan recalled the inked MoU for holding Armenia’s specialized exhibitions in Tehran saying “the first edition of the exposition will be held in Tehran International Permanent Fairground within months providing Armenian industrial and financial firms with the opportunity to introduce their capabilities.”
Ambassador of Armenia to Tehran enumerated further venues for bolstering bilateral ties including internet provision, livestock and poultry industry.
Head of Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture Masoud Khansari, for his part, referred to great economic and industrial potentials held by the two parties noting “identifying venues for cooperation can play and important role in expanding bilateral relation between Tehran and Yerevan.”
The Iranian official, while recalling Armenia’s presence in the Eurasian Union, added “mutual collaboration between the two states must lead to joint participation in third-party markets.”
“Development of economic relations between the two countries requires targeted policies like strengthening the joint chambers of commerce and conducting joint exhibitions as well as the deployment and adoption of trade delegations between the two sides,” Khansari recommended.Welcome to the 7th Elite: Dangerous Newsletter. So far we have focused almost exclusively on the art aspect of development in these updates, but in the future we’re going to be shifting the perspective slightly to also show you as much of the design as possible. Hopefully this will give you all a much better scope of the project! With that said, here are this week’s topics:
Ships land on pads within the yellow marks (shown here is one of the largest dock-able ships in the game – more details soon!). The question is then what happens to the ship while I am offline? We’d like to show you what we plan to do here. The two images below show animations of our team’s current development on this. If the images do not show for you, or are not animated, then click here, to view them in your browser Elite: Dangerous gives us the opportunity to visualise every aspect of the game in a level of detail that was previously not possible. This means that our team are currently scrutinising how every element of the game looks and functions in great depth, so that the solutions for things such as docking operate in a way that is interesting but also believable in a real-world context.Ships land on pads within the yellow marks (shown here is one of the largest dock-able ships in the game – more details soon!). The question is then what happens to the ship while I am offline? We’d like to show you what we plan to do here. The two images below show animations of our team’s current development on this. If the images do not show for you, or are not animated, then
What the team liked about this solution was how grounded and mechanical it felt; there’s nothing fictional about how it operates and for that reason adds a level of believability to a world that is firmly rooted in a science-fiction setting. Whilst this is still only proof of concept and will be subject to a lot more refinement before the game is released, being able to look out the window of your cockpit and see exactly how the functions of a station operate will add a layer of depth to the game that will make the Elite galaxy a much more believable place.
Through these newsletters we have already shared with you the designs for the Empire’s capital ship and short-range fighters. As one of the game’s major factions they will also have a range of other ships that make up their fleet. Developing these ships that bridge the gap between fighters and capital ships is something that the team have been exploring recently.
There is a range of different ship classes that can make up a fleet, all designed to fulfil specific roles. With the Federation, Empire and Alliance being such dominant factions in the Elite universe they have the capabilities to fulfil as many of these roles as possible. Whilst not all of these will be present in the game at release, here is the hierarchy of fleet-class ships that are available to the game’s major factions:
Cruisers (Battlecruisers, Battleships, Interdictors): Long range, independent ships that are capable of controlling entire systems. Heavily armed and capable of deploying large fighter squadrons. The capital ships already shown are an example of this class. In the Empire they are usually known as “Interdictors” – named after the first successful class of cruisers. Currently the most common and most successful is the Majestic class – generally referred to as a “Majestic class Interdictor”. As ships that can also carry out ambassadorial missions they can be used for ‘soft’ power projection, as well as hard.
Frigates: These are large ships designed for escort duties. The actual vessels vary greatly between navies, but are all designed to engage multiple small, fast enemies (typically fighters and missile swarms) and are loaded with point defence batteries. They will also have some anti-ship capability, but are not designed to go up against other warships.
Destroyers: These are anti-warship vessels, but are generally no longer used in the front line, though some are still in service.
Carriers: Designed for the deployment of fighter squadrons. Obsolete in the fleets of the major factions due to the popularity of Cruisers, but small navies still make use of them and some have even been converted into transporters.
Transporters (Couriers) : Armoured warships designed specifically for transporting valuable assets and cargo quickly and safely.
Corvettes (Cutters): Light multirole warships, capable of recon, incursions and escort missions. These small warships are also popular with smaller factions, organisations and even wealthy individuals due to their adaptability. The Imperial Cutter is a lighter and faster Corvette-class ship, that players will be able to get their hands on in the final game (assuming they can make the right contacts).
Fighters: Small short-range craft that generally cannot operate independently due to having no jump capability. Their main roles include the defense of stations and the large warships that they are deployed from. Commercial fighters are typically jump-capable and are therefore much more flexible than their faction-specific counterparts.
Drones: Small automated ships that have largely been phased out due to the existence of effective counter-measures.
forums and let us know what roles you think they’d best fit into! The two images below show you some early designs for ships that we intend to add to the Imperial Fleet, to fulfil some of the roles mentioned above. We will update you on what these roles will be and any changes to their designs in future newsletters, but if you feel like speculating with your fellow commanders then why not head over to theand let us know what roles you think they’d best fit into!
return to contents
Design Discussion: A Workman and his Tools
The main tool of any pilot, whatever their profession, is of course their ship. A conversation that the designers have been having recently has to do with ship ownership and how the ability to own multiple ships in Elite: Dangerous should work.
After an initial proposal was put forward to the DDF, the team revised the design and this is currently undergoing further scrutiny. Whilst not all the details of how multiple ship ownership will work have been ironed out yet, there are some elements of the proposal that are already well established, which we can share with you:
Players will be able to own multiple ships in Elite: Dangerous. What limit will be on the number of ships (if any) has not been decided as of yet.
There will be other methods of acquiring ships other than a direct purchase. This may include special missions, or as rewards for bets and competitions. These however will not be common.
Players can trade in their current ships for credits or as part-exchange for a new ship. The condition that the ship has been kept in will help determine its value at sale.
Ships that are kept in storage incur a storage fee.
. Ships are stored at a real-world location and must be picked up for the player to pilot them, or alternatively the player may pay to have it transferred elsewhere. Players can store different ships at different locations, if they like.
In the Design Decision Forum this month we’ll be discussing in great depth the various roles that you’ll be able to play in Elite: Dangerous; so what it means to be a bounty hunter or a trader and ways we can translate that best into game play. If you pledged £300 or more and have not yet joined in with the DDF discussion, then why not head over and get involved with the conversation. Another thing that the team are keen to explore further is the idea that clean, expensive or prestigious ships will run a lower chance of being scanned for contraband and bounties at stations. This means that players that choose a life of lawlessness will have a way of hiding in plain sight, which should add an additional dimension to careers in smuggling and piracy.In thethis month we’ll be discussing in great depth the various roles that you’ll be able to play in Elite: Dangerous; so what it means to be a bounty hunter or a trader and ways we can translate that best into game play. If you pledged £300 or more and have not yet joined in with the DDF discussion, then why not head over and get involved with the conversation.
Elite Fiction: Empty
www.elite-anthology.co.uk This week’s drabble comes from Elite Anthology writer Ramon Marett. You can find out more about Elite Anthology: Tales from the Frontier at
Empty by Ramon Marett
Space. It used to be so small, jumping from one system to another in the blink of an eye, just popping over to the Star and back for fuel, or talking to friends billions of miles away. Space was so small, but now…
I sit staring out at an endless expanse of black. I’ve been staring for years, no planets, no ships, no contact with anyone. Just floating in this broken down piece of junk they call an escape pod.
Space used to be small. Who am I kidding, Space was never small, it is massive and it is lonely.
On the subject of Elite fiction a new Fiction Diary was recently release, for those who missed it. In this edition Michael discusses the initial setting that Elite: Dangerous will be set in, as well as answering a few questions from our community. Check it out now!
Com Chatter: Happenings in the Community
The first ever LAVECON will be taking place taking place in Cheltenham on 29th June and there are still a few tickets left for anyone that wishes to go along. For those that don’t know, LAVECON is a convention for the fan-made Elite podcast series- Lave Radio, which can be found at laveradio.com and is well worth a listen for any Elite fan! Find out more information at our forums.
We have recently created an Astronomy section on our official Frontier forums, so if you have a taste for space then why not head over there and join the conversation!
Finally this week, I’d like to give a shout out to community member Dobrijzmej, who made a fantastic timeline plotting all of our updates since the beginning of the Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter. He has also been working hard since the Kickstarter ended to translate all of the updates released for our Russian community. If you are a Russian speaking fan then head over to his Russian Community thread, for all of our updates so far. One of the best things about Elite is the fantastic community surrounding the game. Without it we would not have made our Kickstarter target and we would not have all of the great fan projects that are taking place alongside development. These newsletters seem like the perfect place to celebrate everything that our loyal fans are up to, so we’re happy to bring you this quick digest of the main happenings right now:The first ever LAVECON will be taking place taking place in Cheltenham on 29th June and there are still a few tickets left for anyone that wishes to go along. For those that don’t know, LAVECON is a convention for the fan-made Elite podcast series- Lave Radio, which can be found atand is well worth a listen for any Elite fan! Find out more information at ourWe have recently created anon our official Frontier forums, so if you have a taste for space then why not head over there and join the conversation!Finally this week, I’d like to give a shout out to community member Dobrijzmej, who made a fantastic timeline plottingsince the beginning of the Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter. He has also been working hard since the Kickstarter ended to translate all of the updates released for our Russian community. If you are a Russian speaking fan then head over to his, for all of our updates so far.
Elite website and will now be adding notifications for each new update we release on the home page. So if you have trouble keeping track of updates on Elite: Dangerous the official Elite page is now a great site to bookmark.
Thanks again,
Ashley That’s it for another 2 weeks, thanks for reading! For those of you who have not seen it, we have recently redesigned theand will now be adding notifications for each new update we release on the home page. So if you have trouble keeping track of updates on Elite: Dangerous the official Elite page is now a great site to bookmark.Thanks again,AshleyAfter a cataclysmic global war, civilisation lies in ruins. It is the first year after the apocalypse. It is Year Zero… Lead a vicious band of marauders in a post-apocalyptic tactical battle game. Build your base, upgrade your troops then raid and pillage other players for precious resources. All raids are real time against real people in a turn based war game Set in the same universe as the ground breaking game Year 0 but this time you get to play the marauders that were ever a constant plague to the bunker dwellers. Essential resources are scarce in this post-apocalyptic wasteland and as the leader of a bunch of survivors you need to build a base and then raid other people to progress.In-game opponents are real people who are looking for the exact same things as you – resources and upgrades. You’ll need to manage those resources, plan out a strategy and fight hard to be able to survive. If you are a fan of other tactical combat games such as XCOM, Total War and Advance Wars.Constructed
5.0: Multi-format All-Star (and undoubtedly worth too much money). [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card]. [card]Tarmogoyf[/card].
4.0: Format staple. [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card]. [card]Thragtusk[/card].
3.5: Good in multiple archetypes, but not a format staple. [card]Avacyn’s Pilgrim[/card]. [card]Restoration Angel[/card]. [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card].
3.0: Archetype staple. [card]Farseek[/card]. [card]Gravecrawler[/card].
2.5: Role-player in some decks, but not quite a staple. [card]Think Twice[/card]. [card]Curse of Death’s Hold[/card].
2.0: Niche card. Sideboard or currently unknown archetype. [card]Naturalize[/card]. (Bear in mind that many cards fall into this category, although an explanation is obviously important.)
1.0: It has seen play once. [card]One with Nothing[/card]. (I believe it was tech vs. Owling Mine, although fairly suspicious tech at that.)
Limited
5.0: I will always play this card. Period.
4.5: I will almost always play this card, regardless of what else I get.
4.0: I will strongly consider playing this as the only card of its color.
3.5: I feel a strong pull into this card’s color.
3.0: This card makes me want to play this color. (Given that I’m playing that color, I will play this card 100% of the time.)
2.5: Several cards of this power level start to pull me into this color. If playing that color, I essentially always play these. (Given that I’m playing that color, I will play this card 90% of the time.)
2.0: If I’m playing this color, I usually play these. (70%)
1.5: This card will make the cut into the main deck about half the times I play this color. (50%)
1.0: I feel bad when this card is in my main deck. (30%)
0.5: There are situations where I might sideboard this into my deck, but I’ll never start it. (10%)
0.0: I will never put this card into my deck (main deck or after sideboarding). (0%)
For this review, I’m adding another set of criteria. Some people think the best way to respond to my (awesome) puns is a simple letter grade, and even though it is commonly agreed that the grading is too harsh, I left it in the capable paws of Pat Cox (@wildestnacatl on Twitter) to deliver them. Here’s the scale he will be using:
Puns
A: Something an extremely clever and good-looking person would say. It is unlikely Luis will ever achieve this grade.
B: A reasonably clever pun that is actually apt to the situation/conversation at hand.
C: Usually groan-worthy, but at least tangentially related to the current situation. Most puns fall into this category.
D: Has nothing to do with anything, and isn’t funny, but can still be understood to be a play on words. Reused puns also receive this grade.
F: These puns make no sense and have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Balustrade Spy
[draft]Balustrade Spy[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
I spy a Constructed blank. If you really want to kill Belcher, there are better options (though this does give you a way to mill your deck in Vintage, if that’s what you are looking for).
Pun: C
Limited: 3.0
In a non-mill deck, this is a reasonably efficient flier, and you will almost always play it. In a mill deck, it’s exactly what you are looking for, and in either, it’s a great cipher enabler.
Basilica Screecher
[draft]Basilica Screecher[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
You’d have to be pretty batty to think that a 1/2 for two is Constructed playable. I like extort well enough, though not enough to play something this far below the normal curve.
Pun: C+
Limited: 3.0
My experiences with this card have been positive so far. It pecks in for a point a turn, trades for 3/1 fliers, and often drains them for four or five points over the course of a game.
Contaminated Ground
[draft]Contaminated Ground[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
I can’t think of any grounds for playing this, though I hope this review doesn’t contaminate anyone who was thinking about running it.
Pun: C-
Limited: 0.0
Without a land as sick as [card]Karakas[/card] (during Master’s Edition 3), playing a card like this serves no purpose.
Corpse Blockade
[draft]Corpse Blockade[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
Cards like this are why giving out 1s in Constructed is just a matter of corpse.
Pun: F
Limited: 2.0
Sacrifice outlets aren’t in high demand this set, so this is more a defender than any sort of combo enabler. It does do a decent job of defense, stopping most guys outright and threatening to trade your worst creature for any ground attacker. It’s not the best way to kill a 4/4 or bigger, but at least it gives you the option to do so.
Crypt Ghast
[draft]Crypt Ghast[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
[card]Mana Flare[/card] is a powerful ability, and any card that promises to double your mana is worth taking a second look at. Most mono-black decks end up looking ghastly, but the presence of shocklands lets you splash other colors without too much trouble, and there are plenty of ways to abuse double mana (though the best way [card sphinx’s revelation]unfortunately costs UUW[/card]).
Pun: C
Limited: 3.5
If you can untap with this, it’s excellent value, giving you both a ton of extra mana and something to spend it on (not to mention a 2/2). Later in the game it starts to return mana the turn you play it, and fueling giant X-spells is often a possibility.
Death’s Approach
[draft]Death’s Approach[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
[card]Ghastly Demise[/card] is one thing—waiting for the number of creature cards to approach an acceptable number is another. This requiring both a specific type of card and for it to be in your opponent’s graveyard is just too much, and will be the death of this card’s chances.
Pun: D
Limited: 3.0
This isn’t the best removal spell to lead off with, so I wouldn’t draft too many copies, but it’s still a removal spell for small creatures consistently. Later in the game it might kill actual big creatures, and even as a dependable -2/-2 it’s a fine card.
Devour Flesh
[draft]Devour Flesh[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
Edict to Plowshares is pretty sweet. Most decks that will run this aren’t concerned about the opposition gaining life, and saving a mana off [card]Tribute to Hunger[/card] could easily save more life than Tribute would have gained. The extra mana is also very relevant when it comes to using [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card], and worst comes to worst you can target yourself to gain some life. It’s always nice to flesh out your removal suite, and this does that quite well.
Limited: 3.0
Edicts are notoriously mediocre in Limited, and adding a drawback doesn’t help much. I’m not saying this isn’t worth playing, because it is, just that it’s still not premium removal. Killing their worst guy is generally not great, and giving them some life for their trouble could make this very awkward. There are definitely going to be games where this is uncastable because they have a high enough toughness creature and you won’t be able to successfully race. The flip side is that you can target yourself, which isn’t nothing, especially if your opponent has some sort of [card]Pacifism[/card]-type effect. Because this trades 1-for-1 for only two mana, it’s going to always be played, but that doesn’t make it a high pick.
Dying Wish
[draft]Dying Wish[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
Expecting this to do something is just wishful thinking.
Pun: D+
Limited: 1.0
I’m not sure what your deck would have to look like for this to be good. Unless you have a ton of large creatures, are low on playables, and have a multitude of sacrifice outlets, it’s best that this waits on the sidelines. I suppose this makes a potential sideboard card in a removal-heavy race matchup, but that may just be a death wish.
Pun: D-
Gateway Shade
[draft]Gateway Shade[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
Is this supposed to be the Shade that gets you into playing more and more dangerous Shades in Constructed? If so, it’s not doing its job.
Limited: 2.0
This starts a little small, so unless you have a good amount of Swamps and/or Gates, it’s a bit shady. It is cool that you can play Swamps and non-black Gates and have a somewhat real manabase, and if you have 2 or more Shades, I can definitely see playing half off-color Gates for value.
Pun: C+
Grisly Spectacle
[draft]Grisly Spectacle[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
Move along folks, nothing to see here (this card’s not very spectacular in Constructed).
Pun: F
Limited: 3.5
Instant speed kill that hits just about anything (non-Keyrune) is in short supply, so you should take it where you can get it. The bonus mill is cool too, and every now and then it will actually decide a game, though any black deck will want this regardless.
Gutter Skulk
[draft]Gutter Skulk[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
My guttural response is that this doesn’t rat higher than a 1.
Pun: C
Limited: 2.5
As loathe as I am to admit it, this format does seem fast enough that you will play a two-drop 2/2 almost all of the time. Even in the defensive decks, you need some sort of blocker.
Horror of the Dim
[draft]Horror of the Dim[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
Hexproof might be tearing up Constructed right now, but the cards that are seeing play are only dim relations to this. Strictly worse than [card]Rubbleback Rhino[/card] is not a good place to be.
Pun: D+
Limited: 2.0
You could do worse, and much, much better. This isn’t horrible, just not fantastic by any means.
Pun: Is horror/horrible supposed to be a horrible pun?
Illness in the Ranks
[draft]Illness in the Ranks[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
It feels rare that we get solid sideboard cards nowadays, so this is a nice surprise. It bodes ill for token decks, since if they ever get too popular, this will do a good job of moving down their ranking. You do need to have reasonable confidence that this will trade for a card most games, since it is a bit narrow—I don’t think I’d side it in just to hit [card]Lingering Souls[/card]. It does seem good in the token mirror, for what that’s worth.
Pun: B-
Limited: 0.5
I doubt this will come in very often, and when it does, it’s most likely barely worth it.
Killing Glare
[draft]Killing Glare[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
If [card]Death Wind[/card] is getting played, I have to assume that this has a shot too. It does kill [card cloudfin raptor]Cloudfin Wrapter[/card] and the like on turn one, which is efficient enough to make me take notice.
Limited: 3.5
Another piece of fairly good removal, though this one does put you at risk of blowouts. When playing against Gruul, either cast this not during combat or cast it for as much as you can, just to avoid getting destroyed by bloodrush.
Lord of the Void
[draft]Lord of the Void[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
I normally try to avoid spending seven mana on creatures that just die or get bounced to no benefit, and this is no exception.
Limited: 3.5
As much as seven mana is, it should only take one hit to put the game firmly under your control, and this blocks just about anything the turn you cast it. This is an ideal finisher if I’ve ever seen one.
Mental Vapors
[draft]Mental Vapors[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
This just consumes too much mana to be good, a snag from which this will not recover.
Pun: C+
Limited: 1.5
If you have a way to get a guy through, you can build your own [card]Mind Rot[/card] for four mana! It does curve out well on [card]Deathcult Rogue[/card], so if the matchup is slow enough I could see this doing some work.
Midnight Recovery
[draft]Midnight Recovery[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
The work this takes to recover card advantage isn’t worth the meager reward at the end.
Pun: D+
Limited: 2.5
I was somewhat impressed by this. It isn’t a bomb by any means, but double [card]Raise Dead[/card] is pretty swingy. It’s on the slow side, so keep that in mind.
Ogre Slumlord
[draft]Ogre Slumlord[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
I’m sure there’s some rogue strategy that will make this work, and as some kind of Wrath protection is might be decent. It’s also kind of sweet in an attrition-based creature mirror, giving you value turn after turn.
Pun: B-
Limited: 3.5
As a 3/3, it’s large enough to fight every now and then, but ideally it just sits there racking up value. When you have the Slumlord out, all you have to do is make sure the board stays bogged down and you will accumulate enough of an advantage to win the game.
Sepulchral Primordial
[draft]Sepulchral Primordial[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
I still have hope for the Primordial cycle, and if decks are throwing out enough giant monsters, they should be good. If this can reanimate a big threat, it does drop two huge bodies onto the board, and that’s worth keeping in mind. I doubt you’d want a million of these, but as a 1-2 of to top off the curve, it could do some work.
Limited: 4.0
Doubling up on huge creatures is pretty nice, and assuming you reanimate something worthwhile, this goes a long way towards both stabilizing the board and killing them.
Shadow Alley Denizen
[draft]Shadow Alley Denizen[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
The ability on this is close to being good enough, it just needs another point of power. It’s not quite big enough to emerge from the shadows and start battling on the center stage.
Pun: D
Limited: 1.5
Unless you have a ton of cipher cards, this won’t really get the job done. I’d like to see if the turbo cipher deck works, but I don’t have high hopes.
Shadow Slice
[draft]Shadow Slice[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
Thin-slicing leads me to quickly conclude that this isn’t good, and won’t see play.
Pun: B+ (go read Blink )
Limited: 2.5
In a beatdown deck, this seems amazing. It is a 3-point [card]Lava Axe[/card] at the worst, and a 3-power haste unblockable under more optimal circumstances. The amount of damage this does in an evasive deck is high enough that it makes me think a Dimir aggro deck could actually work.
Slate Street Ruffian
[draft]Slate Street Ruffian[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
This guy might be ready for some ruffian tumble, but he’s not ready for Constructed.
Pun: D
Limited: 1.5
Evasion of a sort is nice, though if it really comes down to it, your opponent can just block. Not being able to really rely on this to get cipher through makes me think it’s not all that great.
Smog Elemental
[draft]Smog Elemental[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
You can easily get maw than this for less mana.
Pun: F
Limited: 3.0
I’d basically always maindeck this, assuming your curve can support it, but you should consider siding it out against an opponent who somehow has no fliers (and is fast).
Syndicate Enforcer
[draft]Syndicate Enforcer[/draft]
Constructed: 1.0
There are some casting cost to power ratios that are strictly enforced for Constructed, and four for a 3/2 fails all of them.
Pun: C-
Limited: 3.0
[card]Syndicate Enforcer[/card] is a good attacker and decent blocker, with an ability that works well if you have no particular need for his combat skills.
Thrull Parasite
[draft]Thrull Parasite[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
Making sure you always have extort is pretty cool, so as long as the tap ability is somewhat relevant, I like this card. It counters the evolve deck fairly handily, and makes planeswalkers a fair amount weaker once it’s active.
Limited: 3.0
I like extort enough that I’d always play this, and some decks will have a tough time beating its ability.
Undercity Informer
[draft]Undercity Informer[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
Weird Vintage combos aside, I have to inform you that this really isn’t much of a card.
Pun: C-
Limited: 3.0
With a reasonably-sized body and a very relevant ability, Undercity Informer can both hold the ground and end the game.
Undercity Plague
[draft]Undercity Plague[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
We are already plagued with suggestions as to what to do with this card, so it’s hard to complain that it’s underrated. It seems a bit expensive, so you really need to accelerate it out, and have confidence that you will usually be able to cipher it multiple times.
Pun: C
Limited: 1.5
Unless you have a good amount of evasion, all this does is let you spend six mana for a 2-for-1. That’s not a great deal, and my decks are already plagued with inefficiency, so I’ll probably avoid this most of the time.
Pun: D (check the grading criteria)
Wight of Precinct Six
[draft]Wight of Precinct Six[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
This might be the wight card to assault them with, assuming the format becomes much more creature-heavy. What it isn’t is a sideboard card against Dredge, since if Dredge is a deck in the format you’re playing, you get to sideboard real cards instead.
Pun: C+
Limited: 3.0
Even if this starts out small, it’s hard to not get your mana’s worth out of it. Barring a very strange matchup, creatures will die, and this will grow.
Top 5 Black/Dimir Commons
5. [card]Deathcult Rogue[/card]
4. [card]Shadow Slice[/card]
3. [card]Basilica Screecher[/card]
2. [card]Death’s Approach[/card]
1. [card]Grisly Spectacle[/card]
Dimir seems like it’s in a strange spot. A bunch of its cards want to mill you out, which implies a defensive deck. On the other hand, cipher rewards aggression, and one of its best cards ([card]Shadow Slice[/card]) does as well. It does have good removal, and extort seems like it’s a reasonable thing to have a few of, so it’s not all bad.
Top 5 Constructed Cards
5. [card]Sepulchral Primordial[/card]
4. [card]Lazav, Dimir Mastermind[/card]
3. [card]Devour Flesh[/card]
2. [card]D |
the nation’s entire space policy, both military and civilian.”
In reality, the effectiveness of the space council will ultimately be determined by whether it’s treated as a symbolic group or as a council that actually sets policy.
Another aspect of Walker’s pre-election proposal that raised eyebrows dealt with gutting NASA’s Earth Science Division. Even with the prospect of budget cuts, NASA announced its first new Earth Science mission since Trump’s election: using satellites to observe plants from space, and draw conclusions about how climate change might be affecting vegetation.
Currently, NASA’s Earth Science program is the largest of the agency’s four science divisions, alongside astrophysics, heliophysics, and planetary science. The Earth science division uses satellites and airborne missions to study land surface, biosphere, the Earth itself, atmosphere, and oceans. It receives about $1.9 billion per year, and is about 10 percent of NASA’s overall budget, according to NASA reports.
There were indications in Walker’s op-ed that the division might be facing rough times, however, which could spell trouble far beyond NASA’s walls.
“NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies,” Walker wrote. “Human exploration of our entire solar system by the end of this century should be NASA’s focus and goal. Developing the technologies to meet that goal would severely challenge our present knowledge base, but that should be a reason for exploration and science.”
Walker has suggested shifting some of the duties and research covered by the Earth Science program over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is its own independent government agency. But Dreier thinks this may not be the best strategy. While NOAA has weather satellites up in space, those satellites are managed by NASA.
“NOAA actually works with NASA to launch its weather satellites,” he says. “NOAA doesn’t launch climate science satellites. NASA is the only government agency that actually sends up scientific missions to study the Earth. No one else does that.”
Researchers and scientists from NOAA and myriad other scientists and academics also depend on the data gathered from NASA’s Earth orbiting satellites.
“NASA runs monitoring programs looking at the size and shrinking of the ice caps,” Dreier says.“[There’s] a lot of money invested in super computing, climate modeling, simulations, and lots of basic research in climate science. Not even necessarily connected to climate change, but just Earth science. Understanding Earth as a complex system is supported by NASA funding and NASA data.”
Because NOAA’s budget is about $6 billion per year as compared to NASA’s $19 billion, Dreier estimates that, for NOAA to take on NASA’s climate research, that agency would need a huge budget boost.
“A lot of the world depends on this data.”
“There’s a lot of consequences for removing that program from NASA,” Dreier says. “A lot of the world depends on this data. So other countries or other space agencies would have to launch additional missions to study the climate.”
Despite all the doomsday talk surrounding the gutting of the Earth Science program, Dreier does not believe it will be cut entirely.
“Cutting [the Earth Science program] all together would be very disruptive — to remove an entire division from NASA, not to mention the consequences to the broader scientific community,” Dreier says. “It would be much easier politically to shrink the budget.”
One of the bright spots in Walker’s proposal seems to be an emphasis on NASA’s continued partnership with the private sector. According to Jakhu, Trump’s interest in supporting private industry could herald private company involvement in other activities, specifically in the area of space mining.
“Perhaps [Trump] may cancel other programs, which have been initiated by Obama administration, but I think one can expect he will encourage the private sector to be more involved with mining of asteroids or the moon,” Jakhu says.
In his op-ed, Walker hinted at an even bigger relationship between private industry and the space agency:
Public-private partnerships should be the foundation of our space efforts. Such partnerships offer not only the benefit of reduced costs, but the benefit of partners capable of thinking outside of bureaucratic structures and regulations.
Trump also said he supported the privatization of space exploration at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire while he was still trying to secure the Republican presidential nomination back in 2015.
But there are some gray areas in terms of resource utilization. Neither NASA nor the American government can claim any part of the moon as its own. The Outer Space Treaty, which took effect in 1967, forms the basis for space law; according to Dreier, no one contemplated the role private companies would play in the commercialization of outer space almost 50 years later.
In any case, we’ve already seen good results with NASA’s partnerships with companies in the private sector, as Dreier points out. NASA has had success working with SpaceX and Orbital ATK in resupplying the International Space Station, according to NASA’s own documents.
“If everything works the way it’s supposed to, NASA saves money,” Dreier says. “Industry benefits from having a stable partner and a stable revenue source, and you help the space industry bootstrap itself into becoming completely independent, operating at least in low-Earth orbit.”
Public-private partnership becomes a bit trickier when discussing something like deep space habitats because companies work off fixed-price contracts with the agency. The risks with low-Earth orbit are known and have readily available solutions, Dreier points out. Something like building a deep space habitat for humans might present unknown problems that eat into a company’s project budget.
“It’s finding the right areas where NASA can strategically invest in these companies and these companies feel that they can raise their own capital and take these reasonable levels of risk,” he says. “That could theoretically free up NASA to use their resources in other ways.”
At best, the long-term outlook for NASA remains hazy. It’s not without hope, however. Trump, ever the showman, clearly values space as an inspirational tool.
Following the death of astronaut-turned-Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, Trump tweeted that “we lost a great pioneer of air and space in John Glenn. He was a hero and inspired generations of future explorers. He will be missed.”
Whether his work will be missed literally or figuratively is, for now, up in the air.As reported, Odd Future will embark on a North American tour in support of their new group album, OF Tape Vol. 2. Those cities and dates have been announced-- see the full schedule, below.
In each of the cities, an Odd Future performance will be accompanied by a screening of the collective's Adult Swim television show "Loiter Squad" (which premieres March 25) and an Odd Future pop-up store. OF Tape Vol. 2 is out on March 20 through Odd Future Records. They also have a set of UK dates this spring.
Below, after the dates, watch Odd Future performing "French" at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago last year.
Odd Future:
03-09 Tempe, AZ - Marquee Theater
03-11 Boulder, CO - Fox Theatre
03-13 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
03-15 Toronto, Ontario - Sound Academy
03-17 Miami, FL - Fillmore Miami Beach
03-20 New York, NY - Hammerstein Ballroom
03-21 Boston, MA - House of Blues
03-23 Philadelphia, PA - Electric Factory
03-25 Atlanta, GA - Tabernacle
03-28 Birmingham, England - O2 Academy
03-29 London, England - Brixton O2 Academy
03-31 Manchester, England - Academy
04-01 Glasgow, Scotland - ABC
04-02 Dublin, Ireland - Olympia
04-07 San Bernardino, CA - Paid Dues Festival
04-09 San Francisco, CA - The Warfield
04-11 Seattle, WA - Showbox SoDoWhat goes into the process of casting actors for this kind of film with such a bizarre subject matter?
Casting is really important for these kinds of movies because when the script is written the characters aren’t detailed too specifically. They’re just kind of very general like age, gender, and maybe a little bit of their social class. A lot of it is just going on the street, word of mouth, doing casting calls specifying no experience necessary, and some of my brother’s movies have actually starred people with zero acting experience. When we approach a person, we tell them generally what the movie’s about. During the actual filming, most of the actors aren’t given the full script once they’re selected. Little by little is better because if it’s too rehearsed, especially if they’re not professionally experienced actors, they start to create ideas about how it should be and they lose spontaneity.
How did the director approach the decision of whether or not to reveal too much or too little of the creature?
The first thing that comes to mind is that it’s very expensive for the special effects and it’s a pretty low budget movie, so that’s very important. If you want it to look good and have the creature on screen a lot, then you’re going to be stretching your dollars really thin. But it’s also a creative decision; I remember the creature’s very first scene at the beginning of the movie and how in the script, that part didn’t happen until much later. So, initially, in the first half of the movie, we didn’t have any idea of what this creature was, but in the final cut, it ended up being right there in the beginning to kind of take away that cheap thrill of not knowing. It makes it less traditional of a movie and more unconventionally challenging and we liked making that kind of film.
Were there any direct sources of inspiration for this kind of story?
People who have seen the film have cited other movies like Possession for a resemblance. That film’s director, Andrzej Zulawski, died last year and we actually have a dedication for him at the end of our movie. There are several dedications we have for people who were either collaborators or sources of inspiration to the director. As far as Lovecraft goes, my brother never had that in mind, but I saw the influences when I first read the script. Alan Moore’s Neonomicon was especially prevalent. Even if my brother didn’t read Lovecraft, there’s still a lot of imagery that has been around for a long time that other artists have referenced, either from Japanese culture or comic books. They’re references, either directly or indirectly.
What did your role as music supervisor entail?
Making sure the soundtrack was going in the right direction and achieved what feeling we wanted it to convey. The composer did the themes and anything you hear with an actual instrument in the score. Sound design was a very important part of the film. Some of my brother’s favourite movies are Eraserhead and other David Lynch films, so there’s always a reference for him whenever he’s working on sound.DISCLAIMER: This is a work in progress. Models and instructions may change significantly over time. The device itself is not meant as anything else than an exercise in countertop particle physics, and will not generate any significant amount of energy. It's also designed to contain a small sample of radioactive material, which is not to be trifled with. Read the health & safety section before you even consider building this. It's largely safe, but there are minor risks associated with the tritium gas.
I'm currently waiting for the electronic components - namely, the solar panels and the tritium. Files uploaded so far are basic prototypes, and I don't have any proper math up yet. It'll come :D
Item Description
This model is a small, printable, tritium-powered radiovoltaic generator.
Small enough to fit in a pocket, this device will provide a stable source of minor power for up to 20 years if handled correctly, and (provided nothing breaks) poses no noticeable risk to your health.
The basic principle is simple - contain a sample of a beta-active radioemissive element and use it to generate electricity. This design exploits the radioluminescent traits of tritium when encased in a flourescent tube, and is easily constructed with off-the-shelf items.
Currently, the design requires the following parts other than the files provided above:
Six (6) photovoltaic cells, measuring no more than 53mm by 18mm by 2.5mm
One (1) luminescent photon source. In this case, a 3mm by 25mm tritium vial is used.
In my prototype, I've used these solar panels and a tritium vial from MixGlo. You should take note of the orientation you print the pieces in, as the layer alignment may simplify some of the assembly steps.
The parts show in the images were printed on a Prusa i3 clone from China at a.2mm resolution with a.4mm nozzle size. No supports were used for any of the items, nor any brims. All items were printed on blue painter's tape.
Math & Physics
With the design description and source materials out of the way, we can get to the fun part - nucular sience! The dream of any kid who's ever watched one too many physics shows on Discovery or BBC is, of course, a nuclear reactor (or something akin to one), and while this little generator isn't a fission reactor, it certainly is a nuclear one.
So, what's the principle behind this? In essence, we're building a small array of solar cells that are powered by the glow of some tritium, encapsulated in a glass vial. It's a lot like a tiny fluorescent light bulb, but it doesn't need any power other than its own and lasts for like 20 years. Cool shit!
The electrons emitted by the tritium (beta emissions) come flying out of the material in all directions. In most cases, these just go off and bounce off their surroundings, depositing their energy into whatever they hit. It's a terrible waste!
Ordinarily, the electrons are completely invisible to the naked eye. Not only that, but they're not photons, so we can't capture them with our solar panels. However, in this case, we block that path with a thin layer of phosphorous. When one of the electrons hit an atom of the phosphorous, it deposits its energy into it and excites an electron in that atom. That atom needs to get rid of this energy, so an electron in it accepts the energy, "jumps" to a higher energy state (which uses up some of the energy), and release the rest of it as a light quanta (a photon). This photon comes out with a specific wavelength (colour), dependent on the material and initial energy.
This photon is then emitted from the vial, flies through the generator, hits one of the solar cells and generates electricity.
Now, tritium vials come in a variety of colours, and the amount of energy we generate from our solar panels varies quite a bit depending on the wavelength. A red light, for instance, will not generate as much electricity as a blue light. The higher the wavelength, the more energy we get.
In order to demonstrate this, I bought a number of colours from the supplier and ran the generator using each one of them. If you like math, the next part should be fun.
The base decay energy of one of the vials is [BASE ENERGY]. Now, we won't get all of this energy out as electricity. Some of it is lost in the conversion to photons, and some is lost in the photovoltaic cells, due to issues with their efficiency. Some similar designs have achieved a total energy effieciency of about 4% - that means out of 100% nuclear energy in, we get 4% electric energy out.
Now, for some actual, real-life tests:
Red Vial (W = [RED VIAL BASE ENERGY]
Voltage: [RED VIAL VOLTAGE]
Amperage: [RED VIAL AMPERAGE]
Green Vial (W = [GREEN VIAL BASE ENERGY]
Voltage: [GREEN VIAL VOLTAGE]
Amperage: [GREEN VIAL AMPERAGE]
Blue Vial (W = [BLUE VIAL BASE ENERGY]
Voltage: [BLUE VIAL VOLTAGE]
Amperage: [BLUE VIAL AMPERAGE]
White Vial (W = [WHITE VIAL BASE ENERGY]
Voltage: [WHITE VIAL VOLTAGE]
Amperage: [WHITE VIAL AMPERAGE]
As you can see, the colour of the vial produces very different results. All in all, the [COLOUR] vial seems to be doing best.
Health & Safety
I'm not going to beat around the bush. This design uses radioactive material, and if you build one, it should be treated with the same respect you'd give a small bomb. While it is not capable of exploding, and is not a source of anything other than minor and contained beta emissions, you should still be aware of the dangers.
When the device has been assembled, it should not be moved excessively, exposed to high temperatures, high G-forces or blunt force. Anything that may damage the vial inside the generator should be avoided wherever possible, unless you absolutely know what you are doing. Don't have a degree in engineering or nuclear physics? Be careful.
Beta emissions are dangerous, and may cause cell damage if you are directly exposed to them. Fortunately, they are easily stopped by other matter, and a few millimeters of matter will easily stop them. Beta emissions will not penetrate skin very deeply, nor will they escape this design under normal circumstances.
The type of tritium vials this generator is made to hold are not very dangerous, and are commonly sold as keychains and fobs - usually in the form of a metal cage around the vial. They're also often used in iron sights, watch faces and emergency lighting. In all of these cases, the vial is in some form of hard enclosure.
However, this generator is made out of plastic, and has a number of loose-ish parts. The main power source of this generator may be made out of glass, and contains a non-negligible amount of tritium gas. If the vial shatters or cracks, the gas will escape and you may breathe it in. If you do, the tritium can replace normal hydrogen in your body and cause some damage over a long period of time. Should you damage the vial, leave the area and wait for the gas to disperse - a few minutes should suffice in a well-ventilated area.
If you should breathe some in, it won't be worse than your average CT scan (depending on the quantity). Still, if it worries you to be slightly radioactive on the inside - Tritum tends to bind to water in your body. If you up your water intake over the next week or so, you should increase the rate at which you flush it out. All in all, you shouldn't have to do much beyond being careful.
Before building this design and purchasing the parts necessary, check with your local law to see if you can import and make use of the amounts of tritium you'll be dealing with. Where I live, tritium lights are unregulated up to an activity of 15 Gbq, but you may live under different laws. I accept no responsibility for any repercussions you may face if you do not follow the law (from the government, your workplace, parents or otherwise).Foto: Privatni album, Facebook
RAVNATELJICA zagrebačke Osnovne škole Matije Gupca pokrenula je proceduru izvanrednog otkaza ugovora o radu vjeroučitelja Krešimira Bagarića.
Potvrdila je to u razgovoru za Al Jazeeru ravnateljica škole.
"Slijedi izvanredni otkaz ugovora o radu. To je osobna odgovornost i nema veze sa školom. Ima veze s besprizornim ponašanjem pojedinaca za koje ne znamo da postoje dok ne naprave ovakvo zlodjelo", rekla je Klinger za Al Jazeeru.
Klinger dalje kaže kako dosad nisu imali saznanja o eventualno sličnom ranijem ponašanju vjeroučitelja Bagarića te tvrdi da su imali ikakva takva saznanja da bi također postojale jednako tako drastične mjere koje su u okviru ovlasti ravnatelja.
"Budući da nismo znali, nažalost, nismo mogli niti postupati. Za ovakve postupke vjeroučitelj odgovara po Zakonu o radu kao i svi drugi zaposlenici, odnosno može dobiti otkaz, iako ga na radno mjesto ne postavlja ravnatelj/ica", tvrdi ravnateljica.
"Vjeroučitelji u školi sklapaju ugovor o radu i imaju ista prava i obaveze kao i svi drugi zaposlenici. Razlika između ostalih zaposlenika i vjeroučitelja jest u samom prijemu na posao - dakle, ravnatelj u školi ne prima vjeroučitelje temeljem natječaja, kao ostale zaposlenike, već nakon natječaja Katehetski ured šalje uputnicom vjeroučitelja u školu", tvrdi ravnateljica.
Tekst se nastavlja ispod oglasa
Ravnateljica kaže da će i DORH pokrenuti postupak
Klinger naglašava kako je škola zbog ovog slučaja u kontaktu sa svim nadležnim institucijama te će provesti sve pisane prijave jer se, kaže, radi o specifičnoj situaciji. Dodaje i da će Državno odvjetništvo po službenoj dužnosti pokrenuti postupak.
"Ali mi smo unatoč tome obavijestili sve relevantne institucije koje trebaju, prema našim saznanjima, izvršiti određene radnje. A i mi radimo ono što je u okviru naših ovlasti", zaključuje Klinger.Pokemon Company Threatens Pokemon Go API Creator With CFAA Lawsuit
from the because-of-course dept
see you in court nianticlabs, with love from russia xoxo
Additionally, your actions with respect to the Mila 432/Pokemon_Go_API potentially violate the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA"), a statute that prohibits the unauthorized access of servers and access which exceeds authorization, as well as similar state statutes. And your inducement of others to violate numerous terms of service provisions violates the CFAA. While notice is not a prerequisite to liability, Pokemon hereby puts you on notice that you are barred from accessing Pokemon servers or infrastructure, and barred from facilitating access by others. Any continued access, whether directly or at your direction or on your behalf, will be unauthorized.
Is there no goodwill that the Pokemon Company's lawyers won't step in and kill off? With the popularity of Pokemon Go, some third parties had started trying to develop some services to go with it, and as part of that, a few have tried to create Pokemon Go APIs. A user going by the name Mila432 had created an unofficial Pokemon Go API in Python, and posted it to GitHub. If you go now, you may notice that the Readme now reads:That's because the Pokemon Company (not the game developer Niantic, but rather the Nintendo subsidiary that owns a piece of Niantic along with all the Pokemon rights) sent Mila432 a legal nastygram claiming that the creation of the API could violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Mila432 posted screenshots to Reddit. We have all the screenshots posted at the end of this post.The letter first claims that creating this API is a violation of Pokemon's Terms of Use as well as Pokemon Go's Terms of Service. But, more importantly (and ridiculously) it claims a violation of the CFAA -- a law we've discussed many times before, mainly for it being the one law "that sticks" when no law was actually broken, but you've done something people dislike "with a computer." Here's what Pokemon's lawyers have to say:See that language right there, about putting Mila432 "on notice" and saying that s/he is barred? That's straight out of the very recent Facebook v. Power.com decision in California, where the court ruled that once a company (in that case, Facebook) had sent a cease-and-desist notice, any further access was a CFAA violation. We were troubled by that ruling, and the use of it here further illustrates how problematic it was.Now, yes, you can argue that unauthorized APIs can cause problems for games -- and that's true. Of course, it can also help make them more compelling by allowing others to build on the game and add more value. But, wherever you come down on that debate, going legal seems pretty silly. Niantic, for its part, had simply gone the technology route of limiting access to third-party servers, to deal with some quality of service problems created by such third parties accessing its system. That is, rather than totally freak out about such APIs, it noted the actual problem (overloaded machines) and sought to fix it through technology.It's just the Pokemon company that took it up a few unnecessary notches to pull out a big gun like the CFAA. But, I guess, how can I be surprised? This is the same company that legally fucked over a party by Pokemon fans at PAX last year, suing the people who organized it.
Filed Under: api, cfaa, pokemon, pokemon go, terms of service, threats
Companies: niantic, nintendo, pokemon companyIf you have not yet bought tickets for the upcoming Beers Made By Walking Festival in Denver, on October 3rd, our beer list just might seal the deal for you. Our program is an innovative program that looks at place-based and foraged beers.
We have asked brewers around the state of Colorado to go on nature hikes and make beer inspired by plants from the various trails. Additionally, we have added an Indigenous Beer Category to our festival, featuring a variety of breweries around the country. There are 30 beers from the BMBW program and another 12 in the Indigenous Beer Category.
The beers will showcase the edible plants that grow in our country each beer is an homage to the landscapes and communities where each brewery resides.
Beers Made By Walking /// GABF 2014
Horse & Dragon - Perambulation Ale
Amber ale with gin-like characteristics from Juniper and Cedar, inspired by a walk at The Gardens at Spring Creek in Fort Collins, CO as well as other perambulations around the state.
Odell - Colorado State Tree Stout
This BMBW Stout has a spruce almost maple flavor derived from spruce tips I (brewer Johnny Benson) cut from my Family property near Horsetooth Reservoir in northern Colorado.
Oskar Blues - Pollen Buzz
Inspired by a hike on Rabbit Mountain, Pollen Buzz is a honey lager made with orange blossom honey and Tettnang hops.
Paradox Beer Co - Osa Frambuesa
Brown ale, sour mash, with our house Brett strain and souring bacterias. Raspberries were added during secondary fermentation. The beer was inspired by a hike in the Pike National Forest, near Signal Butte.
Pateros Creek - Hike to the Falls Stout
Creamy milk stout enhanced by mountain sage and juniper berries inspired by a hike to Horsetooth Falls.
Riff Raff - Spruce Juice
Colonial style ale brewed with the new growth from Spruce trees, inspired by trails in the surrounding San Juan Mountains.
Station 26 - Prickly Pear and Yarrow Cream Ale
Cream Ale brewed with Colorado grown and malted barley, Colorado grown hops, prickly pear and yarrow, inspired by a 3 mile walk from the brewery to Bluff Lake Nature Center in Denver.
Strange Craft Beer- Choke Cherry Trail Beer
Cream Ale finished on chokecherries that were harvested off-trail on South Table Mesa overlooking the Coors Brewery in Golden, CO.
Trinity - Farmhouse Red
Crafted in the spirit of wild harvest. Featuring a feral brettanomyces strain, aged on rhubarb and wild Colorado chokecherries, this beer was inspired by a hike in Cheyenne Canon, Colorado Springs.
Trinity - Mr. Saison
Inspired by native ingredients found on the Catamount Trail in Green Mountain Falls, CO. We used amaranth, mustard seed, rose hips and lemongrass in this Saison.
TRVE - Wild One
A pale beer fermented in white wine barrels with two wild yeast strains cultured from the skins of fruit. The beer was aged on Palisade peaches and sage. This beer was inspired by a hike to Hanging Lake.
West Flanders - Post Apocalyptic Foraged Choke Cherry Farmhouse Ale
We hiked along South Boulder Creek which flooded last year leaving behind a lot of uprooted trees and debris along the creek. The heavy moisture last year set up an abundance of fruit, including chokecherry.
Wild Woods - Roasted Root Amber Ale
Inspired by a walk in the Boulder foothills, we roasted both Chicory and Burdock roots and added them to both the boil and secondary fermentation.
Wit's End - Six Pistils
A fashionably anarchic take on an English Pale Ale, this beer was inspired by a walk in the Pike National Forest. It is brewed with sagebrush, thyme, lavender, anise hyssop and wild bergamot for aroma and bitterness.
Wit's End - Killer Rabbit
Falling somewhere between a Belgian blond and a saison, Killer Rabbit comes from a walk along our neighboring South Platte River Trail where an abundance of Rabbitbrush lines the trail.
Wynkoop Brewing - The Denver Pacific
Lightly smoked milk stout aged on American oak.
Indigenous Beer Category
Fonta Flora - Salted Sunflower Saison
Salted Sunflower Saison brewed with local barley, wheat and rye from Riverbend Malt House of Asheville, North Carolina and sunflowers from Bluebird farm of Morganton, North Carolina.
Fullsteam - Stinging Nettle Saison
An earthy and spicy saison brewed with foraged stinging nettle from the NC mountains and Santiam hops. 5% ABV.
Fullsteam - Paw Paw
Hoppy Belgian Ale brewed with Belma and Jarrylo hops and North Carolina paw paw fruit.
Fullsteam - 2014 First Frost
Our first foraged beer and a Fullsteam tradition, we brew this Belgian Winter Warmer with foraged native persimmon (Diospyros Virginiana) and farmed Fuyu and Hachiya persimmons.
Fullsteam - Tree-to-Sea Gose
A food-friendly, balanced Gose with six indigenous ingredients from the mountains to the sea: North Carolina spruce pine, hops, wheat, barley, coriander, and Outer Banks sea salt.
Ladyface - Trébuchet
Golden Farmhouse ale with local wildflower honey from Bennett’s Honey Farm, Fillmore, CA, and locally-grown Sauvignon Blanc grapes & aged in a barrel from Semler’s Malibu Family Wines' Estate.
Scratch - 105
Saison brewed with 105 different plants and fungi found around our property.
Scratch - Black Trumpet Milk Stout
Milk stout brewed with black trumpet mushrooms.
Scratch - Wild Carrot Seed Ale
Amber ale brewed with wild carrot seed (a.k.a. Queen Anne's Lace) root and seeds.
Scratch - File' Saison
Saison brewed with dried sassafras leaves.
Scratch - Cascade Sumac Saison
Saison brewed with Cascade hops from our property and sumac found 6 miles from our brewery.
Wicked Weed - Terra Locale: Hipster Nouveau
A collaboration with Fonta Flora Brewing. Inspired by visits to local farms, it was fermented with Saison yeast and Brettanomyces and transferred onto 75 lbs of fresh, local Rhubarb.
We took wort from our Independence Pass Ale mash and reworked our hops additions to use wild hops from the Rio Grande Trail in Aspen.An ode to the high desert, sagebrush and juniper flavor reign supreme supported by a malty backbone. This beer is inspired by the Boneyard mountain biking trail in Eagle.This beer features dried elderberries, yarrow flower, prickly pear syrup and home grown hops. We chose these ingredients because these plants were seen on our hike at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.A wet hopped Belgian Double IPA aged on wild raspberries gathered along Montgomery Reservoir.A Gose, old-German style wheat beer with salt and lactic acid, turned deep purple from the addition of chokecherry. This beer is inspired by a hike to Grey Rock in Roosevelt National Forest.Chocolate Stout made with Hershey's syrup and Horehound, a plant from the mint family found in Colorado. This beer is inspired by a hike on Mt. Galbraith in Golden, CO.Brewed with Pale Ale wort, with fir needles instead of flavoring and aroma hops. The beer is inspired by a hike along West Lake Creek Road in Edwards, CO.Pale Ale with wild Porcini Mushrooms added post-fermentation, inspired by a hike at Marshall Pass and Waterdogs Lake.The same great honey-wheat beer we brought to BMBW last year, inspired by a hike in Boulder's Chautauqua Park. It has been aged with Brettanomyces in oak for a full year.Inspired by a stroll in Platte Park, we added peaches, lavender, and our house yeast "Johnny Appleseed,” which was propagated from a neighborhood apple tree. The beer was aged in a sherry cask.Saison brewed with organic sage and horehound based on a hike in Red Rock Canyon.A big, bold Northwest Imperial IPA with spruce tips that round out the piney hop character and elderflowers which impart a subtle floral accent based off a hike in Discover Park in Seattle, Washington.The Conservative government fired back at the Liberals on Thursday for advocating a new site for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, as the head of the team that designed it disclosed that it has substantially downsized the controversial memorial.
Voytek Gorczynski, the head of ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture in Toronto, said he and his team are “reducing some of the elements” of the memorial as they refine the design.
The memorial will now occupy about half the 5,000-square-metre site on Wellington Street between the Supreme Court of Canada and Library and Archives Canada, Gorczynski said in an interview. It had previously filled about 60 per cent of the site, he said.
The memorial consists of two main elements. One is a series of parallel concrete folds, rising above 14 metres at their tallest point, covered with 100 million “memory squares” representing lives lost to communist regimes worldwide. The other, called the Bridge of Hope, is a large, triangular viewing platform.
While the design team has been unable to downsize the concrete folds very much, Gorczynski said the Bridge of Hope has been shortened by 20 metres and lowered by nearly two metres.
The changes were partly in response to criticism of the memorial’s scale, Gorczynski said, but also involved “fine-tuning the composition and balancing it out visually. We felt the Bridge of Hope was a little bit too big in relationship to the folds.”
He said the design team opted for a large-scale monument to symbolize and reflect the “magnitude of the crimes” committed by communist regimes.
Most of the controversy over the memorial has centred on its prominent location on Confederation Boulevard. Though some Ottawa Liberal MPs and candidates had raised concerns, the party had remained silent on the issue.
Related
That changed Thursday. At a news conference, the party’s critic for Canadian Heritage, Stéphane Dion — flanked by Ottawa MPs David McGuinty and Mauril Bélanger and local candidates Catherine McKenna and Anita Vandenbeld — aligned themselves with those who want the memorial relocated.
Dion stressed that the Liberals support a monument, saying Canada has a “moral duty to remember these atrocities” and observing that the country has “immensely benefited” from immigrants fleeing communist nations.
But he said the chosen site had long been reserved for a new building to complete a “judicial triad” centred on the Supreme Court. That would not be possible if the monument is built there, he said.
The Conservative government swiftly counter-attacked. Heritage Minister Shelley Glover’s office issued a statement accusing the Liberals of effectively telling the eight million Canadians who trace their origins to communist countries “that they do not deserve a prominent site for their place of collective memory.”
Glover’s statement observed that Liberal leader Justin Trudeau knew where the memorial would be built when he wrote a letter supporting the project in February 2014. Trudeau and the Liberal party “will have to answer to those millions of Canadians whose families found refuge and liberty in our great country,” Glover’s statement said.
Bélanger said the monument as currently designed could be accommodated at the Garden of the Provinces, the nearly-as-prominent Wellington Street site originally allocated by the National Capital Commission.
McGuinty and Bélanger both said they have received many comments about the memorial from constituents. “Every point of contact has been negative,” McGuinty said. “When the entire city is saying, ‘What are you doing?’, there’s a problem.”
The Ottawa South MP called the government’s handling of the project “profoundly disrespectful” of those who suffered under communist regimes and the citizens of Ottawa.
“This is what happens when a government doesn’t come clean,” he said. “There’s no transparency. People have not been consulted.”
dbutler@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/ButlerDon“For me it was a revolution,” Richard Leroy says, as we stand in Les Noëls de Montbenault, one of his small parcels of chenin blanc. “There was chenin and great terroirs, and no one in France knew it.”
It’s the morning after Donald Trump has been elected, and no one has quite processed it yet. My American brain is numb, and it’s quickly dawning on the French that the candidacy of Marine Le Pen, once a running joke, is no longer all that funny.
Revolution isn’t a word I take lightly, but perhaps it’s the right topic to discuss on this particular day. Certainly it’s on Leroy’s mind; almost his first words to me as I walk through |
First off in a military base like this when you're in hostile territory, it's normal procedure to do a very steep climb to get away from surface-to-air missiles.
BURNETT: Right.
HANSMAN: So they would be climbing steeper than you would have in a normal departure. Now, even that, that should have been fine.
There -- it could have been that the trim settings were incorrect so the nose went up higher than expected on this takeoff. There is speculation that there may have been a cargo shift. But, again, because they were climbing at such a steep angle to get away from any ground threat, they were closer to stall than we would normally be in a normal takeoff.
BURNETT: That's interesting you say that. I mean, you know, I flew, not on a 747 but on military aircraft, and both the takeoff and landings are shockingly steep, coming in and out of that very airfield. Now that you say that, I'm thinking about that.
I want to play the part where you talk about first the plane leans one way a little bit and then, you know, looks like it is making a natural bank but then goes the other way and into that horrific move down, which we're going to show you.
Clearly, something as horribly wrong is at that point. What accounts for that that it goes one way and then goes the other way, basically perpendicular to the ground right there?
HANSMAN: Sure.
So normally what happened -- when you normally are flying with a wing, you're getting lift under both wings. What appears to have happened is that if you try to climb too much, the wing can't generate enough lift and you get separation of the flow. It appears that there was a problem on the left wing, you know, it started to go. And it was corrected.
But then the right-wing stalled and it stalled hard to the right. And then it actually appears that the crew is recovering, that the nose is starting to come down. And there simply wasn't enough altitude left for the airplane to recover before -- get back to the flying condition before it hits the ground.
BURNETT: Right. And on that point, let me ask you that. You're referring to, as it's coming down perpendicular, it rights itself towards the end. Do you believe that is the pilot who is doing that, I guess, is the first question? And the second question is, obviously, at that point they're over a road. I mean, who knows what could have done a safe landing. It's also full of fuel.
You know, if your only option at that point -- first of all, was it him able to right it? Secondly, if his only option at that point was to try to land it, if he had a little more space, is there a way to even land a plane of that size full of fuel without it exploding?
HANSMAN: So, it does appear that the crew was trying to correct it, so that you have the right-wing dropped. Again, what you would normally do is try to get the nose down to get it flying, reduce the angle of attack. And it wasn't that there wasn't enough distance in front of them. There just wasn't enough altitude.
So they basically, if they had been higher up when this happened, there is a chance they could have pulled it out. But from looking at the dynamics at the time it occurred, there really just want any chance for them to get out of it.
BURNETT: Right. It looks like the pilot knew what to do, he was trying to do the right thing. I'm thinking of the Air France crash where they came down, it appeared to pilot training, where there was a problem, similar issue, plenty of altitude. But they did the wrong thing when this all happened.
HANSMAN: Yes, they appeared to have the right correction for the stall happening. The real question is, why did it happen?
BURNETT: All right. Well, thank you very much, sir. We appreciate you taking the time.
And still OUTFRONT, we have exclusive new photos of Robel Phillipos, a friend and former high school classmate of the Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who was arrested today.
And the president taking heat from liberal critics. Is Mr. Obama to blame for the so-called do-nothing Congress?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BURNETT: And this just in to CNN. I want to share it with you. New pictures of Robel Phillipos, a friend, former high school classmate of the Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Phillipos was arrested today for conspiring to cover up the crime.
There is the picture of the two together at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can see Tsarnaev in the front, Robel Phillipos in the back.
Let's go straight to Ashleigh Banfield who obtained this new picture. Ashleigh, you're learning more about Robel Phillipos. He's an American citizen. The other two, of course, were Kazakh citizens who are here on student visas.
Robel, though, has been a bit of mystery. What have you learned?
ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think this is one of the biggest mysteries when we heard the names that were being, you know, brought out in court today -- the two Catholic students and then the American student. And we were trying to figure out what connection when these American students made and when to the suspect in this case, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
And it turns out the connection may go right back to their high school days together. That's the class of 2011 that you were just looking at a portion of. You can see the two of them seated within touching distance of one another.
Here's what I can tell you about what we know. We met one of their classmates who knows both of these two people. The classmate says that he played basketball with Robel Phillipos and he had gym class with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. What he could say about Robel Phillipos is that he was a fun guy, sort of an easy going guy, but a bit mouthy.
And when I asked, what does that mean? He said, you know, talking smack on the basketball court. But generally speaking, a pretty fun guy. And then as for the connection between the two of them, my contact, my source could not say if they knew each other or knew each other well, but he could certainly say that they had a lot of mutual friends.
And then you can you see from the photograph together, that photograph that you're looking at is not Robel Phillipos. I want to make sure the person in the cap that popped on the screen is another student unrelated 100 percent to this. But the student seated in the class picture with the red circles around, you can see the upper one is Robel Phillipos and the other one is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
And then, of course, you can see Robel Phillipos' class portrait. That's the class of 2011 when they had their individual portraits, the school of Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. And once again, this was a large class, about 400, class of 2011, graduating together.
BURNETT: All right. Thank you very much, Ashleigh. Appreciate it. Those new pictures just in of one of the three young men arrested today for conspiring to cover up the Boston marathon terror bombings.
Fifth story OUTFRONT now, liberals turning on President Obama.
Columnist Maureen Dowd in a "New York Times" op-ed today hammered the president for blaming Congress for not getting more things accomplished. Dowd writes, quote, "Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self- styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It's called leadership." Dana Milbank in "The Washington Post" piled on, writing, quote, "It's the president's job to lead and to bang heads if necessary regardless of any, quote-unquote, 'permission structure.' Obama seemed oddly like a spectator as if he had resigned himself to a reactive presidency."
These are harsh words and, no, they are not coming from members of the right.
OUTFRONT tonight, CNN contributor and Democratic strategist Hillary Rosen, radio show host Stephanie Miller and political comedian Dean Obeidallah.
These are -- you would read this and read a quote from this and you would think it came from someone else. But it didn't.
DEAN OBEIDALLAH, POLITICAL COMEDIAN: No.
BURNETT: These are people who have supported the president and these are harsh words.
OBEIDALLAH: They are harsh words and to be honest with you, I'm on the progressive side. I think President Obama is in danger of being a lame duck president, to be quite honest with you. No more legislative accomplishments, other than Obamacare. We might -- that's all we might see.
And we saw it with the extended background checks for guns. He couldn't get that through. In fact, he goes four Democratic votes in the Senate from his own party. That's what he's up against. It's not Republican-Democrat. It's Congress and President Obama can't change them. But it's his legacy that's at risk.
BURNETT: And yet, Stephanie, we keep hearing the president talk about Congress and he was frustrated with Congress. Obviously, everyone gets that. I don't -- no one in those articles and no one is going to defend Congress. We know their approval rating is way worse than his.
But what about this point? Ultimately, the buck stops with you, dude.
STEPHANIE MILLER, RADIO HOST: You know, I got to say, Erin, even Senator Pat Toomey said today, the Republican who was behind the background check bill, he said people voted against it because they did not want to be seen as helping the president. This Congress -- these Republicans, Erin, are provably and historically obstructionist. They just are. And I'm sorry, whatever Maureen Dowd wrote, I love Maureen Dowd, but guess what? We don't live in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy where Aaron Sorkin gets to write everybody's lines, including the Republicans.
BURNETT: Hillary, is there a point here, though? Because I'm starting to wonder, look, you can blame him or not blame him, it kind of doesn't matter, but to Dean's point, if he can't get anything done, what's the point of second term?
HILARY ROSEN, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, first of all, there is a lot that he has gotten done. And I think will still get done. And -- but there's one thing he cannot fundamentally change, and that is that the very most important job for every member of Congress, as they see it, is to get themselves re-elected. That's not going to change.
And so when you have situations in the Senate where you have moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats kind of being given a pass by their leadership or by their constituents or by their campaign managers, that -- like, that's not going to change. And President Obama can't do that.
The one thing that I think Maureen makes a good point about, though, it's worth the White House paying attention to this, is that the president should never say I've done everything I can do. Because nobody ever has, right? There's always more to do, there's always more to try and you can never be seen as kind of throwing up your hands and saying, well, it's all on them. And I'm done.
BURNETT: Right.
ROSEN: And I think that that's kind of the -- the one sort of maybe even stylistic mistake that the president made in the press conference or he's making now, is that -- he needs to give people more that they can do, and he needs to keep doing more himself, and the Republicans and Stephanie is absolutely right, Mitch McConnell bears more of this blame than the president does but we ought to just keep talking about it. We ought to just keep pushing at it.
And I think the president can never say it's -- you know, it's up to you guys now. He always has to have some new activity that he and other people can do to keep trying.
MILLER: Erin --
BURNETT: Dean, what about this point, you're president of the United States. You are the president. You have a lot of powers, executive powers.
OBEIDALLAH: Yes, you can always do that. And that's one thing the president can do --
BURNETT: It kind of the whoa is me, you guys are hosing me, people eventually don't want to hear it, whether they think it's true or not. They don't want to hear it. They're looking to you to do something, to stand above it.
OBEIDALLAH: We want to see results. Left and the right want to see it. And Hillary said Republicans want to be re-elected. So do Democrats. That's why four Democrats voted against the extended background check.
He only has a 47 percent approval rating, President Obama. He can't even use the bully pulpit like in the past. What he can do, he can raise money, go to Republicans in the House --
BURNETT: Oh, no, so now you're saying the only reason they got a second term is to run for re-election for the next party? That is sick.
OBEIDALLAH: Complain about Congress or change Congress. And if you can't change it by making friends and building alliances, you know what? You can raise money, you get 17 seats and you have control of the House. That's how you do it.
BURNETT: Stephanie?
MILLER: Erin, can I just say? I am so tired of this. Why doesn't he just knock heads like LBJ did? My dad ran against LBJ. He was Barry Goldwater's running mate.
Obama does not have LBJ majorities. He does not -- you know, as we have sort of alluded to. And I don't hold Democrats blameless. He sometimes can't get Democrats to come along. He does not have the kind of -- you know, liberal majorities that LBJ did.
BURNETT: But to Dean's point, he doesn't -- some of the Democrats don't go along with him. He doesn't like the wining and dining although he has been trying it more recently --
(CROSSTALK)
BURNETT: -- which is fair enough.
ROSEN: We shouldn't under estimate how important over the years using the budget has been as a tool for presidents, you know, giving stuff away and stuff like that. And this president doesn't have that kind of pork to give away that previous presidents have had either. And that's an important issue that nobody really talks about.
BURNETT: All right. Well, thanks to all of you. And you know what she raises, here's what he could do in a second term. Do what Bill Clinton did. Balance the budget.
All right, the essay is next. It's a holiday today. Did you know that? How did you celebrate?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BURNETT: So today is May 1st, known as May Day. People around the world hold parades and parties, unlike Christmas and New Year's, this time different people celebrate May Day in very, very different ways.
The one I was most familiar with is the pagan ceremony of Bill Paine, which include costumes and May poles by the day and bonfires and orgies by night. It celebrates growth and, of course, fertility and encourages a new beginning.
But that is not the only way to celebrate today. May 1st is also an International Workers Day. And around the world today, unions staged marches and demonstrations and protests in celebration of the labor movement. And that is the most common May Day celebrated in America that we know. I mean, you know, maybe there's some orgy bonfires out there, but there's other ways, too. In Hawaii, today is Lei Day, when Hawaiians celebrate island culture and beginning of a new season. And in many other states, Americans celebrate Loyalty Day where they reaffirm their loyalty to the United States and recognize American freedom.
I love the idea of a Loyalty Day because it celebrates this country. What if we could take pieces from all of these May Days and put them together. You know, have a bonfire, go crazy, celebrate your family, your labor, the culture, the country, all at once. It would be the perfect day.
We want to know if you celebrate May Day. And if so, how do you do it. Let us know, Twitter @Erin Burnett or @OutFrontCNN.
Anderson starts now.Using blunt language, a new report by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive singles out China and Russia for cyber economic espionage, saying they are fast-growing threats to US economic and national security. In the past, the US government had largely refrained from naming specific countries as sources of cyberespionage.
Not anymore.
"Chinese actors are the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage," according to the report, titled "Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace." "Russia's intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from US targets."
The report, which was prepared for Congress, in effect puts a government spotlight on threats that had largely gone undeclared until security firms and news media highlighted them over the past two years.
"The evidence has simply become overwhelming," says Joel Brenner, head of US counterintelligence in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2006 to 2009. "It was the gorilla in the room that could no longer be ignored. Not to have named these countries would have yielded a report that would have been irrelevant."
The report also identified allies like France. But China, in particular, was fingered for massive ongoing cyberespionage against American companies in an alleged effort to gather the technological insights needed to make its economy more competitive.
An official spokesman for China vehemently denied any sponsorship of such attacks. But naming China was probably inevitable, intelligence experts say: A number of countries, including Britain, Germany, and South Korea, have already been placing blame.
"One of the biggest challenges America faces is how to deal with countries like China that have been so blatant in their theft of economically important information," says Scott Borg, director of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit think tank.
The report, Mr. Borg adds, appears to be moving the issue of cyberespionage into a more formal realm where diplomats will negotiate the issue. "This is a serious threat to our economy, yet it's so new that government officials don't know what would be an appropriate response,” he says. “This report looks like another step toward putting this on the diplomatic agenda."
The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive was formed in 2001. Its purpose is better evaluation of counterintelligence threats from foreign nations and nonstate actors, as well as integration of all counterintelligence activities.
Whereas in the past, individual spies might have painstakingly collected and transferred physical copies of secret corporate documents, the ease and anonymity of downloading files from the Internet or copying thousands of documents at a time onto a portable thumb drive have made cyberespionage a crucial threat to the nation, the report says.
Project 863, for instance, is a clandestine initiative launched by China in 1986, the report says, "to enhance China's economic competitiveness and narrow the science and technology gap between China and the West in areas like nanotechnology, computers and biotechnology." Cyberespionage is now a big part of Project 863, it says.
Against that backdrop, the report says, American companies and specifically cybersecurity companies have "reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions" originating from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in China.
Private security firms in the US have dubbed the trend the "advanced persistent threat." Examples cited by the report include:
• A February 2011 report by the cybersecurity firm McAfee found that Chinese hackers had broken into the computer networks of global oil, energy, and petrochemical companies. Their alleged goal: steal data on sensitive proprietary operations and the financing of bids and operations for oil and gas fields. (The McAfee report substantially corroborated a January 2010 Monitor report that found Chinese links to cyberespionage attacks on three global oil giants – Marathon Oil, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips.)
• The Chinese government sponsored hackers' intrusions into Google’s networks, VeriSign iDefense reported in January 2010. Google later claimed that its source code had been stolen, a claim China denies.
• Last year, computer security firm Mandiant reported secret business information stolen from the corporate network of a Fortune 500 company while that company was in negotiations to buy a Chinese company. The stolen data may have helped the Chinese company in its negotiations.
In his new book "American the Vulnerable," Mr. Brenner amplifies what is contained in the report. What became known as Operation Aurora, he writes, was a "coordinated attack on the intellectual property of several thousand companies in the United States and Europe – including Morgan Stanley, Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman, Dow Chemical and many others. Intellectual property is the stuff that makes Google and other firms tick."
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington rebuts the report.
"China's rapid development and prosperity are attributed to its sound national development strategy and the Chinese people's hard work as well as China's ever enhanced economic and trade cooperation with other countries that benefits all," writes Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy, in an e-mail. "Willfully making unwarranted accusations against China is irresponsible, and we are against such demonization efforts as firmly as our opposition to any forms of unlawful cyberspace activities."
Looking ahead a few years, the study cites a technological shift toward a "proliferation of portable devices that connect to the Internet and other networks, [which] will continue to create new opportunities for malicious actors to conduct espionage." Such devices are expected to double from 12.5 billion in 2010 to 25 billion by 2015.
Another trend that could make the nation more vulnerable is the massive swing toward "cloud computing," which pools information processing and storage. While cheaper than hosting computer services in-house, data sharing will provide new means for cyberspies to do their work, the report warns.
According to the report, key targets of cyberspies going forward will include information and communications technology and military technologies, especially those pertaining to naval propulsion and aerospace. But the focus will also include civilian and dual-use technologies, including clean-energy technologies such as solar, wind, and other "energy-generating technologies" – expected to be the fastest-growing investment sector in many nations.
China's 863 program, the report says, is trying to acquire advanced materials and manufacturing techniques, in particular to boost its industrial competitiveness in aviation and high-speed rail. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran are focusing on advanced materials like nanotechnology.
"Cyberspace makes it possible for foreign collectors to gather enormous quantities of information quickly and with little risk, whether via remote exploitation of victims’ computer networks, downloads of data to external media devices, or e-mail messages transmitting sensitive information," the report says.Martin Garrix and Ed Sheeran Collab “Replay Rewind” Might Get Official Release After All
A well known and widely celebrated collaboration between Martin Garrix and Ed Sheeran, “Rewind, Repeat It,” might finally be getting an official release — and both fan bases are freaking out!
Rightfully so, considering anything Garrix touches turns to EDM gold and Sheeran has become something of a modern day pop legend, wooing everyone with his mad storytelling skills and boy-next-door attitude. This collaboration has been a long time coming after years of unreleased play, and this is the most promising news yet.
Garrix once cited “label issues and a lot of headaches” were holding up the fate of an official release, but an official ASCAP credit (first pointed out by Redditor ComplexChristian via r/EDM) tells a different, more hopeful story.
A track called “Replay Rewind” can only be referring to the unreleased, yet already megahit song! Release that ish already!
Replay Rewind – ASCAP Credits
JUST IN: 'Rewind Repeat It' is now called as 'Replay Rewind'. Sony & BDi just listed this Martin Garrix & Ed Sheeran collaboration on ASCAP. pic.twitter.com/LsNkCYAX2q — MARTIN GARRIX HUB (@MartinGarrixHub) August 18, 2017
This official unannounced title change out of nowhere is giving us a hope that 'Rewind Repeat It' might finally see the light of the day. — MARTIN GARRIX HUB (@MartinGarrixHub) August 18, 2017
Martin Garrix – Rewind Repeat It (feat. Ed Sheeran)Arsene Wenger has explained why Arsenal found it difficult to sign Shkodran Mustafi from Valencia in the summer.
Mustafi moved to the Gunners for a fee of over £30million after weeks of protracted negoatiations with La Liga club Valencia.
The 24-year-old joined on August 30, by which point the club had already played three games of the Premier League season.
Wenger was criticised at the time for not acting sooner and purchasing the German beforehand, but the manager has explained why the difficult was so difficult to complete at all.
“We started negotiating, we met with Ivan Gazidis in the states the agent of Mustafi and agreed the deal but it took long to get over the line as Valencia were reluctant to sell,” he said at the club’s Annual General Meeting.
“We also took longer because in pre-season he was injured and he couldn’t have played against Liverpool.
“When he came he had had just 45 minutes of competition. We needed him to push too and that is sometimes a slow process as it is not only us that can decide whether he signs.”When a leaked dossier containing dozens of unverified, anonymous claims about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia was published on BuzzFeed yesterday, it caused a complete sensation all across the internet. Millions read the scandalous accusations from an uncorroborated, anonymous source, and the moment they did, they understood what they had to do: Droves of responsible BuzzFeed readers have now booked plane tickets and are flying to Moscow to verify the information in the Trump dossier themselves!
“When I noticed the BuzzFeed report mentioned that its information wasn’t verified yet, I immediately knew it was my duty to conduct a full-scale journalistic investigation into every last one of the claims,” said Long Island resident Donna Strickland, who plans to spend at least three months in Moscow thoroughly vetting the dossier. “I’m grateful to BuzzFeed for giving me this opportunity to decide for myself if what I’ve read is true. They’ve done their job, but before I start sharing this story all over the internet or jumping to any conclusions, I’ve got to travel to Russia to see if it all holds up.”
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Strickland is just one of millions of pragmatic, conscientious people traveling to Russia to confirm the validity of the information in the dossier before jumping to any conclusions. All of Moscow’s major airports have reported that hundreds of flights are arriving filled exclusively with American readers possessing the necessary resources and journalistic acumen to track down and question key officials within the Russian government in order to definitively assess the dossier’s veracity.
Yes! If this doesn’t renew your faith in the power of journalism, nothing will!
“On the plane I met a woman from Nebraska who was taking an online course in Russian so that she can interview the manager and housekeeping staff of the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, find out if any of them could confirm any of the sexual acts described in the dossier, and review several years’ worth of potentially relevant security camera footage,” Strickland says. “The man in line behind me at customs was a high school math teacher from Burbank who’s planning to conduct a series of meticulous interviews with high-ranking members of the Kremlin, pressing them on the exact details of the report. Of course, none of us will be sharing anything about this story on social media until we’re certain it’s 100 percent reliable.”
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Now that’s how you consume the news responsibly! It’s encouraging to see just how many readers are dutifully investigating the unsubstantiated information presented in BuzzFeed’s story. Donald Trump is a controversial and polarizing figure, so it would have been easy to take inflammatory information about him at face value. Fortunately, we can rest easy knowing that there are millions of level-headed, ethical internet users who know that they are honor-bound to fully examine every primary source document and ensure its incontrovertible truth.
Faith in humanity restored!We are wrapping up the blog now, at the end of an historic, but peaceful day of mass protests across Russia.
The protests come three months before Putin, who was president in 2000-2008 and effectively remained the country's leader while prime minister, is to seek a third term in office.
Here's a summary of the events of the day:
• Russia saw the largest political event of its kind in nearly 20 years with tens of thousands of furious protestors rallying across the country against alleged electoral fraud.
• An estimated 50,000 people gathered in Moscow and 10,000 in St Petersburg. There were around 1,000 arrests on a day that passed off largely peacefully
• Protestors pledge to take to the streets again on December 24
• Protestors demand annulment of Sunday's election results; the resignation of the head of the election commission and an official investigation into vote fraud.
• They also want new democratic and open elections and registration of opposition parties
Mark Townsend tweets that the London protest over Russia's disputed elections is starting to disperse as night falls.
The head of the Russian election commission, Vladimir Churkov, could be heading for the chop, reckons Michael Idov, contributing editor of the New York magazine.
He tweets: "Judging from the pointed mentions of his name in all the state TV coverage of the protest (Ch1, NTV) Churkov is toast."
Less than 100 demonstrators were reported arrested across Russia, AP reports. This contrasts with the hundreds taken into custody at smaller protests in the first days after disputed election.
Police, who normally crack down fast and hard on any unauthorised gathering, even allowed a few hundred leftist radicals to conduct an unsanctioned protest on Moscow's Revolution Square just outside the Red Square.
The Interfax news agency reports that no one was arrested during the Moscow protest.
A Ministry of the Interior spokesman said: "The event passed without incident and no one was detained."
Mark Townsend has just sent through his dispatch about today's protest in London.
In London, more than 200 protesters are gathered outside parliament to vent their disquiet over the disputed polls.
Supporters sporting white ribbons have assembled in Westminster to chant "re-election, re-election". Some have travelled from as far away as Manchester, Bristol and Norwich. Most believe that the demonstrations in Moscow and across Russia herald the onset of change, a transfer of power from the political elite to the people.
Student Marina Issaeva, 22, from Moscow, said: "I've never protested in my
life, it's good to see so many young people also here.
"Something has started moving, it's unprecedented. We must make sure momentum is not lost."
Alexey Kovalev, 30, london-based editor of Snob, said the "excellent" turnout in central London was fuelled by fury.
'People are very angry. Look around, people want change.' As he spoke, more small groups joined the demonstration, including a group of Ukranians. Many of those gathered are waving placards, some carrying a portrait of Putin emblazoned with the accusation: "They stole our vote."
Others stated simply: "Fair vote for Russia."
Teaching assistant Dmitri Ponomaev, 30, said: "We are saying enough is enough."
Anastasia Vladimirova, 21, in London on a tourist trip from the Russian capital, added: "I hope we can change the system, something has to give but the politicians are very powerful."
Here's a set of photos from the demonstration.
There was a folk carnival atmosphere to the end of the rally at Bolotnaya Square, writes Alexei Belovs.
People are drinking champagne from the bottle, beating the drums, dancing, Komsomolskaya Pravda reports.
When asked why men are drinking champagne, as it is not a manly drink, they told the Russian tabloid "because the mood is appropriate, and it's more fun than New Year. Most surprising - nobody was arrested!"
Miriam Elder has posted this video on Twitter of protesters dancing.
The protest in Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, went ahead without the organisers, Alexei Belovs writes.
Konstantin Troshin (Drugaya Rossiya party) was attacked by a man. Slava Yemelyanov (Yabloko party) was arrested and brought to the head of the city's department of internal affairs. Oleg Loskutov was called into work under threat of being sacked. Despite this 500 people gathered at the city's Lenin Square.
A senior official from the United Russia party has told demonstrators to not to turn into "cannon fodder" and abide the law, writes Alexei Belovs.
Andrey Isaev, deputy secretary the ruling party's general council, promised to "hear out" the protesters, Russian news agency RBK reports.
Isaev added that people expressing their disagreement with the results of the elections "have a right to do so"
The Russian electoral commission has defended the disputed vote and rejected calls for a fresh poll.
Vice chairman of the Central Election Commission Stanislav Vavilov told the Interfax news agency they had approved the electoral process:
Elections were acknowleged as valid and there are no reasons for any other opinions. We see no reason for election revision.
My colleague Mark Townsend, who is at the London demo, tweets that there is a "sense of optimism" among the Russian protesters.
One of the demonstrators Anna Parigskaia told him: "There will be change definitely. If not this, the next election."
Here's a list of the official demands from the organisers of the Moscow protest:
1. Freedom for political prisoners
2. Annulment of the election results
3. The resignation of Vladimir Churov, head of the election commission, and an official investigation of vote fraud
4. Registration of the opposition parties and new democratic legislation on parties and elections
5. New democratic and open elections
Our Moscow bureau says that 7,000 people attended the protest in In St Petersburg.
Police detained 10 people en route from Vosstaniya Square to Pionerskaya Square.
The number of protesters at Pioneer Square in St Petersburg has now reached 10,000 according to organisers.
Russian dissident Boris Berezovsky has been talking to Sky News. He says the numbers protesting are very significant – previous protests have seen fewer than 5,000 on the streets.
Opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the organisers of today's Moscow rally, has announced there will be another protest on December 24, which he says will be twice as large.
My colleague Luke Harding is at the London demo in support of the Russian protests, which he says is the biggest ever protest against Putin held in the UK.
This is the biggest ever anti-Putin demo in Britain. These protests usually attract 15-20 people. There are 200-300 people here today. Everyone is saying that they think things are changing [with Russian politics]. There are some amusing banners – "Putin cheats at maths" and "Bastards – they stole my vote".
Alexey Kovalev, one of the organisers of the protest, says:
Nobody would have thought a month ago that we'd have this many people. There's a million people on the streets of Russia. It's a phenomenal turnout. The people are fed up with having their votes stolen. I do hope the Russian government comes to their senses.
My colleague Miriam Elder says all the protesters say they will continue demonstrating until their are fresh and fair elections.
She estimates there around 50,000 people at Bolotnaya Square. Hundreds of people are leaving but hundreds more are still arriving. She is walking over the bridge opposite the Kremlin, which is lined with hundreds of police.
The crowd is chanting, "We will come again". Nationalists have burned United Russia's flag.
The overall atmosphere is cheerful despite the snowfall, adds Alexei Belovs. Protesters are handing flowers to police. Some of the slogans on the banners include: "I did not vote for these bastards. I voted for other ones", "Do not hit me – I am here by an accident", "Send Putin to Azkaban"
Here's a link to the Guardian gallery of today's protest in Moscow.
Here's a link to the Facebook group for the London demonstration in support of the protests in Russia.
Russian state television channel NTV has described the rally on Bolotnaya Square as "grandiose", writes Alexei Belovs.
The rally is the main item on its official website. NTV has also reports that one of its journalists, Alexei Pivovarov, refusing to host a news programme if teh channel did not cover the rally.
Here's a video from the square.
AP has filed a report on the Moscow protest, reporting there are between 25,000 and 40,000 people gathered at Bolotnaya Square.
"The falsifications that authorities are doing today have turned the country into a big theater, with clowns like in a circus," said Alexander Trofimov, one of the early arrivals for the protest at Bolotnaya Square. "I don't think any citizen of the country can say he is very happy with anything. We don't have an independent judiciary, there is no freedom of expression all this combined creates a situation where people are forced to protest," said demonstrator Albert Yusupov, who was dressed in civilian clothes but identified himself as a member of the Russian army. By the time the rally started, the square and adjacent streets were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with protesters braving intermittent wind-blown snow. Police said there were at least 25,000, while protest organisers claimed 40,000.
Here's another photo from Twitter that shows how packed the square is. This one shows how the crowd has spilled over onto the bridges leading to the square.
Hardcore Nationalists have set off flares in Bol |
it.
The Shark Tank star who manages billions in investments could surely spring for a $219 copy of language software Rosetta Stone if he’s serious about properly representing one quarter of the nation. For those with time, means and national ambitions, language learning is the safest of investments.
To drive home the point with language that O’Leary will appreciate: Bilinguals make more money.
“Bilingual employees earn more than their unilingual counterparts,” reads a 2010 University of Guelph study, “even if they aren’t using their language skills on the job.”
While embracing English, the international language of business, is unquestionably profitable, French-language skills could become increasingly beneficial outside of Canada as well. African economies are growing and investment bank Natixis predicts that sub-Saharan Africa could help French become the world’s most spoken language by 2050.
Along with economics, the science of multilingualism is also persuasive. Research suggests that bilingualism, plainly, makes people smarter and healthier. It is associated with delays in the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s, improved memory and cognitive skills, denser grey matter in the brain and more (there are too many studies on the benefits of bilingualism to cover in this space). Quebec’s antibilinguals might be perturbed to learn that denser grey matter facilitates all language processing; embracing English, as it turns out, could help strengthen French.
While some leaders remain fearful of the other language, parents are increasingly fearless; francophone students are flooding English CEGEPs and anglophone students are overwhelming Toronto’s French schools. As the benefits of multilingualism even beyond the nation’s two official languages become indisputable, it’s incumbent on leaders to set an example, meet the demand and help build a healthier, more prosperous Canada.
Dan Delmar’s column will appear next on Monday, April 4. He is a public relations consultant at Provocateur Communications and host of The Exchange, Mondays and Wednesdays 8-10 p.m. on CJAD 800 Montreal.
twitter.com/DanDelmarWe are now living 15 years after the global warming apocalypse.
Well, at least according to a top United Nations official who warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth” by the year 2000 if nothing was done to stop global warming.
The dire warning came from a top U.N. official in 1989, warning that mankind only had a 10-year window to stop global warming before it went beyond human ability to reverse. But 15 years after the warning, no nations have been wiped off the planet because of global warming, and global temperatures have not warmed nearly as much as most climate models predicted.
The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”
Brown, who was the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, warned that “[c]oastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” Brown added that “governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human” ability to stop it.
But 2000 came and went with little fanfare, and not a single nation has been “wiped out” or even come close.
The New York Times reported last November that global warming-induced food shortages had already toppled governments, but then quickly retracted the remark because the claim is not true.
U.N. officials and climate scientists, however, are still warning that sea level rise threatens to flood coastal cities and that more extreme weather events will create millions of climate refugees.
“Climate change is a threat to our very existence,” writes Michael Møller, acting head of U.N.’s Geneva office. “Wherever we live and whatever we do. We all contribute to it. And we all have a responsibility to do something about it.”
The U.N. and other groups are calling for countries to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions to avoid warming of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era.
“We have no time to waste, and much to gain by moving quickly down a lower-carbon pathway. All countries must be part of the solution if we are to stay below the 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise threshold,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.
The International Energy Agency says that 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions must be cut to avoid warming over 2 degrees Celsius — meaning that fossil fuels would either have to be totally revamped or done away with completely to meet the 2 degree threshold.
“A continuation of current trends – which saw overall electricity emissions increase by 75% between 1990 and 2011, due to rising demand but little change in emissions intensity – would dangerously drive up electricity-related emissions,” IEA found in a recent report.
But what the U.N. and IEA leave out is that carbon dioxide emissions stemming from fossil fuel use has skyrocketed since 2000 — the predicted doomsday. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have grown from about 370 parts per million in 2000 to more than 400 parts per million in February 2015.
But while CO2 concentrations have skyrocketed, global average temperatures have stagnated for the last 15 to 20 years depending on what measurements are used. Surface temperature data shows little to no warming trend for the last 15 years or so.
Satellite data, which measures the lowest parts of Earth’s atmosphere, shows warming stalled for more than 18 years.
[h/t Real Science]
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.Al Horford’s struggle to find mental equilibrium has been excruciating.
Amid the omnipresent media wanting to know his timetable for returning from the NBA’s concussion protocol program, internal pressure brewed by the Celtics’ uneven play in his absence, and his own personal doubts about what feels right and what most definitely doesn’t, Horford’s sense of readiness can change daily.
He’d missed nine straight games before finally returning to the lineup in last night’s matchup with the Detroit Pistons, the opener of a three-city Celtics road trip.
Any athlete wading through a concussion is desperate for more information. So Horford turned to Brian Scalabrine, the former Celtic and CSN announcer who wrestled with his own concussion issues — and an overriding urge to play through symptoms — prior to the 2009 playoffs.
The opportunity at hand was key to Scalabrine. Kevin Garnett had gone down for good with a knee injury, and Scalabrine had made seven straight starts when he caught an inadvertent elbow to the head from Dirk Nowitzki. Scalabrine was playing some of the best basketball of his career. The last thing he wanted was to fall out of Doc Rivers’ rotation, and the power forward admits he came back too early.
But Horford is a different case, Scalabrine said last week.
“He has to get it right. There’s no variable on that,” Scalabrine said. “And from the medical staff to Danny (Ainge) to wherever, you’ve got to get this right. The whole thing about getting multiples is scary.”
Getting it right — perhaps the most uncertain part of recovery — is the most elusive accomplishment of all.
Asked when a concussed athlete finally knows it’s time to get out, Scalabrine said: “When you go out there and play and nothing happens.”
The word that bothers Scalabrine the most is “multiples.” He discovered through meetings with neurologist Dr. Robert Cantu that he had suffered five concussions since his freshman year at Highline Community College in 1997. He had suffered three alone since January 2009.
Rivers told Scalabrine to not worry about playing — that his young family deserved more consideration than basketball — but the big forward listened to opportunity and returned.
“Then I barely got brushed and I got another one,” Scalabrine said.
The cautionary tale is stark enough. Scalabrine told Horford that if this was his first concussion, then he should take extra care not to get another one. The likelihood of another concussion rises with each “ding.”
“I told Al that everyone is going to have different symptoms. Things that I had, he didn’t feel. I had a sensitivity to light, and he had that, too,” Scalabrine said. “But my issue is, 'Al, if you get another one and your percentage goes up after the first one, then you could be out for a long, long time, not a couple of days. It shifts to a month after that, and you don’t want that — trust me on that one.' You’re constantly thinking, ‘What the heck is going on?’ You’re constantly seeing doctors. One is one and you deal with it. Getting multiples? That’s where it becomes a big, big issue.
“I’m sure there’s football players who are getting them every game. Multiple concussions is bad, bad news. One off here and there is not that big a deal.”
Scalabrine had another message for Horford: Don’t do what I did.
“I wanted to play. Leon Powe tears his ACL (in the playoffs) against Chicago, I went out there and said, ‘Forget it, man. I have a great opportunity to play,’ ” he said. “I averaged 20-something minutes a game in the playoffs. Should I have been out there? From my opinion? Yes. In the real life of the world, being completely cleared, probably no. But nothing was going to stop me from getting that opportunity to play. This is my livelihood.
“It’s a little bit different now because there’s so much info out there,” Scalabrine said. “They just made a movie about it three years ago — a super dark movie by the way. But for me it was about playing basketball and that’s it. I’m opportunistic in life, just trying to take advantage of situations. With Garnett it was really killing me. But the whole organization from Dr. Cantu to Ed Lacerte, Danny Ainge, they all kept the same message — ‘We don’t know a lot about this, but you have to be healthy.’ ”
That’s why Scalabrine wants Horford to heed his own uncertainty.
“It’s about getting through it,” Scalabrine said.
This week’s C’s timeline
Tomorrow, at Minnesota, 8 p.m. — The Timberwolves are probably the most intriguing young team in the NBA, and Karl-Anthony Townes is a future MVP. He’s already one of the best big men — not just best young big men — in the NBA. The Celtics will rest a lot easier if Horford and Jae Crowder are back by this game.
Wednesday, at Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m. — The Nets are supposed to be busy feathering the Celtics’ nest for the 2016 NBA draft. Instead, they’re playing competitive basketball. As Isaiah Thomas recently said, he doesn’t keep track of draft picks. But the Celtics have an especially vested interest tonight.
Friday, vs. San Antonio, 1 p.m. — A special Thanksgiving weekend matinee. The Celtics have to hope it doesn’t turn into a Black Friday event against the longest running power in the NBA, albeit now without Tim Duncan.
Knicks’ Porzingis learns the ropes as he climbs
Kristaps Porzingis may never put enough muscle on his 7-foot-3 frame to bang with the tougher wide bodies in this league.
But the Knicks forward is also learning to make his long, skinny build work in the most physical basketball league on earth. As evidenced by his skillful 35-point performance during a win over a big Detroit team Wednesday, Porzingis may be able to make this work on his terms.
“I think last year when I watched him, obviously we just played against him two times, but it seemed like he’d drive a lot and then throw kind of a wild shot up and that might have been because of strength,” first-year Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said of Porzingis. “He got knocked off his positioning. I don’t see that this year. When he drives he’s been pretty solid, so I think his strength he worked on over the summer helped him. He’s making his shots and guys are looking for him. If he gets the ball anywhere in the lane he should be able to get a shot off. He’s so tall.”
As the Celtics demonstrated with Marcus Smart, though, Porzingis can have significant trouble with smaller, stronger players.
“One night we had a rough time when they switched small guys onto him,” said Hornacek. “We went over a couple of things. Hopefully they’ll get better at that. When teams try to switch we have to be able to take advantage. (The Celtics will) put Marcus Smart on him, just to get into his legs and keep him from shooting 3’s. That’s when we’ve got to go in the post and get him a mismatch there. KP is learning his moves. Our coaches are working with him on that.”Oil Forever? New Technological Breakthroughs Sweeping Oil Markets
New technological breakthroughs are helping turn unprofitable wells into moneymakers and allowed companies to keep pumping even in the face of crude prices that have more than halved over the past three years.
Last spring, Statoil ASA announced it had used the same oil well design and components to drill three reservoirs for the price of one.
While the specs for Norwegian Sea drilling might provoke reactions akin to the oil field’s name—the Snorre—such standardized pipes and casings could hold the key to a pervasive mystery about today’s energy market: Why is everyone still drilling when prices are in the basement?
Even as oil producers have planned $1 trillion worth of spending reductions between 2015-to-2020—cutting staff, delaying projects, and squeezing contractors—they’ve continued to green-light new wells from the Norwegian Sea to Brazil, and from Uganda to the Gulf of Mexico. Those initiatives mean oil production will continue to grow, adding to the supply glut and putting downward pressure on prices.
It’s a development that has both baffled and frustrated the world’s biggest producers of crude, who have been waiting for lower prices to force a rollback of global production. They have largely blamed the resilience of the world’s oil drilling on U.S. shale producers, as well as efforts to maintain market share, but the Snorre and other projects like it suggest there may be another–much more boring–culprit at fault.
That’s because oil majors’ urgent mission to slash costs includes standardizing the components used in drilling for oil–a development that has helped turn unprofitable wells into moneymakers, protected bottom lines, and allowed companies to keep pumping even in the face of crude prices that have more than halved over the past three years.
“One might wonder how it is possible that with expenditures being cut dramatically in the upstream industry, output is still growing in many parts of the non-OPEC world while the costs of future projects are declining,” analysts at JBC Energy GmbH wrote earlier this year. “One of the key topics in this respect is industry standardization.”
While oil traders have been pondering the prospect of a production freeze from OPEC, which has so far ramped up production to seize market share and force upstart shale players out of business, they’ve paid scant attention to cooperation already taking place across the industry.
Earlier this year the heads of some of the world’s biggest oil majors, including Saudi Aramco, BP Plc, Repsol SpA, and Statoil, met behind closed doors to discuss a push to cut costs by standardizing the equipment used in exploration and production. Other joint projects are already under way, meaning everything from the ‘Christmas Tree’ collections of valves and spools used in oil wells, to light bulbs, and engineering contracts are now up for standardized treatment.
It’s a sharp turnaround from the heady days of the mid-2000s when oil reached more than $145 per barrel. Back then, nascent standardization efforts were primarily aimed at speeding up lead times—the interval between the discovery of oil and when drilling commences—in order to make up for a shortage of engineers and other energy industry professionals.
“People were rushing to get hydrocarbons into the market. If something wouldn’t work, you could just throw more money at it,” said Rod Christie, president and chief executive of Turbomachinery Solutions at GE Oil & Gas. “Today that’s not an option. Everything has to be more efficient.”
Now, lead times and costs are again at the fore—but for very different reasons. With the price of oil dipping to $26.21 in February and currently hovering around $45 a barrel, attaining maximum production using the least amount of time and resources is crucial.With more than a third of all bird species in North America facing significant population declines, Nova Scotia plays a key role in protecting the health of migrating bird species, says the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
The first State of North America's Birds report released this week found that of 1,154 bird species that live in and migrate among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, 432 are of "high concern" due to low or declining populations, shrinking ranges and threats such as human-caused habitat loss, invasive predators and climate change.
The report says the decline in bird numbers are particularly bad for species that either nest or fly through Atlantic Canada — primarily ocean birds and shoreline birds.
"When we're protecting [birds] and their habitat, it's not just for Nova Scotia, it's not just for Canada, but these birds link the Americas," Dan Kraus, a conservation scientist with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, told CBC's Information Morning.
"The birds we have today in Nova Scotia may, in a few months, be up in the Arctic or the boreal forest and in the winter they'll be down in Mexico or the Caribbean countries."
Birds the proverbial 'canary in the coal mine'
Semipalmated sandpipers are a species of migratory shorebird that travels through Atlantic Canada. (Nature Canada)
Kraus said habitats of particular importance for migrating birds include the Bay of Fundy and Nova Scotia's South Shore.
"The Bay of Fundy is one of the world's hotspots for migrating shorebirds. It's one of the few places in the world you can stand in awe and look at hundreds of thousands of birds in one day," he said.
He says some birds fly thousands of kilometres and need a reliable place where they can stop, rest and feed before continuing their journey.
According to Kraus, birds are the proverbial "canary in the coal mine," acting as an indicator of the overall health of the environment.
Not all bad news for Nova Scotia birds
Ocean birds like northern gannets are among the most threatened, a new report suggests. Many that nest in Canada migrate to the Gulf of Mexico and were hard hit by an oil spill in 2010. (Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press)
Kraus says Nova Scotia is bucking the bird survival trend and points to birds like the Atlantic puffin and the northern gannet as examples.
"That's probably because of early efforts to protect their habitat, to protect the islands where they nest," he said.
However, coastal birds are a different story. Kraus says the piping plover and semipalmated sandpiper are on the watchlist and at risk of extinction if more isn't done.
He says the health of bird populations is directly linked to preserving habitat.
"If we don't have habitat, we can't protect those birds. They are facing other threats but if they don't have healthy habitat to breed, to feed, to stop during their migration, we're not going to be able to protect birds for future generations," said Kraus.
More than 12% of Nova Scotia protected
According to the province, there are currently more than 100 properties designated as wilderness areas, nature preserves and parks that protect a total of 12.26 per cent of Nova Scotia's landmass.
Canada, as of the end of 2014, had designated 10.3 per cent of the country's terrestrial area (land and freshwater), and 0.9 per cent of its marine territory as being protected areas.
Birds like Atlantic puffin (pictured) and northern gannet are not doing too badly in Nova Scotia. (Ronald O'Toole)
While birds may be nice to look at, Kraus says they also have a positive impact on the economy.
"For example, birds in Canada's boreal forest provide over $5 billion a year in pest control services," said Kraus, giving the example of birds controlling the spruce budworm.
Natural Resources Canada calls the spruce budworm "one of the most damaging native insects affecting spruce and fir trees in the country."
Also, passionate birders even travel to see our feathered friends, resulting in tourism.
"Nova Scotia has opportunities where you can see birds in a number and a diversity that doesn't exist elsewhere in Canada," said Kraus.Retired Navy SEAL sniper Charlie Melton, the badass who trained legends such as Navy SEALs Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell, threw down the gauntlet to former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura over his claims that Kyle lied about punching him in a San Diego bar.
Melton told Independent Journal Review that he was at the bar that night and personally vouched for his fallen SEAL brother.
Thursday was Chris Kyle Day, a day of remembrance declared by the state of Texas, which means it’s a perfect time to hear Melton’s account of the Kyle’s infamous knockout:
“We were at a SEAL bar in San Diego called McP’s, and we were having a wake for one of our guys that just died, I believe it was Michael Monsoor. We were doing his wake after the funeral there. And Jesse Ventura was in there…I was at the other end of the bar, but he said something kind of derogatory toward us losing guys or whatever and Chris did knock him out. Then we all left and went to Danny’s, which is another bar down the street.”
We then asked, “So Jesse went down?”
“Yes, sir,” Melton responded. “And there were several team guys there that night too.”
When asked why Ventura would lie about the incident and drag Kyle’s family through court proceedings, Melton said it could be for the publicity.
“Personal opinion, Jesse Ventura has probably lost his mind a little bit,” he added.
Ventura was recently handed a legal defeat when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his defamation case against the estate of the late Chris Kyle. Ventura is still seeking $1.8 million from Kyle’s estate.
Melton spoke to IJR last month during a “try and buy” shooting event in Henderson, Nevada, put on by Anteris Alliance, a network of gun manufacturers and service providers dedicated to supporting veterans, first responders, and their families.
Before you can join the Anteris Alliance network, companies have to show how they benefit veterans or first responders in a tangible way. That’s step one. Companies also have to demonstrate that their product and customer service is top-notch. It’s something of an exclusive club comprised of some of the biggest military veteran names, including “Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell and his Team Never Quit ammunition.
Melton also operates Charlie Mike Precision, a shooting instruction company in Normangee, Texas, that offers customers the chance to be trained by a Navy SEAL legend. Charlie Mike Precision offers long-range rifle training, pistol instruction and will soon offer “elite expeditions.”Looking for news you can trust?
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At 5:39 a.m. on Friday, after a 20-hour negotiating marathon, top House and Senate lawmakers put the final touches on Congress’ 2,000-plus-page bill responding to one of the worst financial meltdowns in US history. The bill, more than a year in the making, would create a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, seek to end taxpayer bailouts, and illuminate the opaque and risk-laden $600 trillion derivatives market. The legislation was the target of fierce lobbying by groups on all sides of the debate, and some clear winners and losers emerged as the House and Senate merged their bills into one. Here are some of the biggest in each category:
WINNERS
Too-Big-to-Fail Banks: They were at the heart of the financial crisis, and their fate was likewise at the center of the grueling financial reform debate. In the end, however, it looks like systemically risky banks and non-banking institutions will escape any major crackdowns. Sure, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and their ilk will see some dips in profitability due to new derivatives reforms and a ban on proprietary trading (when banks trade for their own profit). But as Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, told Mother Jones in an email, “the legislation will not reign in [too-big-to-fail] banks and they will be at the heart of what happens next.”
One proposal that would’ve broken up the biggest banks and capped their leverage (the debt they amass to amplify their financial bets), the Brown-Kaufman Amendment, was opposed by the Obama administration and killed in the Senate. That amendment posed a major threat to banks not only by limiting their financial size and risk-taking abilities, but also by scaling back their political clout and outsized influence over regulators due to their economy-tumbling size. Now, all that’s left in the financial reform bill addressing too-big- and too-interconnected-to-fail banks is a council of regulators to keep an eye on big banks and a plan to recoup the cost of a bank’s unwinding after its collapse to ensure taxpayers aren’t on the hook for it. That’s little consolation to reformers like Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), who fear mega-banks could cause the next financial meltdown.
Auto Dealers: After months of lobbying, auto dealers and their influence peddlers on Capitol Hill succeeded in winning an exemption from oversight under a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Dealers, who make almost 80 percent of all auto loans, bilk consumers out of an estimated $20 billion annually through shady practices like inflating a car’s actual retail price by tacking on unnecessary products and services. Dealers had already prevailed in the House’s version of the bill, passed in December, but lost out on the Senate side, which voted to include them under the Bureau’s purview. During the conference process, dealers pushed hard and managed to win an exemption from Bureau oversight, a loophole sure to appear in the final bill.
The auto dealer lobby spent lavishly to avoid new regulation. In the last three months of 2009 and first three months of 2010, the National Automobile Dealers Association, the industry’s main lobbying group, spent nearly $1.5 million lobbying Washington lawmakers and bureaucrats on issues like the dealer exemption.
Consumer Protection Advocates: On Wednesday, bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren gave her imprimatur, albeit hesitantly, to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau agreed upon by the House and Senate. The idea was largely Warren’s brainchild, and the Harvard professor said she still supports the new independent Bureau, which would be housed in the Federal Reserve, funded by an independent budget, and led by a presidentially appointed candidate. Warren had previously pushed for a standalone Consumer Financial Protection Agency, resembling the EPA, but once that idea was deemed politically toxic due to Republican opposition, Warren threw her support behind a Fed-housed bureau so long as the Fed doesn’t meddle with its activities.
Warren has said she’s disappointed by the carve-outs in the Bureau’s oversight, including the exemption of car dealers under its mandate. But, as she told Huffington Post‘s Ryan Grim, “right now the bureau has the authority and the independence it needs to fix the broken credit market. I keep waiting for an incoming missile that means the banks have won their fight to destroy this consumer agency, but that hasn’t happened so far—and I don’t think it will.”
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.): Despite joining Democrats to vote for the Senate’s reform bill in May, the junior senator’s vote is in play on the Senate’s final vote on the bill, which is expected next week. But before voting with Democrats again, Brown demanded changes to the bill’s “Volcker Rule” provision, which would limit banks’ investments in riskier entities like hedge funds and private equity funds. Brown pushed for a loophole in the Volcker language, allowing banks to invest a small percentage of their money in these funds—a change sought by major investment firms in Brown’s home state, like State Street, a Boston-based investment company.
In the end, Brown got his loophole, which was opposed by Democrats and former Fed chairman Paul Volcker himself. Now, we’ll see if Brown again votes in favor of financial reform. If he does, he will, in other words, have had his cake and eaten it, too: his big bank constituents will get their loophole, and Brown will get to look like a reformer.
Derivatives Industry: For months, Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln stood firm in defending her tough derivatives provisions that would’ve forced banks to spin-off all of their swaps trading operations. Her reforms, better known as “Section 716,” were anathema to Wall Street and its lobbyists, opposed by the White House, but backed by a chorus of experts, like economists Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, and James K. Galbraith.
At the 11th hour, however, the derivatives industry won: to ensure the bill’s passage, Lincoln’s proposal was watered down so that banks need only spin off their riskiest swap trades in areas like agriculture, metals, and energy. Trades of interest-rate swaps, foreign exchange swaps, and gold and silver swaps will be allowed to stay in-house at the big banks.
Here’s why that’s a major win for the industry: In December 2009, the swaps trades exempted from the spin-off rule now in the bill accounted for almost $500 trillion in notional value, according to the Bank for International Settlements (pdf); for some context, the total over-the-counter market at time was valued at $614 trillion. Now, all those trades weren’t executed by American banks, but it shows how diluted Lincoln’s proposals became. With Congress allowing banks to make the kinds of swaps trades that account for more than 80 percent of the market, Wall Street and its lobbyists won a loophole that all but defeats the spin-off provision entirely.
LOSERS
The Credit Card Industry: The big credit card companies face billions in losses each year from a ban on interchange, or “swipe,” fees, pushed by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), in the final bill. Swipe fees comprise around 1 to 3 percent of credit or debit card purchases. That amount, paid by store operators, flows into the coffers of companies like Visa and Mastercard as well as the banks (Chase and Bank of America, for instance) that issue cards to consumers. According to The Nilson Report, swipe fees totaled $62 billion in 2009 from almost $4 trillion in US purchases.
Despite intense lobbying from the credit card industry, top House lawmakers agreed on Tuesday to incorporate a major portion of Durbin’s swipe-fees ban into the merged financial reform text. Once the bill goes into effect, credit and debit card companies are set to lose a significant source of income.
Office of Thrift Supervision: The beleaguered financial regulator, which oversees federal banks as well as institutions like mortgage lenders, will be no more under the bill. Criticized by many as the weakest of all federal regulators, the OTS is set to be merged into the Office of the Comprotroller of the Currency and its duties would be split among existing bank regulators, the Federal Reserve, and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Main Street Investors: For years, securities regulators have pushed to end a glaring conflict of interest among a particular breed of financial advisers called broker-dealers. Broker-dealers, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both advise investors and sell them financial products, as well as trade for their own benefit. A particularly egregious (and potentially illegal) example is the transaction for which Goldman Sachs is currently under investigation by the SEC, which allegedly entailed peddling to its investors a product that was rigged to fail and which Goldman itself was betting against. Unlike investment advisers, who by law must put their clients’ interests first, broker-dealers don’t have a “fiduciary duty.” That’s right—they can screw over their clients if they want and don’t have to disclose conflicts of interest in financial deals.
The House’s bill featured a provision that would’ve immediately made broker-dealers adhere to a fiduciary duty. In the merging of the House and Senate bills, however, lawmakers agreed Thursday to require a six-month study by the Securities and Exchange Commission on the need for this measure—even though a 2008 RAND Corporation report, commissioned by the SEC, concluded that customers have trouble differentiating between broker-dealers and investment advisers, and that a fiduciary duty would beneficial. “We saw this as the strongest investor protection provision in the whole package,” says Bob Webster, communications director with North American Securities Administrators Association. Now, he adds, “we really have no idea what the fiduciary standard will look like.”“It’s certainly not what I would call the position we wanted to be in at this point in the race. He’s going to have to make the case that we wouldn’t even be at 8 percent if it weren’t for him.”
-- A senior Obama administration official talking to the New York Times about the economy and its effect on the election.
An embattled incumbent with weak job approval and a grouchy, sharply divided electorate rolls out of his convention and opens a lead on his challenger, a Massachusetts politician whose primary resume point has been turned into a liability by personal attack ads.
That lead would prove durable, and take George W. Bush into a second term and ensure that his most controversial policies in the Global War on Terror – the main issue in the election – would be maintained, many of them even to this day.
Bush left the 2004 Republican National Convention with a bounce of something like 9 points. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry had led for most of the summer and the conventional wisdom was that Bush, owing to broad disapproval for the Iraq war, was kaput.
[pullquote]
But as voters began to pay attention to the race, they found Kerry wanting. The ads from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked Kerry on his Vietnam record and his subsequent efforts against the war.
The endlessly replayed video of Kerry accusing his comrades of atrocities like those of “Genghis Kahn” made it awkward when the Democratic nominee stepped to the stage in Boston for his party’s convention and saluted, announcing that he was “reporting for duty.”
Neither did it hurt that Bush’s convention bounce was bolstered by the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, just nine days later. Just as Kerry was being called craven and unpatriotic, Americans were reminded of Bush’s leadership after the attacks just three years prior.
The 2004 convention accelerated a trend that had been working in Bush’s advantage. The incumbent was down 5 points in mid-July in the ABC News/Washington Post poll, but up 9 points after the convention. He would surrender the lead, but the trajectory had clearly changed as voters tuned in and began to pay attention.
The election would be close, with Bush pulling out a 2.4 percent popular vote win and an electoral victory predicated on a margin of 118,601 votes in Ohio out of 5.6 million cast in the Buckeye State.
This is the scenario that President Obama had envisioned for this year and with early signs of a post-convention bounce for the president, many in the political press are starting to rally to the idea. Politico proclaimed, “State of the Race: Advantage Obama.”
But Obama has had the advantage on paper all along. He has consistently led in the polls since May, has outspent his opponent in dramatic fashion and benefits from favorable press coverage and all the advantages of incumbency
Unlike Bush, Obama is trying hard to defend a small lead, not mount a comeback. Obama has steadily held a small lead in swing-state polls and nationally. He has dumped tens of millions of dollars in caustic, personal attack ads on Romney. He has campaigned almost without cease since Labor Day 2011.
The conventional wisdom is that the race will remain unchanged and that Obama will continue to hold or even expand his edge. And polls taken over the weekend suggest that Obama got a nudge of as much as 5 points from his prime-time extravaganza in Charlotte.
But re-elections are about tipping point moments. Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan by 5 points or more at this point in 1980. Reagan would go on to win a 10-point smash over the incumbent.
What the conventional wisdom misses is that while the pool of self-described “undecided” voters may be small, the pool of persuadable voters remains very large. And with an incumbent president, people are less likely to start paying close attention early. The Republican primary contest offered sparks of interest but wrapped up more quickly and conclusively than many expected.
The two weeks of political infomercials that took place in Charlotte and Tampa were the cue to voters to start paying attention. The next big moment, the first presidential debate on Oct. 3, will be the time that the game can really change.
While the similarities with 2004 are notable, Obama’s position is appreciably worse than Bush’s. He has lower job-approval ratings, the nation is more pessimistic and the character attacks are proving less effective than those launched by Bush-backers against Kerry.
It’s the last one that’s most important. Romney has so far survived, and while hardly beloved by the electorate, forced Democrats in Charlotte to concede that he was a “good man” and shift their attacks more to policy and away from the personal.
The under-funded Obama political action committee and others will continue to call him a cancer-callous vampire, the Obama campaign has shifted its attack to the thornier issues of tax rates, Medicare and other points where Republicans can offer easier rebuttals. The cost to Obama’s reputation of being the antagonist in such searingly personal attacks was too great.
With all signs showing that Obama will face deep disapproval of his handling on the economy on Election Day, any bounce that comes out of the convention seems unlikely to last even until the two men first face off in Denver.
The state of the race is this: Romney has lived long enough to get into the final quarter with the frontrunner in reach. He may win by 6 points or lose by 10, but don’t be deceived into believing this is a replay of 2004.
Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox |
the Metropolitan and Lorimer G and L stop, a transfer station that could see a huge bump in riders switching to the G train if the L doesn’t run into Manhattan. That Williamsburg station has six closed staircases and one closed entrance, according to the MTA. On either side of Union Avenue where Hope and Powers streets intersect it, there are two yellow grates emblazoned with the words “Subway Keep Clear.” On the corner of Grand Street and Union Avenue, there’s another metallic grate with the same words, and across Union from that, Minor suspects, is one staircase that’s been sealed with concrete.
In response to the article, the MTA reiterated its noncommittal position on closed entrances. “As part of our efforts to accommodate growing ridership, we are studying and evaluating closed access points throughout the subway system and we’re looking at every idea for how to provide alternate service to L customers during any potential shutdown,” the agency said in a statement to DNA Info.
As I understand there are two major barriers to reopening these entrances. First, as I’ve explored in the past, the MTA is worried that ADA requirements trigger full accessibility if these entrances are opened, and the agency cannot afford full accessibility build-outs for these stations. Whether any group with standing is capitalized enough right now to take the MTA to court over ADA violations remains an open question, but with the government breathing down the MTA’s neck, the agency may be hesitant to so blatantly flaunt ADA requirements.
Second, from what I’ve been told, the MTA may not have enough equipment on hand to reopen entrances that have been closed for a long time. Due to the opening of the 7 line extension and the impending-ish debut of the Second Ave. Subway, all MetroCard turnstiles are spoken for, and the agency doesn’t have a bunch of HEETs in a closet somewhere. Consider the institutional desire to move beyond the MetroCard and not spend much money on an obsolete technology, the MTA doesn’t want to open entrances closed before the advent of the MetroCard without fare payment equipment on hand, and they don’t want to pony up big bucks for turnstile technology with a five-year expected life span. So these entrances remain in limbo.
While the L train coalition has busied itself with pie-in-the-sky proposals for a new East River subway tunnel, this is the kind of improvement the group should be focusing on. If the MTA can help disperse some customers, making up for the lost capacity of the L train tunnel gets incrementally easier. It’s a baby step but a step nonetheless, and it will take many steps to overcome the dreaded L train shutdown.Joel Matip is set to miss Liverpool's Premier League clash with Southampton at Anfield on Saturday.
The former Schalke defender has been hampered by a thigh problem this week and is unlikely to be risked against Saints.
It means Dejan Lovren is expected to start for the Reds for the first time since his nightmare afternoon in last month's defeat to Tottenham at Wembley.
Matip's absence is likely to see Lovren play against his former club alongside Ragnar Klavan at centre-back.
It's a blow for Jurgen Klopp after the club's injury situation had cleared up considerably this week.
Jordan Henderson, Adam Lallana and Sadio Mane have all returned to full training and are fit to face Southampton.
Philippe Coutinho is also poised for his Liverpool comeback after missing the previous three matches with a groin injury.Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
FOR all its elephantine weight, India has long shown mouselike diplomatic clout. Historically, its diplomacy was constrained by poverty at home, fraught relations with neighbours, notably Pakistan and China, and an anxiety to avoid taking sides in the cold war. Even today, its foreign service remains woefully understaffed: both New Zealand and Singapore have more serving diplomats. Now India is trying harder to get noticed.
About time. India's growing economy and population need far more energy than can easily be produced at home, requiring eyes to be raised to distant horizons. Already the world's fourth-biggest oil consumer, within 15 years India will import nearly all its oil. India is set on diversifying supply away from the Middle East. Increasingly, it expects to get supplies from Central Asia and Africa.
As it happens, India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has just spent six days in Africa, along with hordes of Indian ministers and businessmen. An Afro-India summit, the second in three years, with leaders of 15 African countries, produced a surge of shared goodwill. Mr Singh had admirable deeds to point to. India is the third-biggest contributor of UN peacekeepers to the continent, helping clamp down on civil wars in Sudan and Congo. India's navy chases Somali pirates. And, the prime minister reminded listeners, India's record of speaking out against apartheid in South Africa was an honourable one.
More striking, Mr Singh promised $5 billion of loans on easy terms over the next three years for Africans willing to trade with India, plus another $1 billion to pay for education, railways and peacekeeping. It is a steep rise in aid and assistance—last year India gave a mere $25m to Africa—and marks a striking shift, especially since India itself is still a big recipient of aid. But Mr Singh wants something in return: African backing for another round of long-stalled efforts to reform the UN Security Council. India craves a permanent seat, and will back an African permanent one, too, probably for South Africa.
Booming two-way trade, likely to pass $50 billion this year, is the backdrop to all this goodwill. Oil exports account for much of the trade, thanks in part to a rash of investments by Indian oil firms in eight producing countries. Minerals matter too. India's large jewellery industry gobbles up South African diamonds and gold. Mozambique's coal fuels power stations. India wants uranium from Malawi and Niger for nuclear power.
Mr Singh talks cheerily of all this helping Africa to prosper. For now, however, rival China plays the bigger role. The value of its trade is three times India's. Whereas China's African embassies are large and well staffed, the handful of Indian diplomats in Mozambique struggle to speak Portuguese. Bids by Chinese state-owned firms for African oil concessions routinely knock Indian ones aside. It helps that Chinese-built infrastructure projects have already charmed governments.
For all that, India's African activity may one day prove to be at least as rewarding as China's. Whereas the state led the Chinese charge into Africa, Indian forays are mostly guided by private firms. Tata, an industrial conglomerate, Bharti Airtel, a mobile-phone company, and a batch of generic-drug producers have invested heavily on the continent. Accustomed already to dealing with hundreds of millions of poor Indian consumers, they know what to expect in Africa. As their host economies grow at the fastest rate in decades, Indian firms stand to prosper. All the more reason, then, for India's diplomats to look a good deal keener, too.Florent Malouda: Joined Metz after leaving Turkish side Trabzonspor
Former Chelsea winger Florent Malouda has joined Ligue 1 side Metz on a one-year deal with the option to extend by a further year.
Malouda, who has 80 France caps to his name, was a free agent after leaving Trabzonspor and was heavily linked with a return to England, although he distanced himself from links with Birmingham.
The 34-year-old is now back in French football after just one season in Turkey and says he did not panic about securing a move despite only becoming available in the transfer window’s latter stages.
"When my contract was cancelled with Trabzonspor, I had no agent and it was the end of the transfer market, but it was not a problem," Malouda explained at his unveiling.
"I could study peacefully the different propositions that came from Serie A, Premier League, India and USA.
"I have been really taken with the Metz project.
"It is a historic club in Ligue 1 with a young group, and where I will have big responsibilities on the pitch."AFsoccer Retired PR Developer
Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 4,279 United States of America United States of America Location: Denver, Colorado
[Map Pack] PR:BF2 0.973 Map Pack BETA Test 0.973 MAP PACK
The Project Reality:BF2 team is proud to announce the upcoming release of FOUR NEW MAPS as part of a 0.973 Map Pack that will be released in December.
Black Gold (4km)
Created by [R-CON]VapoMan
Operation Marlin (2km)
Created by [R-CON]billoute
Pavlovsk Bay (4km)
Created by[R-DEV]Rudd
Vadso City (4km)
Created by [R-CON]pleym
In addition to these new maps, the map pack will also include three favorites from the past that have been updated for 0.973.
Assault on Mestia (1km)
Created by IronTaxi and updated by [R-CON]AnimalMother
Operation Ghost Train (1km)
Created and updated by [R-DEV]Rhino
Tad Sae Offensive (1km)
Created by NickBond592 and updated by [R-DEV]AFsoccer Black Gold (4km)Created by [R-CON]VapoManOperation Marlin (2km)Created by [R-CON]billoutePavlovsk Bay (4km)Created by[R-DEV]RuddVadso City (4km)Created by [R-CON]pleymIn addition to these new maps, the map pack will also includethat have been updated for 0.973.Assault on Mestia (1km)Created by IronTaxi and updated by [R-CON]AnimalMotherOperation Ghost Train (1km)Created and updated by [R-DEV]RhinoTad Sae Offensive (1km)Created by NickBond592 and updated by [R-DEV]AFsoccer
As you can see, this is NOT your standard winter map pack! Many of these maps have been in development for over a year and have all of the features and details that you've come to expect from PR:BF2 maps. Another difference is that this map pack is not seasonal and they will all be integrated into the next full release of PR:BF2 or PR:Vietnam.
Beta Test / Stress Test
So why are we telling you this now if the map pack won't be released until December? Well, based on feedback from the community and development team, we will be conducting a beta test / stress test November 25-27. The Tactical Gamer (TG) and New Era Warfare (NEW) servers have graciously volunteered to host the beta test and will be running all seven maps during those three days.
To sign up and get more information, please visit their respective forums:
NEW:
TG:
They will provide details, server rules, passwords, etc. If you're not able to help with the beta test, have no fear. The fully-tested map pack will be released in December, so keep your eyes on the Project Reality forums in a few weeks.
Also, since I'm sure we'll get questions... This is not a patch to 0.973. Since downloading the map pack is completely optional, we are unable to change files to existing maps. Those changes will be seen when PR publishes its next full release.
Enjoy... and please help test. The Project Reality:BF2 team is proud to announce the upcoming release ofas part of a 0.973 Map Pack that will be released in December.As you can see, this is NOT your standard winter map pack! Many of these maps have been in development for over a year and have all of the features and details that you've come to expect from PR:BF2 maps. Another difference is that this map pack is not seasonal and they will all be integrated into the next full release of PR:BF2 or PR:Vietnam.So why are we telling you this now if the map pack won't be released until December? Well, based on feedback from the community and development team, we will be conducting a beta test / stress test November 25-27. The Tactical Gamer (TG) and New Era Warfare (NEW) servers have graciously volunteered to host the beta test and will be running all seven maps during those three days.To sign up and get more information, please visit their respective forums:NEW: Newcommunity.eu • View topic - 0.973 Map Pack Betatest TG: ANNOUNCEMENT Masive Epic New Maps Event at TG They will provide details, server rules, passwords, etc. If you're not able to help with the beta test, have no fear. The fully-tested map pack will be released in December, so keep your eyes on the Project Reality forums in a few weeks.Also, since I'm sure we'll get questions... This isa patch to 0.973. Since downloading the map pack is completely optional, we are unable to change files to existing maps. Those changes will be seen when PR publishes its next full release.Enjoy... and please help test.A former Belfast mayor was ruing an expensive slip-up today after his failure to vault a giant human tomato cost his council £24,000.
Jim Rodgers accidentally kicked Belfast City Council employee Lorraine Mallon in the head in a publicity stunt that went spectacularly wrong.
Ms Mallon, who was dressed up as the huge fruit for a photo shoot to promote a gourmet food fair, suffered a slipped disc in the ill-fated leap.
She brought a negligence case against the council and a settlement was reached this week in Belfast High Court.
She has been paid £24,021.75 (€27,321), with the council also agreeing to cover the cost of the action.
Egged on by press photographers, Mr Rodgers tried to jump over her but he slipped on wet grass on his run up and ended up kneeing Ms Mallon in the back of the head.
The Ulster Unionist councillor today said it would not be appropriate for him to comment on the outcome of the case.
But at the time of the incident in September 2007, he apologised for his stumble.
“I have been absolutely devastated over what has happened,” he said. “There had been three false runs and I think Lorraine thought this was just another one. I just caught the top of her head and unfortunately I injured her.”
Mr Rodgers said he was confident he would have been able to make the jump if he hadn’t slipped.
“I’m very fit and look after myself, but it was just one of those unfortunate things.”
A council spokewoman confirmed a settlement had been reached.
PAOn the campaign trail today, President Obama laid down the clearest challenge yet to the Romney/Ryan approach to tax policy, and left citizens with a challenge question for the other guys:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Their ideas are pretty simple. They're not hard to explain. They think that if we get rid of more regulations on big corporations and big banks, some of which we put in place to prevent another taxpayer-funded bailout, and if we do more tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans then somehow prosperity’s going to rain down on all of you. That is their theory.
In fact, the centerpiece of my opponent's entire economic plan is a new five trillion dollar tax cut, a lot of it going to the wealthiest Americans. His new running mate, Congressman Ryan, he put forward a plan that would let Governor Romney pay less than 1 percent in taxes each year. And here's the kicker -- he expects you to pick up the tab.
Governor’s Romney tax plan - this is not my analysis now - this is the analysis of independent folks who analyze tax plans for a living. That’s what they do. Their analysis showed that Governor Romney's tax plan would actually raise taxes on middle class families with children by an average of $2,000. Not to reduce the deficit, not to grow jobs, not to invest in education, but to give another tax cut to folks like him.
Now, ask Governor Romney and his running mate, when they’re here in New Hampshire on Monday - they’re going to be coming here on Monday - ask them if that’s fair. Ask them how it will grow the economy. Ask them how it will strengthen the middle class. They have been trying to sell this trickle-down snake oil before. It did not work then. It will not work now. It’s not a plan to create jobs. It will not reduce the deficit. It will not move the economy forward. It’s the wrong direction for America.OnePlus wants to enter the smartphone battlefield with a bang, not a whimper. Its motto “never settle” suggests a smartphone free of compromises and sacrifices. The best handset, both in terms of the hardware and software experience.
The startup, born out of fellow Chinese manufacturer Oppo, is raising the stakes even higher with its pricing. Its first smartphone, simply called the One, will be sold for $299 (16GB) and $349 (64GB) later this year. That’s significantly cheaper than the Nexus 5, which is currently available for $349 (16GB) and $399 (32GB) from the Google Play store.
It’s hard not to be sceptical about the OnePlus One. On paper, the handset looks too good to be true; performance that can rival the best Android flagships, as well as customizable software courtesy of the folks at Cyanogen Inc.
But, I’m happy to report, the One lives up to its potential. There are some drawbacks that you need to be aware of, but overall this is a stellar handset and proof that OnePlus is a company to be reckoned with.
Design
At first glance, the OnePlus One isn’t particularly memorable. It’s a solid design for a first-gen smartphone, but it doesn’t stand out like the Moto X, with its stylish customization options, or the HTC One (M8)‘s luxurious metal body.
But for $299, you can’t help but gawp at what OnePlus has managed to achieve here. The curved, plastic back sits nicely in the hand and the slightly harsh, angled edges give your digits something to grip. Both of those features are important when you consider the 5.5-inch display that dominates the front; this is a large smartphone, so anything that makes it secure and comfortable in one-handed use should be appreciated.
The metal-effect plastic rim sandwiched between the display and rear cover adds a certain panache, but otherwise the One is a fairly by-the-numbers design. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the Oppo Find 7a, with its three capacitive buttons and almost identical physical footprint.
The One looks the part though. The bezels aren’t too large and, at 162 grams, it’s only a fraction lighter than the smaller Sony Xperia Z2. The button placement – volume rocker on the left and power button on the right – is also sensible and easy to reach. I was testing the Silk White edition and the black coloring meant they were easily distinguishable, although I found the volume buttons to be quite mushy and difficult to press.
The high-contrast color scheme extends to the back of the device, where you can see the OnePlus logo and Cyanogen branding underneath. The small print and regulatory logos are a little distracting, but it’s a small nick on an otherwise polished design. The camera module is reserved and practically flush with the rear cover, so it doesn’t unbalance the device when you place it on a table.
For a first effort, it’s difficult to criticise. Such a large smartphone won’t be to everyone’s tastes – particularly those who prefer smaller handsets such as the Xperia Z1 Compact and HTC One Mini 2. I would’ve liked OnePlus to go with a bolder design, but even in its current form the One is a looker.
Display
With the Oppo Find 7 and LG G3, it seems the market is ready to move toward Quad HD displays. While the higher resolution is certainly beneficial, there isn’t much in the way of content and apps that take advantage of it. Of course, that’ll change in the coming months, but for now 1080p is the norm.
OnePlus, similar to Samsung, HTC and Sony, has opted to stick with the trusted 1080p display for its first Android flagship. If you’re passionate about pixels you might want to look elsewhere – the LG G3 is a great choice – but for its price the One still offers a lustrous 5.5-inch display.
The IPS panel comes in at 401 pixels-per-inch (ppi) which is, inevitably, lower than smaller devices such as the Sony Xperia Z2, HTC One (M8) and Samsung Galaxy S5. Look beyond the numbers though and you’ll find a screen that is just as good, if not better than its closest competition. The viewing angles are top-notch and the clarity is superb.
When you’re using the One outdoors, the handset rarely suffers from glare or reflections either, even on its lower brightness settings. Color reproduction is also fantastic, with dazzling whites and blacks that are suitably deep and penetrating. Whether you’re reading an ebook, browsing the Web or checking Facebook, the One really is a stellar viewing experience – especially on such a large, well-built display.
If the colors aren’t quite to your liking, you can adjust them in the handset’s firmware. Standard and Vivid are pre-configured, but you can also create your own with varying levels of contrast, saturation, intensity and hue. It works as advertised and should keep everyone happy, regardless of their preferences.
Sound
For belting out tunes and taking calls on loudspeaker, the One comes with bottom-facing stereo speakers. The placement is similar to the iPhone and Nexus 5 which, while better than a single rear-facing speaker, still pales in comparison to HTC’s front-facing BoomSound offerings.
The One’s speakers are loud and punchy, especially at higher volumes – this was reportedly an issue with the first pre-release handsets, but OnePlus appears to have fixed the problem with a recent firmware update. While the device isn’t lacking in power anymore, the audio experience is still underwhelming.
Vocals are crisp enough, but distortion plagues the device across the mids and highs. Sound is often muddy and instrumentals rarely punctuate the track with the force and clarity you would expect. At lower volumes it’s less noticeable, but the problem is difficult to ignore when you increase the amplification anywhere above 50 percent.
Throw in a pair of headphones, however, and the device transforms into an altogether different beast. The quality will, of course, vary depending on your choice of cans, as well as the file format and bitrate of your music library. Even so, I was impressed with the One in this regard – whenever I changed one of the aforementioned variables, the smartphone still delivered a clear, natural and immersive sound.
Audiophiles will also appreciate the AudioFX app that comes pre-installed with the One. You can switch between different sound profiles – such as jazz, rock, electronic and dance – and, if you have some music playing, you’ll be able to hear the difference in real-time. The changes are substantial and you can also boost the bass if needed.
Software
Before buying the One, you’ll need to ask yourself an important question. Am I on board with CyanogenMod? Although it looks awfully similar to “stock” Android, it’s unlikely that you’ll receive firmware updates ahead of the Nexus portfolio. CyanogenMod is also known for its bugs and generally lacks some of the stability you would expect from a traditional Android build.
In return though, you get heaps of customization options. If you’re like me and love to tinker with custom launchers, icon packs and widgets, you’ll love the freedom and tweaks that CyanogenMod offers.
It all starts with the Themes Showcase, which lets you download custom packs to overhaul the look and feel of the UI. Some are better than others, but you can dial down into wallpapers, sound icons and boot animations if you’re after something specific. I’m happy with the Holo theme (which follows “stock” Android to a tee) but it’s great to know the option is there.
After configuring your preferred “style,” sound packs, fonts and more, you can customize the One’s unique lock screen experience. By default, it shows a light blue panel at the bottom where the time, date and other useful information is displayed. The wallpaper is lightly blurred up top and to unlock the device, you simply drag the blue area towards the bottom of the screen.
It’s intuitive and because you can drag down from any part of the panel, it’s easier to execute than the traditional Android lock screen. You can also access the camera by swiping in from the right-hand side of the display; a small gesture, but an invaluable one for capturing those spur-of-the-moment events.
OnePlus also lets you customise the status bar, quick settings panel and notification panel. My favorite feature by far, however, is the option to replace the capacitive keys with a virtual bar of soft buttons. Obviously this eats into the device’s screen estate, but it’s a nice option for those who prefer this setup. Furthermore, you can tweak the virtual bar by switching the icons around and also adding new ones, such as a search and permanent menu button.
To mix up your interactions with the device, OnePlus supports a number of gesture shortcuts while the screen is turned off. Drawing a circle activates the camera, while a “V” toggles the flashlight and an array of directional swipes control your music. They’re a bit gimmicky, but if you want to conserve battery life some of these could prove useful.
A far more useful and impressive feature, in my view, is the ability to use hands-free voice commands. With the phrase “Okay Snapdragon” you can train the device to launch Google Now or any task of your choice. This could be launching an app, grabbing directions from Google Maps or calling someone in your address book. I found the voice recognition to be very unreliable, but who knows, perhaps OnePlus can remedy this in a future update.
Update: OnePlus says the current voice-enabled wake-up call isn’t final and will be improved before its public release. “Okay Snapdragon” is a holding phrase and will be updated with the phrase “Okay OnePlus” in the near future.
Next Page: We look at the OnePlus One’s camera
Camera
I’ve written in the past about the importance of cameras in Android flagships this year. As the difference in specs and performance continues to narrow, this is an area where handsets can truly differentiate.
The One sports a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, powered by a Sony Exmor IMX14 sensor. It’s a perfectly capable shooter, but falls short of matching the iPhone or a high-end Lumia smartphone. Although I’ve only tested the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2 briefly, I suspect that both of those devices also best the One by a small margin.
Still, there’s a lot to like here. The images produced by the One are always sharp, bright and with a suitable level of vibrance and saturation. Living in the often overcast and dreek city of London, there’s a tendency for smartphone cameras to wash scenes out completely, or overcompensate with unnatural colors.
Not so with the One. It strikes a fine balance between richness and realism, never straying too far into the murky waters of post-processing and software tinkering. While my images aren’t quite as detailed as I would like, they’re always correctly exposed, in focus and with a lovely level of contrast. Those three elements create a solid foundation for the One’s camera and the rest can usually be salvaged in your preferred photo-editing app.
The camera isnt without some minor issues: the placement of the module means you need a delicate grip to avoid obstructing shots with one of your fingers. The device often defaults to a shallow depth of field too; your subject matter is perfectly in focus but anything in front or behind is lost in a soft blur. This can be dramatic for portraits and macro shots, but unhelpful when you want all of the scene to be in focus.
CyanogenMod comes with its own camera app that prioritises simplicity and speed over a bevy of shooting modes and options. It’s not as stripped back as Motorola’s camera app, but the on-screen buttons have been kept to a strict minimum. There are different shooting modes to choose from, including HDR, Action and Night, which tweak the camera’s performance in a subtle manner.
Most of the time though, you’ll probably be keeping the camera locked on Auto. There are three buttons on the right-hand side for recording video, taking a still or starting a Photo Sphere, and they’re all clearly defined and accessible. Tap-to-focus is responsive and the shutter itself is nippy, but not lightning-quick.
Video can be shot at up to 4K resolution, although there’s also the option to shoot at a more storage-friendly 720p and 1080p. While the footage will never compete with a dedicated camera, it’s a surprisingly versatile camcorder in the wild. Footage is crisp and detailed, with minimal focus hunting as you pan or move the handset. The audio is shallow and pretty lacklustre, but that’s to be expected from a smartphone’s onboard microphone.
Sample images
Sample video
Performance and build quality
In previous reviews, I’ve highlighted the shrinking gap in performance between low-end and high-end smartphones. After using the low-cost Lumia 630 and Moto E, I’ve begun to reconsider the value proposition of a $600 flagship.
But moving to the One has reaffirmed my passion for bleeding-edge components. With a quad-core 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 processor and 3GB of RAM, this handset is ferociously fast. On a number of occasions, I was taken aback by the pace and sheer fluidity of CyanogenMod. Swiping between home screens and digging through the settings is a pleasure, rather than a chore, with the handset never letting up for even a single second.
The 16GB model I’ve been testing can happily store all of my favorite apps and intensive software, such as Asphalt 8: Airborne and Riptide GP2, rarely pose a challenge. Switching between multiple apps is silky-smooth and there’s no discernable slowdown when you have a handful open at once. In short, this is a beast with plenty of horsepower to spare.
It’s an impressive technical achievement, although its construction does come with some downsides. The One doesn’t have a microSD slot and the 3100 mAh battery is non-removable. The latter isn’t uncommon for Android flagships, but the 64GB variant is definitely worth considering if you store plenty of apps, music, photos, movies, ebooks and more.
The aforementioned internal powerpack is also larger than the equivalent found in some of the One’s competitors. It beats the LG G3, Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One (M8), before falling just a fraction short of the Sony Xperia Z2 – which sports a beefy 3200 mAh battery.
As a result, the One offers plenty of stamina. In general use, I’m able to get at least 24 hours out of the One without too much difficulty. Sometimes I can eke out a day and a half, although performance will clearly varies depending on your usage. Broadly speaking, the handset’s battery life will rival most Android flagships – despite the device not shipping with a battery saver mode.
The bottom line
For $299, this handset really delivers. The performance is incredible and rivals anything else I’ve tested – both the processor and RAM combine for a blazingly fast experience. CyanogenMod is also delightful; modders should get a real kick out of the customization options and, even if you ignore those features, the default “stock” Android experience can rival a Nexus device.
There are some downsides though. The One is an enormous smartphone (152.9 x 75.9 x 8.9 mm) and the capacitive keys don’t exactly help matters. The industrial design isn’t very exciting – although some of the customizable cases might help – and the twin speakers at the bottom are pretty poor.
Still, it’s difficult to criticise the One. The value proposition is fantastic and beats the Nexus 5 – the closest competitor for its price-tag – in terms of sheer hardware. You might prefer the build quality of the HTC One (M8) or the camera in the Sony Xperia Z2, but in return you’ll need to pay extra.
The One should be available in June and, provided OnePlus can keep up with demand, it’s certainly a contender for the best Android flagship. With its debut smartphone, the Chinese startup has certainly made its mark.
GalleryWe’ve just received some wonderful news – a horrific annual “festival” in which men on foot and horseback pursue and stab a terrified young bull to death, has just effectively been banned by the regional government in Spain.
The Toro de la Vega “festival” has, until now, taken place every September in the autonomic region of Castilla y Léon, Spain. The event entails chasing a young bull through the streets of Tordesillas and stabbing him with darts and spears until he is bleeding and crippled. His tail is cut off while he’s still alive. When he dies of his injuries, the person who ultimately killed him is awarded a ceremonial spear and a medal by the city council.
Compassionate people, including tens of thousands of PETA supporters as well as local Spanish groups such as PACMA, have been protesting against this cruelty for years. Now our efforts have finally paid off! Thank you to everyone who has taken part in our actions or otherwise spoken out against this cruelty.
This victory is part of a wider movement in Spain, as more and more people are turning against events such as bullfighting and bull runs. To date, more than 100 towns have banned these events. The tide is turning against barbaric so-called “traditions” – and with your help, we’ll keep on fighting until no more animals suffer slow and painful deaths in the name of entertainment.George Soros lost nearly $1 billion as a result of the stock-market rally spurred by Donald Trump's surprise presidential election, the Wall Street Journal reported.
But Stanley Druckenmiller, Mr. Soros's former deputy who helped him score $1-billion of profits betting against the British pound in 1992, anticipated the market's recent climb and had sizable gains, the newspaper reported Thursday, citing sources it didn't identify.
Mr. Soros became more bearish immediately after Trump's election. But the stock market has rallied on expectations that Mr. Trump's policies will boost corporate earnings and the overall economy. The S&P 500 Index has risen 5.6 per cent since Mr. Trump's election through Wednesday.
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As a result, some of Mr. Soros's trading positions incurred losses approaching $1-billion, the Journal said. Mr. Soros exited many of his bearish bets late last year, avoiding further losses. The broader portfolio held by Mr. Soros's firm performed better. His firm gained about 5 per cent on the year, according to the report.
Mr. Druckenmiller took a different tack. At an investor conference on Nov. 29, Mr. Druckenmiller expressed a bullish position on the American economy following the election.
Mr. Druckenmiller said then that the euro could weaken to 82 cents against the dollar. He also said yields on the U.S. 10-year Treasury should rise over the next year or two from their then current level as long as the incoming administration sticks with plans, such as tax reform, designed to boost growth. He was also short the yen and global bonds, according to people who heard him at the gathering, which was closed to the press.
Mr. Druckenmiller, who manages his own wealth, said at the time his returns for the year were in the low teens. He averaged annual returns of 30 per cent from 1986 through 2010 at his Duquesne Capital Management.
A representative for Mr. Soros wasn't immediately available to comment.Do not let that pretty face fool you, Katrina Pierson, the national spokesperson for Donald Trump, does not mess around.
The up-and-coming Tea Party star emerging from Dallas, Texas, blasted CNN host Brian Stelter on Sunday morning—and it was lovely. Pierson did three main things here: she pointed out specific examples of media bias, exposed Stelter in a moment of contradiction, and underscored why the American people largely do not trust the media.
Pierson points out specific examples of media bias
Stelter began by asking Pierson what the “dishonest media” (referring to Donald Trump’s words from a previous clip) don’t “get” or “understand” about the Republican president front-runner Donald Trump.
Wrong move, Stelter.
Pierson explained that the media don’t “get" Trump and mostly loath him simply because he “isn't playing by their rules," and that their “rules” “don't apply to a Democrat.”
“We didn't see coverage on CNN wall-to-wall recently when the administration came out and said they wanted to add ‘biometrics’ to the vetting process for refugees, because guess what, that's gonna be in a ‘database.’ But we did hear for two weeks that Donald Trump want the ‘database’ for the Muslim refugees and it was insanity,” said Pierson.
“We don't hear back-to-back coverage on CNN about Hillary Clinton lying to the American public knowing that we had a terrorist attack in Benghazi, she blamed an American citizen who made a video—yet, we spent weeks on talking about a headcount when Muslims celebrated 9-11, so I think that goes to show the dishonesty in media,” added Pierson.
The spokesperson also pointed out that MSNBC falsely reported on Friday that Mr. Trump was forced to “abruptly” leave his stage early at rally in North Carolina, which Pierson called a blatant lie and noted that there is a video to prove the contrary. (Stelter did not push back on this one bit.)
“What do you view the job of the press to be? Do you believe we should be fact-checking the comments that Mr. Trump makes?” Stelter asked Pierson.
“I think the press should be reporting both sides of the story. I mean, when was the last time you 'fact-checked' Barack Obama? Because we haven’t seen that lately,” said Pierson. “Are you telling me you fact-checked global warming as the cause of radical Islamic terrorists? You ‘fact-checked’ that?!"
“Did you fact-check that California gun control laws would have prevented a terrorist attack?” she asked, already knowing the obvious answer.
No adequate response was given by Stelter.
Pierson exposes Stelter in a moment of contradiction
Stelter then attempted to disprove the claim that Muslims celebrated after the 9/11 attacks in America by asking Pierson if she meant “a very small handful” when she spoke of the celebrations happening—since there have been “no reports” of such an event.
“No. I mean radical Muslims celebrating |
clinching interception was more indicative of his play throughout the game. Slay erased Ricardo Louis on the fade route to add an interception to an already impressive stat line that saw him surrender just 42 yards on 11 targets.
Top 5 Grades:
QB DeShone Kizer, 87.9 overall grade
RG Kevin Zeitler, 87.0 overall grade
DI Trevon Coley, 86.6 overall grade
RT Shon Coleman, 82.9 overall grade
Edge Nate Orchard, 80.4 overall grade
Performances of Note:
QB DeShone Kizer, 87.9 overall grade
This was the kind of performance that Browns fans have been hoping to see from Kizer since the beginning of this season, even if the individual and team results still weren’t quite there. Knocked out of the game for two series by Quandre Diggs, Kizer came back with a strong fourth quarter drive which included three fourth down conversions. Kizer wasn’t helped by his receivers at times with four dropped passes but he put the ball on the money especially down the left sideline to give his receivers a chance to make plays down the field. Especially when adding in his work on the ground to exploit space in the Lions’ coverage this was comfortably Kizer’s best pro performance to date.
RB Isaiah Crowell, 77.4 overall grade
The Browns worked their way into this game on the ground with the three headed monster of Crowell, Duke Johnson and DeShone Kizer racking up a 200-yard game on the ground. Crowell led the way with 90 yards, 59 of them after first contact, three missed tackles forced and a touchdown run outrunning the Lions’ contain inside the 10-yard line. This marked the the second-straight week for Crowell topping 5.0 yards per carry, 3.0 yards per carry after contact, multiple missed tackles forced and a touchdown. Browns fans will hope Crowell and the running game are rounding back to 2016 form.
DI Trevon Coley, 86.6 overall grade
Coley was disruptive in the middle of the defense and took advantage of tackle turned gaurd Corey Robinson. He forced the Lions running backs off their marks a number of times and totaled two solo stops and two tackles against the run. Coley’s best work was against the pass, where he pressured the passer on two occasions, and had two batted passes at the line of scrimmage.
Edge Myles Garrett, 66.7 overall grade
Garrett had a number of positive plays throughout the game, impacting the Lions quick-strike passing attack with three QB hurries and forcing Stafford off the spot. His play against the run was not as effective, as the Lions found success on outside zone running plays around the edge. Garrett had a big mistake that took the game for a turn, jumping offsides on a 3rd-and-11 in the fourth quarter with the Browns down by seven, with the ensuing play going for the game-sealing touchdown to Golden Tate.
PFF Game Ball: Darius Slay, CB
*Grades are subject to change upon reviewEnvironmentalists in the United Kingdom are reeling after French energy giant Total became the first company to announce an investment in fracking in the country.
The $48 million play is tiny by industry standards, but many see it as the first sign that Prime Minister David Cameron’s push to allow the controversial practice has paid off, despite protests from environmentalists who say the environmental danger posed by shale gas exploration (commonly known as fracking) outweighs the potential economic benefits.
Fracking — a process in which thousands of gallons of water mixed with chemicals and sand are injected into drilled wells in order to break up shale rich with oil and natural gas — has been spreading across the U.S., giving environmentalists and proponents of the practice in the U.K. precedents to point to when arguing their case.
Advocates point out that communities like Williston, N.D., and parts of Pennsylvania have seen huge economic gains because of fracking. Opponents, meanwhile, highlight the myriad environmental and health issues linked to fracking — including water pollution, cancer concerns and even earthquakes.
The U.K. debates have mirrored those in the U.S. because Britain is experiencing a similar economic depression in its rural counties, making the promise of any industry attractive, no matter how controversial.
But in the U.K. both sides are even less reserved in expressing their viewpoints, with political leaders telling communities to get ready for fracking whether they like it or not and with environmentalists resorting to unconventional tactics to get their points across.
Days before Total announced its investment in Gainsborough — an economically struggling part of northern England — Cameron released a statement saying his government was “going all out for shale.” He announced that in order to incentivize municipalities to allow fracking, they would be able to keep 100 percent of the fees that energy companies must pay for each well they drill. Cameron previously said local communities would keep just 50 percent.
“I want us to get on board (with) this change that is doing so much good and bringing so much benefit to North America,” Cameron said. “I want us to benefit from it here as well.”
He dismissed concerns from environmentalists, saying that opponents would drop their protests once they saw how much economic benefit fracking could bring to the country.It was a secret she had harbored for 18 months, and now she was baring its most intimate details on the floor of Victoria’s state parliament. Gripping the podium, she spoke slowly and deliberately, her voice shaking.
Rachel Carling-Jenkins, an Australian politician, revealed this week that her now-estranged husband had been jailed for possessing child pornography. She said she discovered the collection in her home in February 2016 and immediately went, along with her son, to report the crime to the police. The images of young girls who have lost “their control over their destiny” will outlast any sentence served by her husband, she said.
“I find myself now unconsciously searching the faces of little girls that I see on the streets, distressed when a face triggers a memory of a photo or a video of a little girl that I glimpsed in his collection,” she said.
In March, Carling-Jenkins’ husband, Gary Jenkins, was sentenced to four months in prison, according to the Canberra Times. He will be required to report to police for the next eight years after being placed on the Sex Offenders Register.
Carling-Jenkins said she had waited to speak out against her husband’s crime so as not to interfere with police investigations or court proceedings, but that it was now time to represent the “voiceless and the vulnerable in this story, the victims.” She said she had no idea before the discovery that her husband was addicted to child porn, but believed he was suffering from mental illness and had tried repeatedly to get him help, only to be rebuffed.
“I look back now with clarity which only comes through hindsight around the lies, the deception and the coverups,” Carling-Jenkins said. “His behavior stemmed from something much more sinister.”
Carling-Jenkins is a politician in the upper house of the bicameral parliament of the Australian state of Victoria. Originally elected to parliament as a member of the Democratic Labour Party, Carling-Jenkins announced in June that she would be switching to the Australian Conservatives Party, according to the Australian.
Prior to her election, Carling-Jenkins worked in the welfare sector for two decades and specialized in social movements supporting people with disabilities, indigenous Australians and women in Australia. She holds a doctorate in social sciences.
In her time in Parliament, Carling-Jenkins has campaigned for government-supported employment for people with disabilities, according to the Australian national news service ABC News.
Carling-Jenkins began her remarks saying “this is going to be a very difficult statement for me to make,” yet continued her speech, speaking up for the victims “who were abused for the sick viewing pleasure of pedophiles.”
“These little girls would not have been abused if people like my ex-husband did not provide a market for that abuse,” she said.
Her marriage had already suffered from what Carling-Jenkins perceived to be her husband’s mental illness, she said, yet “ended instantly” the day she discovered the child porn collection. She said she and her son “were gutted,” only to face further financial, emotional and psychological abuse. Carling-Jenkins said her now-estranged husband has refused to sign divorce papers or grant a property settlement, and against her family’s wishes has continued to contact their son.
But Carling-Jenkins said her husband’s crimes were not about her pain, but about the pain of innocent children whose faces “are etched in my memory for eternity.” She said she did not believe a sentence of a few months in jail and designation as a sex offender were “adequate given the seriousness of the crimes.”
The politician was lauded on Twitter for her honesty in a setting rarely used for such personal speeches. One user praised her “raw emotion” in Parliament while another noted her “strength of character.”
Still, she was quoted after the speech in the Canberra Times saying she was met with harsh criticism from those who believe “that no matter what a wife should not stand up and call her husband out.” She did not name any of the critics except, she said, “it wasn’t all from strangers.”
“I don’t by any means want to make this a gendered issue but it is a prevailing attitude in society,” she said. “I think it’s wrong and it needs to stop.”
Carling-Jenkins took a seat after her speech, but soon she rose again. Standing before her was a line of her fellow members of parliament, waiting to embrace her.
MPs console Dr Rachel Carling-Jenkins after heart wrenching speech about husband and child pornography #7NewsMelb pic.twitter.com/iooxWiEBWx — Brendan Donohoe (@BrendanDonohoe7) September 6, 2017
Gutsy Dr Rachel Carling-Jenkins says she also got couple of abusive emails from public today. What is wrong with people. Rhetorical question https://t.co/GxGadkfcMu — Jane Marwick (@JaneMarwick) September 7, 2017
I am no fan of Rachel Carling-Jenkins, but she did the right thing reporting her husband to police after finding his stash of child porn > — Karen (@kcIMT122) September 7, 2017
I still can't believe people have criticised Rachel Carling-Jenkins for reporting her ex-husband for child porn https://t.co/34KBGfDaKM — Richard Willingham (@rwillingham) September 7, 2017
I applaud what Rachel Carling-Jenkins did, it was gutsy & absolutely the right thing to do. I wish her & her son well #springst https://t.co/UzImFmuixK — Jenny Mikakos MP (@JennyMikakos) September 7, 2017
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Science journal Nature ventures into racist medical atrocities — and regrets itThe unprovoked "sucker punch" of an Occupy Wall Street protester Friday's march in New York City has now been seen by millions. It was unclear from the videos who the ranking officer (White Shirt) who violently attacked the man was - but the NY Daily News now confirms his identity was Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona.
This comes as no surprise to me as when I first viewed the footage I immediately recognized the officer by his demeanor and tried to get a positive identification from stills taken from the videos. The photos suggested strongly that this was Cardona, whose involvement in the violence that led to the pepper-spraying of innocent citizens on September 24th by D.I. Anthony Bologna I documented here on DailyKos two weeks ago, but I was unable to pin down the identity until the release of his name to the Daily News. [NOTE: Click here for animated gif of punch; here for the look that caused it]
As a community we were able to reveal that Bologna's act on September 24th was neither justified nor an isolated incident - but a pattern - and we were able to get that important aspect of the story to the national and international media's attention and to force official investigations into Bologna's activities. It also appears to have kept Bologna off the streets during this time and prevented furtehr abuses by him.
I warned that the same concern should be raised by Cardona's violent attack on a young woman, arbitrary and unprovoked, when he singled her out and grabbed her by the head and throat from behind the orange netting and forced her to the ground, dragged her under the barricade into the street, appears to have kicked her (and similar acts appear possible in Friday's incident) while on the ground, and had her forcibly arrested.
The interests of public safety require that Cardona be taken off of the streets immediately and that he be added to the investigations currently ongoing by the NYPD Internal Affairs Division, the Citizens Complaint Review Board (CCRB), and by the Manhatten District Attorney.
Just as with D.I. Anthony Bologna it was the collective and collaborative efforts of those here on Daily Kos and those we were able to share this story with that made the difference in gettting both the media to pay attention to the story and in shifting the official NYPD line from a "justified" and "limited" use of force, contrary to the initial video evidence, we again can and must take action to support our fellow members of the 99% and to assure all of our rights to peacefully assemble, speak freely, and seek to petition our government for redress of grievances without the fear of aribitrary violence by police officers.
Please again contribute to this Movement by spreading the word about D.I. Johnny Cardona - demanding that the evidence of his wrongdoing be made public and that he be removed from active duty on the streets immediately pending formal investigation by the above named entities.
If we work together, as we did with D.I. Anthony Bologna, we can make a difference and contribute significantly from our positions in cyberspace to the ongoing Movement. Tweet, post to Facebook, share via email, etc. this story as far and wide as you can. Alert the media to D.I. Cardona's identity and the evidence of his pattern of abuse. Call upon NY and Federal authorities to investigate these matters.
Together we can change the world. We proved it once. Now we can do it again.
See the original diary:The Tarun Tejpal episode is depressing. The alleged sexual assault of a junior colleague by one of India's best-known activist-editors brings out not just Mr Tejpal's infirmities but those of an entire industry.
For one, it shows how badly run are our mechanisms for self-regulation. More than a week after the scandal broke, the Press Council was still to react.
The processes for addressing any form of sexual assault are, largely, absent in most news media organisations. In a profession that is a heavy employer of both men and women, and one that involves a lot of late nights and crazy hours, this is a bad idea.
But, more importantly, it shows how pathetically the whole business of news is faring in India.
Tehelka reflects the state of the news business much too accurately. According to news reports, the combination of investors in Tehelka, the 13-year-old magazine Mr Tejpal partly owned, has never made money. One estimate puts the losses suffered by its investors - one of whom is a member of Parliament - at upwards of Rs 40 crore over the last four years alone.
That raises the question: why?
Globally, news is an unprofitable business unless it is bundled with entertainment or any other product. So CNN, a news channel, is part of a larger entertainment behemoth, Turner. Similarly, SkyNews is part of BSkyB, a UK-based direct-to-home operator. Most media companies are, in fact, wary of getting into the news business. In India - there are too many standalone players in news and not enough serious investors willing to fund it.
Many of the investors coming in now want their pound of flesh. So you could keep making losses as long as you play hit man for the investor or his buddies. This could be done by burying a story or by highlighting another. Or it could be done by providing access or influence within policy or other circles for the investor to further his business interests.
You could argue that even proprietors of established newspapers have used their brands as tools to exercise power. The reason India has a mind-boggling 86,000-plus registered publications in a Rs 22,000-crore print market is that everyone wants to keep their little fiefdoms in Ranchi and Raipur or wherever they are.
So puny little brands with circulation of a few thousands keep chugging along, refusing to either sell out or shut down. Has anyone wondered how they survive in the cut-throat market for news in India?
Some peddle influence, others extort money and some burn cash from other profitable businesses, thereby destroying wealth instead of creating it.
The situation in news television is worse. By some estimates, India has more than 135 news channels - the most in the world - fighting over a stagnating advertising pie. Of the five listed television news companies, only three - TV Today, Zee News and Network18 - managed to make a profit in the year ending March 2012.
Most of the unlisted ones, except perhaps MCCS (which owns ABP News and others), are making a loss. A cursory analysis of these 135 channels shows that roughly a third are owned by companies or individuals using it as a political vehicle, a tool of influence, favour or threat.
The companies that want to build a regular news business end up competing with those that have money to burn. This has pushed everyone into a race for ratings and, therefore, to the bottom in terms of journalistic standards.
The meaning of the words "news media" and "journalism" is now tainted with tabloidisation and sleaze. In a business where credibility is the key currency, its value is eroding at an alarming rate.
And the good, clean, media houses - a majority - have done little to arrest this slide. Most are members of the Press Council, but they did nothing when the paid news scandal - in which several leading newspapers were accused of taking money to cover candidates in the 2009 general election - broke.
According to Election Commission data, the instances of paid news, in fact, went up in 2012. Why are the "responsible" media houses not standing up for the business and profession? Why are they not pushing for a framework that keeps non-serious investors away, one that makes training and basic qualifications mandatory, among the dozens of other things that could be done to clean up the news media?
Without these measures, there is every possibility of more bust-ups as the dodgy doings of spurious news media firms are revealed. These could lead to thousands of job losses a la the Tara group of channels from the infamous Saradha Group in Kolkata.
Tehelka's mess came out because of the sexual assault allegations against its editor. The others might come out for other reasons - a bounced cheque, a string of cover-ups, or a sting gone wrong. Such episodes give any government a nice stick to regulate news media more tightly.
More importantly, they build public opinion for more regulation. Tehelka is a huge punch in the face of the news industry, particularly because it came from one of its more moralistic brands.
A few more episodes like Tehelka, and the whole idea that a free press and democracy go hand in hand will be irreparably damaged.Back in March of 2012 I posted the build components for my ESXi 5.0 home lab server. Since we’re coming up on 2 years from that point, and there’s all sorts of crazy holiday shopping deals going on, I figured it was time for a refresh. Without further ado, here is a look at the new build components for an ESXi 5.5 home lab server.
Processor
Many folks have had an eyeball on the new 4th gen Haswell chips, which is the latest Tock release for Intel in the 22nm fabrication process (Broadwell, the next Tick, is coming shortly). Haswell requires a motherboard with the LGA 1150 socket (also referred to as Socket H3) and offers a decent number of performance bumps over the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge chips.
There are two quad core options available for your home lab server – with Hyper Threading or without. The Xeon E3-1220v3 runs a straight 4 cores and 4 threads, while the Xeon E3-v1230v3 runs 4 cores and 8 threads. Both are similar in almost all other respects (the 1230 has a slightly faster clock) and include support for the entire range of advanced technologies – vPro, VT-x, VT-d, EPT, TET, etc.
I’d personally go with the 1230 or better, but I realize that many folks do not need Hyper Threading and want to save a few bucks with the 1220 option.
Intel Xeon E3-1220V3 Haswell Proc About $204 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
Haswell Proc Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 Haswell Proc Outdated About $255 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
Intel Xeon E3-1231V3 Haswell Proc About $252 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
Haswell Proc
Motherboard
Because the Haswell requires the LGA 1150 socket, the older SuperMicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O board won’t do – it has an LGA 1155 socket (called the Socket H2 for those playing at home). LGA 1150 is the replacement for LGA 1155.
I have no desire to deviate from SuperMicro server boards, mainly due to the superb IPMI and remote KVM / media features. These are “must haves” on my home lab list, mainly because I hate crash carts, and IP KVMs for a small environment rarely have remote media at a good price. As such, I would go with the SuperMicro MBD-X10SLH-F-O. This micro ATX board has all the bells and whistles of the previous board – including IPMI 2.0 with KVM – with an Intel C226 chipset.
If the C226 has too many features for your price point, you can drop down to the Intel C222 chipset with the MBD-X10SLL-F-O board.
If you are upgrading the guts of an older server running Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge, chances are you can re-use your heat sink assembly. The LGA 1150 screw placements are identical to the LGA 1155 screw placements.
SuperMicro MBD-X10SLH-F-O (C226) About $205 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
(C226) SuperMicro MBD-X10SLL-F-O (C222) About $160 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
(C222)
Both boards use the Intel I210-AT LAN chipset, which is supported by VMware. If the hypervisor does not recognize your NICs during installation, create a custom ESXi ISO with the Intel I210 driver package. I suggest using the ESXi-Customizer – it’s awesome!
As a bonus – for those looking for a box to run FreeNAS or some other white box storage appliance, the SuperMicro MBD-X10SL7-F-O has a ridiculous amount of device ports.
Memory
The processor maxes out at 32 GB of ECC Unregistered DIMMs (UDIMMs). The memory type is critical – I saw a ton of comments in my last build post where people bought the wrong memory, so make sure it is Unregistered / Unbuffered (these mean the same thing) and has ECC. Most vendors will call this an ECC UDIMM.
Earlier in 2013 I posted an article about upgrading the SuperMicro box to the max amount of memory. A full set of 4 sticks of 8 GB memory cost about $250 US. Unfortunately, the price of memory has skyrocketed (at the time of this writing) due to disasters at fabrication plants. My advice is to shop around for a great deal on 4 sticks of 8 GB memory (commonly just called 4×8) of ECC UDIMM at 1600 MHz.
Here’s the list of filters I used on Newegg for memory:
32 GB (4×8) of Kingston Technology ValueRAM box KVR16E11K4/32 About $400 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
16 GB (2×8) of Crucial box CT2KIT102472BA160B About $180 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
8 Gb (1×8) of Crucial Memory CT102472BA160B About $90 US [ Amazon | Newegg ]
Other Components
I still like to run a diskless setup for my ESXi 5.5 hosts. I use a small profile USB stick. Here’s a few of the other odds and ends necessary to complete the build:
USB Stick Option 1 – 8 GB SanDisk Cruzer model SDCZ33-008G-B35 About $8 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– 8 GB SanDisk Cruzer model SDCZ33-008G-B35 USB Stick Option 2 – 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer model SDCZ33-016G-B35 About $10 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer model SDCZ33-016G-B35
Case Option 1 – Lian Li model PC-V351B About $90 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– Lian Li model PC-V351B Case Option 2 – Lian Li model PC-V354B About $130 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– Lian Li model PC-V354B
Fans – 2x Scythe 120mm Slipstream model SY1225SL12L About $15 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– 2x Scythe 120mm Slipstream model SY1225SL12L Power – SeaSonic Platinum model SS-400FL2 About $120 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– SeaSonic Platinum model SS-400FL2
If you plan on working with VMware VSAN, HP StorVirtual, or any other “disk + flash” storage using local disk, make sure to budget in for some hard drives and SSDs. Also, if you want to play with PernixData FVP or VMware’s vFlash Read Cache (vFRC), you’ll need at least one SSD.
I’m a fan of the Kingston HyperX series for a home lab – these are cheap and easy to find online. If you want higher performance flash, such as PCIe cards from Fusion-io, you obviously have a well placed friend or a fountain of cash. 🙂
SSD Option 1 – 128 GB SanDisk Ultra Plus model SDSSDHP-128G-G25 About $65 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
128 GB SanDisk Ultra Plus model SDSSDHP-128G-G25 SSD Option 2 – 120 GB Kingston HyperX 3K SATA III SSD model SH103S3/120G About $95 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– 120 GB Kingston HyperX 3K SATA III SSD model SH103S3/120G SSD Option 3 – 240 GB Kingston HyperX 3K SATA III SSD model SH103S3/240G About $160 [ Amazon | Newegg ]
– 240 GB Kingston HyperX 3K SATA III SSD model SH103S3/240G
Thoughts
I’ve provided links to the two major vendors I purchase from – Amazon and Newegg – along with prices as of December 2013. Keep in mind that these vendors will often choose to change prices for deals at various times, and that rarely can you snag all of the items from a single vendor for the best price. I usually end up grabbing some components from both (or occasionally from a 3rd party).
Note: For those using Google Chrome or FireFox, just download the Hover Hound extension. It adds a new button to Newegg that checks prices on Amazon and Tiger Direct. It also shows a trend of prices.
The total price for all components: anywhere from $1000 US and up, depending on if you buy all the entire list or shave off a few things. The price of memory is really hurting the server build, so if you can find a good deal on memory – pounce on it!
Build PhotosJapanese metal-idol band Babymetal have been tearing through the heavy metal world since 2014, when they released the self-titled Babymetal, but it was only in April that they made their U.S. television debut when they appeared on Colbert. Since then, their second album, Metal Resistance, became the highest-charting album for a Japanese band in the U.S. in more than 50 years and they’ve launched their third stateside tour, which hits the West Coast Tuesday.
Made up of three teenagers — Suzuka Nakamoto (Su-Metal), Yui Mizuno (Yuimetal), and Moa Kikuchi (Moametal) — Babymetal was the brainchild of Japanese record exec and producer Kobametal, who mythologizes the group by saying they were born with inspiration from the Fox God. They fuse J-pop and heavy metal to create catchy, frenetic, head-banging tracks that have attracted fans like Rob Zombie and Judas Priest, whose singer Rob Halford will perform with the band at the 2016 Alternative Press Music Awards next week.
Earlier this year, EW sat down with Babymetal (through a translator) to catch up about taking America by storm, and what it was like to meet their metal heroes Metallica.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You made a splash with your late night appearance on Colbert. What was that experience like for you?
MOAMETAL: We had to travel the very next day, so when we were on board the plane, the stewardess immediately recognized us and said they gave us a bunch of sweets and snacks. That was a great experience.
That was one of the biggest moments you’ve had in the U.S. and made you much more visible to so many new fans.
SU-METAL: We were pleasantly surprised by how many responses we got after the appearance. When we went to L.A. when we were walking in the town, some people recognized us. After that we were about to embark on the U.S. tour so that the tickets immediately sold out.
This has been a massive year for you. Metal Resistance cracked the Top 40 in the U.S. and the Top 20 in the U.K. What changed for you since you released your first album in 2014?
YUI-METAL: The last two years we’ve been touring around everywhere in international countries and in Japan so we’ve been growing to the next level. At the same time, the popularity grows everywhere, so we feel the difference as we tour. Also, it was very remarkable that we’re the first Japanese artist in 50 years to enter into the Top 40 on Billboard. That was shocking.
How have the other bands in the metal scene reacted to you?
SU-METAL: Mostly the response has been positive from metal bands and the metal industry. We’re grateful for that. The surprising thing is when we met Judas Priest, they all recognized us. They knew our songs. They knew “Gimme Chocolate!” and started dancing along with the music.
There hasn’t really been a major female metal group that’s had this success, and your songs have a feminine perspective. Do you think about that intentionally when making your music?
SU-METAL: We’re girls and we’re feminine so it naturally comes into the music but at the same time we intentionally put beauty and females and also Japanese culture J-pop into the music so it creates unique music. Sometimes metal music tends to be very masculine, but because our version of metal is a fusion of dance and heavy metal, all the mixing will create a very different type of music and the female aspect of it will help to create more uniqueness to it.
People have been so taken with your choreography and your dancing. Do you have dance backgrounds? Who comes up with your choreography?
MOAMETAL: We danced before we formed Babymetal but we weren’t familiar with the metal headbanging movement at the beginning. When we first tried “Doki Doki Morning” with headbanging, I had whiplash for the next few days.
Had you been big metal fans before forming the band?
YUIMETAL Before Babymetal I wasn’t familiar with metal. I used to listen to more pop music and anime music, but through Babymetal, I discovered not only heavy metal music but it opened the door to other genres.
Are there any bands or artists you really love right now?
SU-METAL: Metallica, Bring Me the Horizon, Limp Bizkit.
Where did the idea to fuse metal and pop come from?
SU-METAL: They were called upon by the Fox God and the Fox God has chosen the three girls to become Babymetal and carry out the mission. Only the Fox God knows why he came up with this idea.
Are there any artists you hope to work with?
SU-METAL: Metallica. We first met Metallica members three years ago and at that time we weren’t so into metal music. Actually, the Metallica live concert was the very first heavy metal concert we saw. We met the member of Metallica before they went out on the stage and at that time was “oh such nice, sweet, middle-aged people.” Once they were up on stage, the energy and aura was so enormous so not only just the impression we got but that also really got into our hearts. We learned to appreciate their metal music. That was a great encounter.
What are you most excited about for these U.S. shows?
SU-METAL: Even though this is the third U.S. tour, this is an intense one. We’re going to visit so many more cities than we used to in the last two tours. After Colbert, we have more fans who will come to the tour at the venues so we’re looking forward to meeting them. At the same time, because they may know a little bit about Babymetal, we have a very exciting live show. Our goal is to mesmerize those people who just started loving Babymetal. Because the second album was released recently, through those performances we want to create a new versions with our performances with the audiences.While 4K is a popular resolution at the moment, it isn't always big with PC gamers. Why? Well, UHD can be very taxing on a graphics card, leading to lower frame rate. Not to mention, 4K monitors are still fairly pricey by comparison. Depending on your hardware, you might have a more enjoyable experience using a lower resolution, such as the trusty 1080p. For example, some people would rather get 60fps with 1920x1080 than 30fps with 3840x2160 -- I know I would.
Today, AOC unveils a trio of new 1080p gaming monitors that are aimed at PC gamers on a budget. All three feature AMD FreeSync technology, while two of them also have 144Hz refresh for extra-smooth motion. The very small bezels and red color makes them look very attractive too.
ALSO READ: Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5 32-bit 384 KHz PCIe gaming sound card [Review]
"AOC's G90 series offers models in two sizes: the 24.5-inch AOC G2590VXQ and AOC G2590PX as well as the 27-inch AOC G2790PX. All of them feature a frameless 16:9 Full HD TN panel (1920 x 1080 pixels), a short 1 ms response time to eliminate annoying ghosting effects, a high refresh rate (G2590PX and G2790PX: 144 Hz, G2590VXQ: 75 Hz) and FreeSync support. The latter reduces stuttering, tearing and input lag for an even smoother gaming experience. The AOC Low Input Lag Mode gives gamers an additional edge: it bypasses most of the monitor’s internal video processing, which results in even more responsive gameplay. Titles with a very dark map design especially benefit from the AOC Shadow Control feature: it lightens overly dark screen areas and darkens bright parts without affecting the rest of the screen," says AOC.
ALSO READ: Razer unveils 'Naga Trinity' gaming mouse and 'Tartarus V2' keypad
The budget-friendly display-maker further says, "With their simplistic '3-sided frameless' design, the G90 monitors are not only a pleasure to look at. They also let players focus on the game, allowing seamless 3-monitor set-ups for next-level immersion. To protect players’ eyes throughout long gaming hours, the G90 series offers AOC Flicker Free technology against eye fatigue and the AOC Low Blue Light Mode against potential long-term effects from harmful blue light. For a healthy posture while playing, the G2590PX and G2790PX also come with an ergonomic monitor stand which can be adjusted in height, swiveled, tilted and rotated (pivot). For a fast and easy setup at LAN parties, esports tournaments and other gaming events, the stands of all G90 models can be mounted and removed within seconds - without using a screwdriver. Thanks to built-in stereo speakers, users can enjoy games and entertainment without additional speaker or headphone solutions."
ALSO READ: SteelSeries launches RGB tenkeyless 'Apex M750 TKL' mechanical gaming keyboard
Model G2590VXQ G2590PX G2790PX Display 24.5-inch (62.2 cm) TN
@ 75 Hz 24.5-inch (62.2 cm) TN
@ 144 Hz 27-inch (68.6 cm) TN
@ 144 Hz Resolution 1920 x 1080 1920 x 1080 1920 x 1080 Sync technology FreeSync
(30-75Hz range) FreeSync
(30-144Hz range) FreeSync
(30-144Hz range) Connectors 2 x HDMI
1 x DisplayPort
1 x VGA
Audio out 2 x HDMI
1 x DisplayPort
1 x VGA
USB 3.0
Audio out 2 x HDMI 1 x DisplayPort 1 x VGA USB 3.0
Audio out Features 3-sided frameless
Simple stand
Stereo speakers
1 ms GtG response time 3-sided frameless
Ergonomic stand
Stereo speakers
1 ms GtG response time 3-sided frame |
Under Law. “The relief we seek from the court can help ensure that all voters are able to participate in Maricopa’s electoral process free from unnecessary burdens and barriers.”
Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Maricopa County would have had to obtain federal approval of the reduction before its implementation. Section 5 required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to preclear all voting changes with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Today’s motion asks the court to require the secretary of state and Maricopa County recorder to submit an EAP 30 days before the August primary and 45 days before the November general election. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors would be required to approve the plans before they are submitted to the court. Specifically, the EAPs would require officials to develop and implement measures to manage and reduce wait times, explain how the number of polling places was chosen, and create an Election Day communications plan.
“Everyone would benefit from increased transparency in the management of Maricopa’s elections,” said John W. McGuinness, partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, which is representing the plaintiffs pro bono. “After what happened in March, voters should have the assurance that a comprehensive plan was in place well in advance of Election Day.”
“Our request simply asks the court to recognize that long lines at polling places are the same thing as denying citizens their right to vote, and to make sure election officials don’t make the same mistakes again,” said Shane Ham, an attorney at Osborn Maledon.
In June, the Lawyers’ Committee, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP and Osborn Maledon, P.A. filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Maricopa County voters who were either unable to cast their ballots, or had to wait in line for many hours to do so in the March presidential preference election. The suit was filed in the Arizona Superior Court and names Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan, Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as defendants.
To read the full motion, click here.
About the Lawyers’ Committee :
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers’ Committee), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, was formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy to involve the private bar in providing legal services to address racial discrimination. Formed over 50 years ago, we continue our quest of “Moving America Toward Justice.” The principal mission of the Lawyers’ Committee is to secure, through the rule of law, equal justice under law, particularly in the areas of fair housing and community development; employment; voting; education; environmental justice; and criminal justice. For more information about the Lawyers’ Committee, visit www.lawyerscommittee.org.
About Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, is one of the nation’s leading law and consulting firms, with offices strategically located in California (Los Angeles, Orange County, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Sacramento), New York (New York City and Albany) and Washington, D.C. The firm represents a sophisticated client base—including Fortune 500, middle-market and emerging companies—across a range of practice areas and industry sectors. For more information, visit www.manatt.com.
About Osborn Maledon
Osborn Maledon, P.A. is a Phoenix law firm of 48 attorneys that provides litigation, business and general counsel solutions for its clients. For more information, go to www.omlaw.com.
###CHENNAI: Over 60 professionals working in various IT majors like Microsoft eBay and Oracle joined hands at the first NaMo tea stall set up in Silicon Valley US, as part of extending their support to BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi for the Lok Sabha polls.The Indian American professionals met at a Indian tea-stall in Ortega Park in Sunnyvale as part of the volunteer group -"I Care for India", a press statement said here today."The meet-up was set up at a traditional village-side tea-stall where people attended discussion on the role of technology in solving Governance issues in India", it said.Participants, who came from engineering background, came up with suggestions such as making use of latest technology to cut power transmission losses in India, fully computerising the process of Government tenders and providing technological aids to Indian farmers.The organisers plan to compile all the suggestions discussed and send them to a team formed by BJP in India, the statement added.Jun.26 (GMM) Monza, the historic home of the Italian Grand Prix, could be a victim of F1's continued push into "emerging markets".
That is the warning of F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, who admitted that even the sport's longest-standing European races are not secure.
"It is possible that Europe will lose a couple of races in favour of emerging markets," he told the weekly Italian magazine Panorama.
"If we do move away from Monza - and I say 'if', because no decision has been taken yet - it would be only for economic reasons.
"Of course, the quality of the circuit and the organisation could also be better," added Ecclestone, "but that is not the crucial point."
Earlier this week, 1996 world champion Damon Hill warned Ecclestone that removing the "cornerstones" of the sport, such as key European races, is a real risk.
"Without European enthusiasm," he told the London Evening Standard, "if you just took the sport off to China, India or the States, it would die within minutes.
"But I don't think Bernie's interested in the sport. He's interested in the return it gives," added Hill.The makers of the popular Chrome and Firefox extension Copyfish announced yesterday that the Chrome version of the extension was hijacked.
According to the posted information on the company blog, an attacker managed to steal the Google password of a team member using phishing on July 28th, 2017.
A team member received an email from “Google” saying that we need to update our Chrome extension (Copyfish) otherwise it would be removed from the store. “Click here to read more details” the email said. The click opened the “Google” password dialog, and the unlucky team member entered the password for our developer account.
The Chrome extension was updated to version 2.8.5 then the next day; something that the company did not realize directly. The attacker, who held the password and email address for the developer account, pushed a manipulated extension to the Chrome store.
Since Chrome extension update automatically without user interaction, the majority of users of the extension received the updated version. While it is possible to take precautions before installing Chrome extensions, there is no such option for extension updates.
Reports began to come in on July 30, 2017 that Copyfish for Chrome was displaying ads and spam on websites.
The team realized that something was wrong. A check of the Google Developer account revealed that the attackers did not only upload a malicious version of the extension, they moved the extension to their account as well.
This means that Copyfish has no access to the extension at this point in time. They cannot update it, and the attackers may push out another version of the extension to the userbase. Since Chrome extensions update automatically, it can only be prevented by removing the extension for Chrome for the time being.
Chrome users who have Copyfish installed right now are advised to remove the browser extension from the web browser until the situation is resolved.
This is done by loading chrome://extensions/ in the browser's address bar and activating the trash icon next to the extension.
The Firefox extension Copyfish is not affected, and there are several reasons for that. The most obvious one is that the attackers phished the Google account password and not necessarily the Mozilla account password. While it may be identical, it does not have to be.
More importantly from a user perspective is that Mozilla employees audit extension uploads manually while Google uses automation for that. It is far more difficult to place a malicious extension in Mozilla AMO than it is on Google's Chrome web store.
Phishing attacks, especially targeted ones, are still very successful. While the company could have better security processes, e.g. using two-factor authentication or a password manager to prevent having to enter account passwords manually, it is taking responsibility by explaining exactly what has happened and what users can do to resolve the issue.
It is interesting to note that Copyfish is not the first Chrome extension that got hacked successfully in recent time. Social Fixer, another popular extension, was hacked as well and the methodology the author describes on Facebook looks very similar to the one used to attack Copyfish.
Closing Words
Google's convenient but weak -- from a security point of view -- automatic updating of Google Chrome and Chrome extensions, and the company's refusal to spend resources on manual extension audits, is a serious flaw in a browser heralded for its security.
I guess it is less of a problem for users who don't use extensions, but if you do in Chrome, attacks like this will happen and there is nothing that you, as a user, can do about it if you use extensions.
If the maker of an extension gets phished or hacked, malicious extension updates may be pushed to your Chrome version and computer without you being able to do anything about that.
Now Read: Monitor extension updates in Chrome and Firefox
Summary Article Name Chrome extension CopyFish hijacked: remove now! Description The makers of the popular Chrome and Firefox extension Copyfish announced yesterday that the Chrome version of the extension was hijacked. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo
AdvertisementNext time you use a public bathroom, you may want to take a closer look around.
Authorities in Florida were notified recently after several "hidden cameras" were spotted in public facilities disguised as coat hooks.
SEE ALSO: Woman gives fierce response to sexist note claiming she's not a veteran
The innocent-looking household items were found in three different locations in the Florida Keys, mounted to the walls in locations facing the toilet areas.
According to a Facebook post made by Monroe County Sheriff's Office, all of the cameras that have been confiscated thus far have been models that can be purchased online as "home security devices" for as little as $13.
Monroe County's Sheriff Rick Ramsay is asking locals to be aware of their surroundings and to know what to look for.
"Anyone who has a public restroom on their property needs to check them closely," he said. "If you find anything suspicious you think might contain a hidden camera, don't touch it. Call us right away and we will respond."
In an interview with Miami's CBS4, Lt. Alberto Ramirez claimed that he's hoping his department can trace the culprits back through the footage found on the cameras. It was also revealed that only female officers will be in charge of scanning the images found from the motion-detector cameras.
As one Facebook user pointed out, considering that children also use those restrooms, those found responsible for the cameras may also face child pornography charges.
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Don’t be fooled by the post-Paris fanfare: The climate change movement faces big trouble ahead.
Mario Loyola has written a lengthy essay for The American Interest, entitled Green Idols: Twilight of the Climate Change Movement. The American Interest allows one free article per month; if you have already used yours, here are some extensive excerpts (about 35% of the original article):
The UN’s climate summit in Paris at the end of 2015 concluded with a bang. The world’s governments promised sweeping cuts in carbon emissions. Rich countries promised to help poor ones with $100 billion per year in climate assistance. The consensus quickly jelled that this was a major, historic achievement.
Then came the fizzle: The agreement is non-binding. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted on NBC’s Meet the Press that compliance would be enforced through the “powerful weapon” of public shaming, apparently implying a policy of verbal confrontation toward states that fall short. The Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg called the Paris agreement the “costliest in history” if implemented. According to Lomborg, the agreement would “reduce temperatures by 2100 by just 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit)…. This is simply cynical political theater, meant to convince us that our leaders are taking serious action…a phenomenally expensive but almost empty gesture.” NASA scientist Jim Hansen, one of the earliest proponents of the idea that global warming is manmade, slammed the deal as “half-assed and half-baked,” a “fake,” and a “fraud.”
Hansen’s assessment is probably close to the mark—and he and his fellow alarmists have only themselves to blame. While those who flatly deny the possibility of any global warming can be readily brushed aside, the alarmists have been much too quick to dismiss legitimate questions about precisely what the evidence shows. Indeed, they have frequently treated such questions as heresies to be persecuted, adopting an even more virulently anti-scientific mindset than the one they accuse others of.
Meanwhile, on the policy side, the alarmists’ call for worldwide economic controls, including caps on fossil fuels, are largely recycled from previous scientific doomsday fads, such as the oil scarcity scare of the late 1970s. Despite the enormous costs these policies would impose, especially on poor countries, they would do virtually nothing to stop anthropogenic climate change, let alone protect anyone from relentless natural climate change that is one of our planet’s most prominent and inescapable features. They are also distracting attention both from investments that would make society less vulnerable to climate change.
Don’t be fooled by the fanfare in Paris: The climate change movement faces big trouble ahead. Its principal propositions contain two major fallacies that can only become more glaring with time. First, in stark contrast to popular belief and to the public statements of government officials and many scientists, the science on which the dire predictions of manmade climate change is based is nowhere near the level of understanding or certainty that popular discourse commonly ascribes to it. Second, and relatedly, the movement’s embrace of an absolute form of the precautionary principle distorts rational cost-benefit analysis, or throws it out the window altogether.
The right strategy for confronting environmental challenges will have to be based on rational market incentives, rational cost-benefit analysis, and a broad-based consensus about the vital importance of efficient markets. Strategies that distort rational cost-benefit analysis (or the science on which it is based) to suit an anti-market agenda will not work and can only maintain the illusion of legitimacy for so long before they are discredited.
Heretical Questions
In political discourse, it is often necessary to simplify complex policy matters in order to make them accessible for public debate. But too much simplification can have the effect of stifling public discourse, as in this unfortunate State of the Union statement by President Obama: “The debate is over. Climate change is real.” Of course climate change is real. The climate is always changing. Only the most foolish of the President’s critics believe otherwise, and it doesn’t help his cause to demonstrate that he can be just as foolish.
The evidence is overwhelming that the planet has been warming off and on for several centuries. There is also compelling evidence that at least some significant part of this warming is attributable to carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels since the mid-20th century. There is good scientific reason to believe that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases almost certainly constitute a net contribution to global warming. But crucial questions remain about the relative importance of natural factors that influence climate. The President is therefore wrong in the sense that, for the most crucial scientific questions, the debate is just beginning.
The public debate is dominated by simplistic claims that “climate change is man-made,” which might lead one to think that all of the current warming trend is man-made. But nearly all climate scientists accept that many factors influence temperatures, including major shifts in patterns of ocean circulation, variations in the earth’s orbit, variations in solar activity, and volcanic activity. The “attribution statement” in the IPCC’s latest assessment report is carefully couched: “It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG [greenhouse gases] and other anthropogenic forces together.”
The distinction between “more than half” (the IPCC summary’s of scientific literature) and “all” or “nearly all” is crucial from the point of view of public policy. If only about half the observed warming is due to human activity, the cost-benefit analysis of currently proposed policies becomes far more dubious, and reveals another problem: As much as half the current warming trend (whatever that is) could be due to natural causes, and current policies will do nothing to address that.
This highlights an important self-correcting feature in the development of climate science. Yes, it’s true that many major journals reject articles that critique the current consensus, and that funding priorities strongly reinforce the consensus. But even the strong bias in favor of more dire findings, which has been introduced into scientific inquiry by the pervasive politicization of the issue, cannot readily invent false data. Every year produces more raw data than the year before, and the discrepancies between the new data and the simple climate models are increasing. Alarmists say that discrepancies are to be expected, and models are meant to be refined. But they have boxed themselves in with misleading claims to certain knowledge where in fact considerable uncertainty remains. Uncertainty about risks is not necessarily fatal to a policy of precaution, and but false claims to certainty usually are, sooner or later. Witness the Iraq War and Saddam’s non-existent WMD.
There is a huge difference between admitting that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is a driver of current global warming, and claiming that it responsible for virtually all current global warming. Many climate scientists who agree that humans contribute to global warming are skeptical of prognostications of catastrophic climate change.
This blurring of the lines between inquiry and advocacy confuses the public and leaves scientists open to charges of professional dishonesty. The fact that the apocalyptic vision of impending doom is a matter of obligatory orthodoxy gives the movement a quasi-religious tone, and lends itself to the persecution of “skeptics” as heretics.
Revolutionary Politics
In the United States, where unadulterated socialism usually doesn’t sell well, the climate alarmists put a decidedly capitalist face on their policy prescriptions. Led by prominent social-democratic billionaires, these capitalist-climate-alarmists go for huge clean energy subsidies and come armed with all kinds of theories about how a 50 percent or even 80 percent renewable energy mandate would pay for itself. The Clean Power Plan essentially forces “red” states like Texas (and chiefly Texas, in terms of overall carbon emissions reductions) to adopt the electricity mix of “blue” states like California—precisely because electricity is so much cheaper and more reliable in Texas than in California, conferring a huge advantage in interstate competition.
Americans across the political spectrum might agree that the scientific evidence on climate change justifies certain precautionary measures, and that naturalism is an important value. But with so many alarmists, from Bill McKibben to Naomi Klein, calling for an end to capitalism as we know it, the debate tends to go off the rails from the start.
Do climate alarmists want to eliminate the human impact on climate, regardless what the climate would be doing otherwise? Or are they trying to eliminate climate change itself, regardless of cause? Obama’s loose talk about “saving the planet” seems to elide rather than to clarify whether it’s really the planet that needs saving from mankind, mankind that needs saving from itself.
The question hasn’t gone unnoticed. In Slate, Joseph Romm concedes that the planet will be fine no matter what we do, so we should be more worried about ourselves. We live on a planet where adaptation is a necessary skill.
Imagine something that is entirely possible—that a single such technological breakthrough enables us to control the world’s average temperatures. Could we then agree on what the ideal temperature should be? Is the current global average temperature the ideal one? Many would take that for granted, and climate alarmists appear to presuppose it, but the proposition is hardly self-evident.
To read the IPCC reports, alarmists find the idea of adapting to climate change far less satisfying than the idea of preventing it. But their focus on worldwide economic controls boils down to a kind of climate engineering, because it presupposes that humanity should not learn to live with a changing planet. Hence we are to believe that the most adaptable species that has ever existed, a species so sophisticated that it can survive in outer space, requires an absolutely stable average temperature and sea-level in order to survive. This defies common sense.
Human civilization faces many challenges. We face an ever-present risk of dangerous climate change due to natural causes. We face an immediate crisis in the rapid loss of the world’s most valuable and critical habitat, due chiefly to farming and logging. The future will bring further challenges for which we will find ourselves far less prepared than we could have been. But frightfully little attention is being paid to these risks, for the simple reason that they don’t fit snugly into the environmentalists’ essentially anti-industrial agenda.
The Paris conference achieved agreement on an annual $100-billion Global Climate Fund to help developing countries reduce their carbon footprint. The money would be far better spent on adaptation assistance, to make sure that poor societies preserve critical habitat while reinforcing their access to things they will need in the event of really catastrophic climate change: food, water, and fossil fuels.
JC reflections
I excerpted about a third of Loyola’s essay, highlighting the parts that I find most insightful. This essay shows a remarkable grasp of the public debate on climate change.
I didn’t excerpt the discussion about the science. Loyola raised most of the outstanding issues that contribute major uncertainty to understanding of climate change. He got the bit picture right, if not all of the details.
I bolded the statements I found most insightful, here are my favorites.
Uncertainty about risks is not necessarily fatal to a policy of precaution, and but false claims to certainty usually are, sooner or later.
The distinction between “more than half” (the IPCC summary’s of scientific literature) and “all” or “nearly all” is crucial from the point of view of public policy.
These are both hugely important points, that I have tried to make also, but alas not as concisely or elegantly.
It is very good to see legal scholars such as Mario Loyola providing perspective on the climate change debate.Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan said on Thursday that the country's push to build infrastructure should not come at the expense of financial stability, adding banks already had too much exposure to the sector.
Instead, Rajan said, the country needed to find new sources of funding for infrastructure so that debt levels remained "moderate".
The comments, at a financial event organised by the RBI - attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley - come as the government says it wants US $1 trillion invested in infrastructure in the five years to 2017, with half of the funding coming from private companies.
"The nation has enormous financing needs in infrastructure, and far too many of our banks already have too much exposure," Rajan said.
"Big corporate infrastructure players have also taken too much debt. The required national push to finance infrastructure should not override financial stability, which is key to national security," the RBI Governor added.
Funding for infrastructure is expected to pose a challenge to the country, whose banks, especially state-run lenders, continue to struggle with bad loans.
The gross bad loans ratio at banks could rise as high as 5.7 per cent by March 2016 from 4.5 per cent last December, rating agency ICRA estimates.
In 2014, the apex bank launched infrastructure bonds, allowing banks to raise debt and use the proceeds to help fund the government's plan to provide affordable housing for all by 2022.
But issuance has been slower than expected due to low trading volumes in secondary markets.
Still, the government is pushing ahead with its ambitious infrastructure initiatives, which it sees as vital for economic growth.
(Reuters)The IRD's Andrew Stott hits out at those who engage in cashie jobs.
Tradespeople are doing cash jobs worth up to $20,000 or more under the table, as cash jobs continue to allow massive sums of tradie money to go untaxed, the IRD has revealed.
In an Inland Revenue Department survey of around 500 tradespeople, a quarter said under-the-table jobs were common in the building and construction industry.
Of those surveyed, 79 per cent also believed it was a crime.
123rf.com A survey of tradies showed 25 per cent believed under-the-table jobs were common.
Another survey found 11 per cent of tradies surveyed said they were aware of cash jobs worth more than $20,000 going untaxed.
READ MORE:
* Cashies come under IRD spotlight again
* Cash jobs costing NZ billions
* IRD starts cracking down on cashies
The surveys are part of a IRD campaign targeting Christchurch this week, after previous campaigns in Auckland and Queenstown earlier this year.
123RF The true extent of tax the country misses out on due to cash jobs is unknown.
The department said there had been a big shift in people's attitudes towards tax avoidance compared to four years ago, when it first began its research.
A quick survey by TVNZ found that three out of six tradesman contacted for a quote provided a cash price, without being asked.
John Gray, from the Homeowners and Buyers Association of New Zealand, said he was dealing with at least a dozen complaints a month of dodgy alterations work, often by people willing to do cash jobs.
"We think that is in part related to the fact that people aren't in the position to move on and buy a new home but there is value in their homes, particularly Auckland where they can borrow against that improved equity position to renovate their homes."
Because many qualified builders were being lured away to bigger jobs, Gray said unlicensed tradespeople were coming forward to meet the demand, dropping brochures or advertising in local newspapers.
"For us, there's a distinct connection between these people who are prepared to do cash jobs and the job that ends up by really compromising the owners.
"They're willing to break the tax law and they're equally willing to break the building law."
However, Grant Florence of the Certified Builders Association said he had no evidence that the alterations industry was being filled by unlicensed "cashies".
"A lot of our members who have done alterations particularly in the large markets like Auckland are continuing to do alterations... they haven't drifted off to do new homes."
He said his organisation had worked with IRD in the past but its focus was currently on other issues.
"I think the industry has enough challenges around quality and the shortage of tradepeople."
IRD group manager of marketing Andrew Stott said that whenever there were lot of new entrants to an industry, there were often non-compliance issues with tax.
"Part of that isn't necessarily intentional, part of that is a whole lot of new people coming in and might not have run a business before... so our job there is to help them understand what is they have to do.
"But on behalf of those who are trying to do the right thing, we've got to make sure that we're dealing with those who aren't, because it's not fair to those who don't want to do cash jobs and if they're being undercut by others."
There were various estimates as to how much money was being lost in the "hidden economy. "We can't know... I've heard numbers bandied around between $6 billion and $9b We don't spend our time trying to verify those because they're all guess work but really, that's a lot of money."
And the penalties could be significant. "It is a crime so there is jail time potential and every year we see that.
"But one that's often forgotten is that if they are part of a registered association, a master trades or a registered builders, if they're convicted they lose their licence, which means they can't continue to work with reputable organisations."
Comments are now closed on this article.Here's a couple more:
Name: Goldenhair
Description: Goldenhair is a short grass found growing high in remote alpine meadows. It is almost indistinguishable from other grasses, save for a blue-green stripe down the centre of each blade. The most noticeable feature of this plant however, is the golden coloured, hair like strands, which trail from its seedheads, hence the name, Goldenhair.
Uses: Goldenhair has only one significant property, the ability to confuse magical divination. As a result, an oil is often extracted from the plant as a potion additive. Adding Oil of Goldenhair to a potion or other mixture will confuse the results of minor divinations, causing them to give false readings. As a result, it is used to conceal potions, and even allows poisons to go undetected. However, it can not stand up to more advanced magic, and a skilled alchemist can detect it due to a faint smell of apple.
Name: Razorleaf
Description: Razorleaf is a decidedly unpleasant desert plant. It consists of a thin trailing vine that spreads along the ground. Thorns of all sizes cover this plant's stems and branches. The leaves are short, razor shape, covered in spines, and shaped like knives. Besides all this, those who have managed to prepare the leaves for consumption (after getting cuts all over their hands) state that while a good source of water, the taste was incomprehensibly disgusting, and that dying of thirst would be preferable to eating it.
Razorleaf is a very long-lived and slow growing plant, taking one hundred years to grow one foot. It is capable of living for millenia, but growth slows after one thousand years, and stops after two. For every two feet the plant grows, it branches, spreading slowly and surely across the ground. Upon reaching the age of three hundred years, the plant is ready to set forth flower, and will do so every time there is rain. When Razorleaf flowers, many have said that it is in fact one of the most beautiful plants in the entire world. Each thorn opens, revealing a variegated flower in either blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, or a combination of those colours. The flowers are quickly wind polinated and each yields hundreds of seeds. The seeds are capable of travelling hundreds of miles; but only those that land within desert have any chance of growing, as other plants quickly smother the young seedlings.
Uses: The only usable part of Razorleaf are the seeds, which have to be quickly gathered from the flowers before they blow away. The seeds are an antidote to many poisons and also a mild painkiller. They are also valuable as people often desire to cultivate them, not realising how slowly they grow.A coalition of Hawaiian homestead associations has declared its intent to purchase the beleaguered Sandwich Isles Communications, which in June lost its exclusive license to provide telephone and internet service to homestead communities statewide.
The Sovereign Councils of the Hawaiian Homelands Assembly is collaborating with regulatory experts to acquire and operate Sandwich Isles without any disturbance of service to customers, according to a notice to federal regulators.
The goal of the potential acquisition, said SCHHA Chair Robin Puanani Danner, is to ensure continuity of service, reduce costs, improve customer service and expand the customer base by creating a sustainable, Native-owned telecom enterprise.
Courtesy of Robin Danner
“If successful, this indeed would represent an historic step toward economic self-determination and long-term economic opportunities for our rural communities and our native people,” reads the SCHHA letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.
The SCHHA, which is not directly tied to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, has also asked the FCC to re-establish the exclusive license to provide telephone and internet service.
Since its inception in 1995, Sandwich Isles has delivered telecom services to 3,500 households on lands held in trust for Native Hawaiians to ensure that technological parity is achieved in communities that are most expensive and difficult to serve.
Last year the FCC penalized Sandwich Isles with a total of $76 million in fines and repayment orders after it said the company fraudulently collected millions of dollars in subsidies intended to equip rural, remote U.S. communities with affordable and reliable telephone and internet service.
Subsidy payments to the telecom provider were suspended in 2015.
Albert Hee, the former owner of Sandwich Isles’ parent company, Waimana Enterprises, was convicted in 2015 of six counts of tax fraud and one count of impeding the IRS from correctly calculating and collecting his taxes.
Over a span of 13 years starting in 2002, authorities said the brother of former state Sen. Clayton Hee siphoned more than $4 million of Waimana’s funds to pay for personal expenses, including massages, school tuition for his children, false wages for family members and a $1.3 million home in Santa Clara, California, according to court documents.
Service to Sandwich Isles customers has not been disrupted, but the company’s legal troubles have some rural homesteaders concerned about the future quality and cost of their telecom service.
Leaders of the SCHHA, which states on its website its dedication to the fulfillment of the promise of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act that created a 200,000-acre land trust in 1921 to serve as farms, ranches and neighborhoods for indigenous Hawaiians, assert that dependable telecommunications access is fundamental to the financial and professional well-being of homestead families.
“It’s not such a far-fetched notion that the people most impacted by an enterprise should control that enterprise,” said Danner. “You can’t live in a homestead area that’s hard to get to and not know instantly that telecommunications is everything.”
Tribally owned and operated telecommunications companies exist in Alaska and on the U.S. mainland, where 63 percent of tribal land residents lack access to advanced broadband, as compared to only 17 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the FCC’s 2015 Broadband Progress Report.
As it continues to analyze of the viability of the proposed telecom purchase, the SCHHA has formed a panel of acquisition advisers consisting of current and former professionals in telecommunications, business, banking, law and finance.
At an SCHHA meeting Friday attended by U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz in Honolulu, the coalition’s leaders reaffirmed their commitment to pursue the acquisition.
Schatz declined to comment on the proposed acquisition for this report.
The SCHHA on Aug. 3 filed with the FCC a motion to reconsider its revocation of Sandwich Isles’ exclusive permit to serve Hawaiian homesteads, arguing that it disenfranchises Hawaiian homesteaders.
Whether the SCHHA purchases the telecom provider or not, Danner said the FCC should fulfill its duty to protect the interests of Hawaiian homesteaders by reinstating the exclusive permit.
Read the coalition’s letter to the FCC:
Read the coalition’s request for the FCC to reconsider its revocation of the exclusive license:ReedPOP, the world's largest producer of pop culture events including New York Comic Con (NYCC), continues to grow the East Coast's biggest entertainment event and offer its Fans additional once in a lifetime experiences. Due to growth of television programming at New York Comic Con, it will for the first time expand Panel content beyond the Javits Center to include a location devoted solely to the latest news, content and high-profile stars of today's biggest television projects at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. On both Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10, Cartoon Network, CBS TV Studios, USA Network and STARZ will have exclusive events at the storied Hammerstein Ballroom.
Fans will have the ability to attend the Panels taking place at the Hammerstein Ballroom with their NYCC 2015 Badge from 11:30 AM - 6:00 PM on Friday, October 9 and from 10:00 AM - 5:30 PM Saturday, October 10. The Hammerstein Ballroom is located at 311 W 34th Street on the corner of 8th Ave. This announcement follows a slew of television entertainment featured at this year's Show including an appearance by the cast of Pretty Little Liars and events with the casts of The X-Files, Gotham, Supergirl, Game of Thrones, The League, Sleepy Hollow, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel's Agent Carter, Marvel's Daredevil and Marvel's Jessica Jones.
The blockbuster lineup at Hammerstein Ballroom includes: Cartoon Network will host a Panel featuring the magical minds behind Adventure Time; CBS TV Studios will host Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu and John Noble with Executive Producer and Creator Robert Doherty for a sneak peak of the upcoming season of Elementary and have the stars, Jake McDorman, Jennifer Carpenter and Showrunner Craig Sweeny of Limitless discuss their debut season. USA Network and Universal Cable Productions will have a Panel block at Hammerstein including a Q&A with the cast and creators of Mr. Robot and a cast Q&A and exclusive screening of Carlton Cuse and Ryan Condal's highly anticipated Colony. Finally, STARZ will have a Panel with the filmmakers and cast of Ash Vs. Evil Dead including Executive Producer and Director Sam Raimi, Showrunner Craig DiGregorio, Executive Producer and star of the series, Bruce Campbell along with Lucy Lawless, Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo to discuss their new series. Below are specific details on the New York Comic Con television Panels taking place at Hammerstein Ballroom - (311 W 34th St):
Related: Xena & Ash Vs. Evil Dead in Army of Darkness Crossover Comic
Friday, October 9 - 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM - Cartoon Network Presents: Adventure Time
For years, Fans have asked for it, and the magical minds behind Adventure Time are finally unlocking the secrets behind one of Ooo's most righteous and mysterious characters! This October, Cartoon Network presents a special 8-part story that explores the life of Marceline the Vampire Queen! New York Comic Con Fans will be the first to get a sneak peek of the exciting story before it airs, LIVE with the cast and crew, with plenty of time for questions from you! Talent: Olivia Olson (Marceline), Jeremy Shada (Finn), John DiMaggio (Jake), Adam Muto (Executive Producer, Adventure Time) and Rebecca Sugar (Lyricist/composer Adventure Time; Creator, Steven Universe)
Friday, October 9 - 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM - CBS TV Studios Block, featuring Elementary and Limitless
Join Elementary series stars Jonny Lee Miller (Dexter), Lucy Liu (Charlie's Angels) and John Noble (Sleepy Hollow) with Executive Producer and Creator Robert Doherty for an exclusive sneak peek of the new season followed by a Panel discussion. As well, TVK0UNQMO459ON||Limitless} stars Jake McDorman (American Sniper) and Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter) with Executive Producer and Showrunner Craig Sweeny for an exclusive sneak peek of the new season followed by a |
See also [ edit ]While the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls into slavery by the Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram, received abundant media coverage, and deservedly so, the mainstream media regrettably failed to bestow similar attention on an equally newsworthy and globally important anti-slavery story occurring simultaneously nearby in Mauritania.
In a national election last June, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a West African country like Nigeria, re-elected President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, a former army general, to a second five-year term with 81.94 percent of the vote despite accusations of extensive voter fraud. The dubious distinction of a Third-World ruler getting himself re-elected dictator is, unfortunately, nothing new. But what distinguished markedly this particular Mauritanian election from previous ones was Aziz’s main opponent, Biram Ould Dah Abeid, a remarkable and fearless Mauritanian anti-slavery activist whose Radicals For Global Action (RAG) party came second.
“We are the only ones to have a different ideological position,” said Dah Abeid in an interview with Le Courier de Sahara. “We are fighting against slavery, against racism, against government waste and against corruption. The true opposition, it’s us!”
Though largely unknown in the Western general public, Dah Abeid was recognized in 2013 by the United Nations (UN) as one of of the world’s foremost abolitionists, receiving the prestigious UN Human Rights Prize from Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last year in New York. Reflecting his human rights stance and his Le Journal de Sahara statement, Dah Obeid’s RAG ran on an anti-slavery, anti-racism, anti-corruption platform in the recent election. Dah Abeid himself is the son of a slave; his father was freed by his grandmother’s master, but his grandmother and uncles remained slaves.
“I am from the servile community of Mauritania that makes up 50 percent of the population,” said Dah Abeid in a speech at the UN Human Rights Summit in Geneva earlier this year. “Twenty percent of the 50 percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.”
And Mauritania is direly in need of such dauntless slavery opponents. Through his own research, Dah Abeid believes his country possesses the highest number of chattel slaves in the world, to which he estimates 20 percent of his country’s 3.3 million people belong (Most observers admit, however, that an exact number is difficult to determine).
Mauritania’s slaves are black and their owners are Arabs or Berbers, called “whites,” who constitute about 20 percent of the population and almost all of the political, business and military elite class that controls the country. Like most other Mauritanians, both slaves and masters are Muslim, enmeshed in a cruel, life-destroying institution that dates back centuries in Mauritania, with some slave families remaining trapped in this evil for generations.
“This is a state racism that has become institutionalised, that has caused pogroms, purges, bloody purges, murdering of the black population, of different groups like the Wolof (a black African people)…” Dah Abeid said in his Geneva speech.
Dah Abeid belongs to the Haratin class, an oppressed group of people composed of freed slaves and their descendants, while members of black African groups, like the Wolof, form another 20 percent of Mauritania’s population. But all “free” black Mauritanians suffer discrimination based on race and live in what Dah Abeid calls “sub-citizenship.” Some “free” black Mauritanians’ slave origins can be identified in their names, like Dah Abeid’s, whose last name is Arabic for “slave.”
“The proverbs of our masters say that the difference between a slave and one who is freed is the distance which separates the tail of a cow from the ground. In Mauritania, our cows have very long tails,” Dah Abeid said in a slate.com interview.
In 2013, indicating the extent of the slavery tragedy in Mauritania, Global Slavery Index ranked the country number one in the world for its prevalence there. Slavery was abolished in Mauritania in 1981 and criminalized in 2007, but only one person has ever been convicted and jailed for owning a slave. Local and foreign observers of Mauritania’s human rights situation generally regard these decrees as having been made solely for foreign consumption. The slavery situation remains the same despite government denials that only “vestiges” remain.
However, Dah Abeid, a constant thorn in the ruling Arab-Berber class’s side regarding slavery, used Global Slavery Index’s announcement to “congratulate” in a sarcasm-laden speech his government’s winning “the trophy and the title of the first slave state in the world.”
“We (anti-slavery activists) have been working towards the re-foundation of a Mauritania without masters and servants but, once again, you have beaten us,” he said. “We will never stop complimenting you on this enviable place on the international stage that you have managed to achieve, after a hard fight, for our country…Your leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz deserves to be re-elected in the first round of the presidential election in 2014…”
With other members of the Mauritanian anti-slavery group Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) he founded in 2008, Dah Abeid has undertaken several public actions to embarrass the government into freeing slaves and to abolish slavery. In 2011, for example, he and several others staged a protest demonstration to obtain a ten-year-old slave girl’s freedom from her mistress. The Mauritanian government reacted accordingly for a pro-slavery regime. It didn’t arrest the mistress under its 2007 law and free the girl but rather punished the protesters with jail terms.
In 2012, Dah Abeid and other IRA activists staged a sensational (for Mauritania) anti-slavery protest on a Friday outside a mosque. There, Dah Abeid symbolically destroyed a copy of the Sharia law code used by Mauritania’s ruling class to justify slavery. According to the eminent scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, “…the institution of slavery is not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Sharia law.”
Dah Abeid said he made sure he first removed the pages referring to the Koran and those containing the names of the Prophet Mohammad and Allah before carrying out this provocative and symbolic act. The anti-slavery activist does not believe Sharia is divine law, as more fundamentalist Muslims do, saying it is simply outdated codes drawn up during Islam’s Middle Ages.
“In the Constitution of Mauritania, they are the primary source of law. But it completely contradicts the letter and spirit of the actual Quran, which is in its nature egalitarian,” he said.
The government reaction to the anti-Sharia demonstration was as overwhelming as it was barbaric. Dah Obeid’s home was violently raided and he and other anti-slavery activists were imprisoned and tortured. But due to the international outcry, President Aziz had him released from jail. A Sharia court, however, declared Dah Abeid an apostate and he is currently under sentence of death.
“There were TV programs transmitted that talked about how I was going to be hanged…,” he said. “And they said on television we will kill him, like we kill a cat.”
But Dah Abeid says what disturbed him the most about this grisly affair was the silence of “ambassadors of democratic countries” who “did not speak up about freedom of speech and worship.”
Dah Abeid and other Mauritanian anti-slavery activists have been arrested, imprisoned and tortured multiple times. Both his anti-slavery group and political party were banned almost the moment they were announced. Dah Obeid’s non-violent protest activities, sense of justice and self-sacrifice for the most powerless in his country remind one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who, Dah Obeid says, is his role model. Fittingly, both Mandela and King were previous recipients of the same UN human rights award bestowed on Dah Abeid. But Dah Abeid’s struggle is probably fraught with more obstacles, since he is confronted with an established slave system, backed by Sharia law, and a slave-owning political class that supports both.
So it is all the more remarkable, and probably unprecedented, that the son of a slave, under sentence of death and heading a banned party, ran in a presidential election against the incumbent representative of his country’s slave-owning class. Despite the alleged voter fraud, RAG still managed to receive 8.72 percent of the vote. The other three presidential candidates all received under five percent. Some opposition parties boycotted the election to protest expected voting irregularities.
“If these elections were held under normal circumstances, I would get between 35 and 40 percent of the vote,” said Dah Abeid after the election.
Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Africa and Oriental Studies at the University of London and author of several books on Africa, agrees. Before the election, Keenan wrote that “Mauritania’s elections under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz are neither free, fair nor transparent.”
“If all Haratin (freed black slave class) and blacks were registered on the voters role, which they are not, and if Mauritanian elections were 100 per cent free and fair, which they are not, and if all Haratin-blacks voted on racist-ethnic lines, which is conceivable, then Biram Dah Abeid would be president,” wrote Keenan.
The mainstream media’s neglect regarding Dah Abeid and the Mauritanian election story is all the more curious when one considers the story’s heroic nature as well as its far-reaching implications that could eventually end the suffering of hundreds of thousands of enslaved black African Mauritanians, whose same sad fate the young Nigerian women are now experiencing. Already, Dah Abeid’s and IRA’s efforts are reported to have led to the release of two thousand slaves.
And that, definitely, is news worth reporting.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Subscribe to Frontpage's TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.Image copyright AFP Image caption The Italian authorities released footage of the tanker on Wednesday
An oil tanker carrying 102 African migrants has brought them to Italy after Malta refused to allow them to land in a dramatic stand-off.
Boats began taking the migrants to shore from the M/V Salamis, moored off the Sicilian port of Syracuse.
They are being taken to a holding centre after medical and police checks.
Malta accuses the captain of the tanker of ignoring calls to turn back to Libya, after it rescued the migrants from a craft off that country's coast.
The crisis was resolved overnight when Italy gave permission for the Salamis to travel on to Syracuse.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem welcomed news of the migrants' arrival in Italy, tweeting: "Thank You Italy."
The migrants reportedly include an injured woman, four pregnant women and a five-month-old baby.
Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who had resisted EU pressure to allow the migrants to land, thanked his Italian counterpart Enrico Letta earlier, saying the decision would "reinforce" ties between the countries.
The government of the tiny island state, which receives thousands of illegal migrants heading to Europe each year, had argued that the migrants were no longer in danger and to accept them would set a "dangerous precedent".
According to the Times of Malta, a new group of 86 migrants was brought to Malta on board a patrol boat on Wednesday morning, after being rescued off the coast.
On Sunday, 111 mainly African migrants arrived in a rubber dinghy at Delimara, on Malta's south-east coast.
Mr Muscat told EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy last month that the burden of immigration to the EU should not fall on its smallest member.
"Call us harsh, call us heartless, but we are not pushovers," the Maltese prime minister said.It is essentially a rag-tag army of Sunni Arab extremists that hived off from the remants of al-Qaeda and took control of parts of Syria and Iraq under the cover of the Syrian civil war. It rules by terror and murder, and loves to videotape its atrocities and share them on the Internet. Lately, it has been losing battles and territory. Its attacks on Paris last week may have been the lashing out of a weakened criminal enterprise running short on options.
And yet they called themselves, grandiosely, the Islamic State, implying that they are 1) representative of all Muslims, and 2) a sovereign state. Many in the media, including this newspaper, also refer to them that way, since it is proper journalistic practice to call something by its stated name. Former prime minister Stephen Harper, not constrained by the same rules, always called it the "so-called" Islamic State.
Some world leaders – French President François Hollande and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, among others – have lately started calling IS something else: "Daesh." The term is used by IS's Arabic-speaking opponents – and it is heard a lot, since most in the region don't support IS. It is taken from the acronym for the Arabic name of the Islamic State: al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. When spoken, it sounds like an Arabic word meaning "one who sows discord." IS leaders have vowed, with the usual medieval flourish, to cut out the tongue of anyone uttering it.
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So Daesh it is, at least for some of the leaders of countries that have been named by IS as targets. These leaders should keep at it. Propaganda is a key part of this battle; IS relies desperately on recruits to keep its killing machines in operation, and those recruits are lured in by the impression that the group is successful and powerful, and waging a war between Islam and The World. By refusing to refer to IS by its ridiculously overblown moniker, Western leaders strip it of some of its power and credibility.
Because the "Islamic State" is plainly neither of those things. It is a terror organization that, for the most part, has only been able to seize sparsely populated conflict zones ill-equipped to fight back against it. It is no more representative of Islam than the Ku Klux Klan is of Christianity. Its acolytes are frightened and hateful, hiding their insecurities behind a thin tissue of fake religious unity. Its lynchings and sadism and burnings-alive, all for public consumption, betray its true values.
An ultimately doomed religious death cult by any other name would smell just as bad.TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
(Soundbite of song, "Another One Bites the Dust")
QUEEN (Music Group): (Singing) Another one bites the dust. Another one bites the dust, and another one down...
GROSS: That's the band Queen. My guest, Brian May, is a founding member and the band's lead guitarist. In recent years, he's been concerned with a different kind of dust. Exactly three years ago today, he submitted his doctoral thesis in astrophysics on the subject "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud." He is now Dr. May, and he's chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.
But that's not the only twist in his career that would surprise Queen fans. Brian May has also co-written the new book "A Village Lost and Found" that features stereoscopic photos from the 1850s. The pictures were taken by T.R. Williams, one of the first stereo photographers, of the small English village he used to summer in. To see these very early photos in 3-D, you have to assemble and look through a viewer that Brian May designed, which comes with the book.
In May's life as a member of Queen, he's famous for his guitar solos and for writing one of the band's biggest hits, "We Will Rock You." The lead singer of the band, Freddie Mercury, died in 1991. Before we talk about Queen, we're going to hear about May's new book.
Brian May, what a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to FRESH AIR.
Dr. BRIAN MAY (Astrophysicist, Author, Musician): Thank you, Terry.
GROSS: You've been at work on this stereoscopic project on and off for about 25 years, and I'm wondering what hooked you on it. Was it the actual story of this village in the 1850s or the idea of the early stereoscopic photos?
Dr. MAY: It's the magic of stereo, I think, which became known as 3-D in the 1950s, but it goes right back to the very dawn of photography in the 1840s and in this case the 1850s, which is pretty close to the birth of photography itself.
Yeah, it's the magic of seeing two quite flat-looking pictures and then putting them in a viewer, or not as the case may be, if you're able to free-view, and the whole thing just springing into life. And suddenly, you can see a virtual window, which you can walk through.
Now, everybody knows what I'm talking about now because everybody's seen "Avatar." When we started the book, I was having to explain to people what 3-D was, and you can say, look, it's like View-Master, or it's like - you know, most people have experienced something like it in their lives.
But we're now, by good fortune, in the middle of a stereoscopic boom, a 3-D boom. So it's nice for us to be putting a balance into this and showing people that the 1850s had a lot to offer in stereoscopic photography, as well as the 2010, the 21st century.
GROSS: This project is such a quiet project. It's about vision, which isn't about sound.
Dr. MAY: That's right.
GROSS: It's about how you tracked down - you found these photos long before you knew what village they were from. You found the village. You went back to the village. So it's such a quiet counterpart to your life as a musician, and you were still in Queen when you started this, right?
Dr. MAY: Oh, yes. I mean, this goes back way beyond Queen, really. I was interested in stereo when I was about nine years old. So yes, all through my life, I seem to have had these threads, which things that I'm passionately interested in, and I've been very fortunate to be able to close many of the circles.
One of them is astronomy, as you may know. I was able to go back and finish off my astrophysics degree. My second degree, which...
GROSS: Your Ph.D., yeah. No, that's great.
Dr. MAY: My Ph.D., yeah. So I'm a doctor now.
GROSS: But here's what I'm wondering. I'm wondering if throughout your years in Queen that if you needed a kind of quiet, private side that was about a passion that was completely different from what you were doing with Queen, and that was something that you pursued on your own that was quiet, that was solitary.
Dr. MAY: Yes. It's always been a nice, refreshing change of scenery. All through those days in Queen, when we were on tour, normally I would get up in the morning and think hmm, I'm in Philadelphia for one of the few times in my life. You know, what will I do? Very often I would go up a tall building and get a lovely view of the city and go and take photographs.
But very often I would go out and try and find somebody who could sell me some stereo photographs because it was always a passion, and I found people all around the world. You'd be amazed, you know, Japan, South America, North America, all around Europe, there were people who were interested in stereo views and could trade with me and could find me some of these precious things I was looking for.
And a lot of the time, I was looking for T.R. Williams material, and T.R. Williams is the man who photographed scenes in our village and also wrote the poems that go with them, which are a very crucial part.
GROSS: So I have to tell you, in preparation for this interview, I was listening back to a lot of Queen recordings and thinking about how much fun some of them are and how dramatic some of them are and how they, like, mix, you know, like hard rock and music theater and opera.
So if it's okay with you, I'd like to talk a little bit about your work with Queen.
Dr. MAY: Sure.
GROSS: And I thought we'd start this part of the interview with the most famous song that you wrote, which is "We Will Rock You." So let's hear a little bit of it. Then we'll talk.
Dr. MAY: Oh, okay.
(Soundbite of song, "We Will Rock You")
QUEEN: (Singing) Buddy, you're a boy, make a big noise playing in the street, gonna be a big man some day. You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kicking your can all over the place, singing we will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you.
Buddy you're a young man, hard man, shouting in the street gonna take on the world some day. You got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place. We will, we will rock you. Sing it. We will, we will rock you.
Buddy, you're an old man, poor man...
GROSS: That's Queen's "We Will Rock You," which was written by my guest, Brian May, who was the lead guitarist for the band. So what inspired that song? I mean, it's been played at so many sports stadiums over the decades. What were you thinking about when you wrote it? Were you thinking of it as a sports anthem?
Dr. MAY: No, not really. I was thinking of it more as a rock anthem, I suppose, and a means of uniting an audience or taking advantage, you know, enjoying the fact that an audience is united. And I didn't realize that it would transfer to sports games. This is quite an amazing thing.
It's wonderful for me to see what "We Will Rock You" has done. You know, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions," of course, have kind of transcended the normal framework of where music is listened to and appreciated. They've become part of public life, which I feel wonderful about. It's fantastic to me if I go to a, you know, a football game or a soccer game or basketball or whatever or anyplace all around the world, and there it is.
And I think, my God. Most people don't even realize that I wrote it. Most people don't realize that it was written.
GROSS: That's right.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. MAY: It's sort of become one of those things that people think was always there. You know, it sort of goes back into pre-history. So in a way, that's the best compliment you could have for a song.
GROSS: Well, I think, you know, that's - if people don't even realize it was written, it's in part because it almost sounds like an old-school cheerleader cheer, you know, because...
Dr. MAY: Yeah. It's become part of the fabric of life.
GROSS:...of that stomp-stomp-clap thing and because it's a chant.
Dr. MAY: Yeah, that's right. Well, the stomp-stomp-clap thing, yeah, people think it was always there, but actually it wasn't. And I don't know how it got into my head.
All I can tell you is we played a gig sort of the middle of our career in a place called Bingley Hall near Birmingham. Now, Birmingham is the sort of home of heavy metal, as you probably know. You know, Sabbath and Slade and people come from there.
And it was a great night. People were just, the audience were just responding hugely, and they were singing along with everything we did. Now, in the beginning, we didn't relate to that. We were the kind of band who liked to be listened to and taken seriously and all that stuff.
So, people singing along wasn't part of our agenda. Having said that and then having experienced this wave of participation of the audience, particularly in that gig in Birmingham, we almost to a man sort of reassessed our situation.
I remember talking to Freddie about it and saying, look, you know, obviously, we can no longer fight this. This has to become something which is part of our show, and we have to embrace it, the fact that people want to participate. And really, everything becomes a two-way process now. And we sort of looked at each other and went, hmm, how interesting.
And he went away that night and to the best of my knowledge wrote "We Are the Champions" with that in mind. I went away and woke up the next morning with this...
(Soundbite of verbal stomp-stomp-clap)
Dr. MAY:...in my mind somehow because I was thinking to myself: What could you give an audience that they could do while they're standing there? And they're all crushed together, but they can stamp, and they can clap, and they can sing some kind of chant. So for some reason, it just came straight into my head, that "We Will Rock You."
And to me, it was a kind of uniting thing. It was an expression of strength. And the words came out very quickly. In fact, everything came out very quickly, and I think that's a good sign when you're writing a song. It should happen quickly, very often, and that means the flow is a good one.
And the words are something completely different. If you ask me what I was thinking of in the words of the verses, it's something different. It's - although it's related.
GROSS: About the boy who's told he's no good?
Dr. MAY: Yeah, it's about the development of a boy into a man and his dreams and how he sees himself and how he views his power in the world. And it's a - it's sort of a contemplative song, really, although it's a big chant with fist in the air. It's about balancing your power with acceptance, I think.
GROSS: So how did you record the stomp-stomp-clap so it would sound grand and reverberating, as opposed to three people, four people stomping their feet and clapping?
Dr. MAY: Well, I'm a physicist, you see.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. MAY: So I had this idea, if we did it enough times, and we didn't use any reverb or anything, that I could build a sound which would work.
We were very lucky. We were working in an old, disused church in North London, and it already had a nice sound, not an echoey sound but a nice, big, crisp sound to it. And there were some old boards lying around. I don't know what they were, but they just seemed ideal to stamp on. So we kind of piled them up and started stamping. And they sounded great anyway.
But being a physicist, I thought, well, supposing there were a thousand people doing this, what would be happening? And I thought, well, you would be hearing them stamping. You would also be hearing a little bit of an effect which is due to the distance that they are from you.
So I put lots of individual repeats on them, not an echo but a single repeat and at varying distances. And the distances were all prime numbers.
Now, much later on, people designed a machine to do this, and I think it was called Prime Time or something, but that's what we did. As we recorded each track, we put a delay of a certain length on it, and none of the delays were sort of harmonically related.
So what you get is there's no echo on it whatsoever, but the claps sound as though - they're spread around the stereo, but they're also kind of spread as regards distance from you. So you just feel like you're in the middle of a large number of people stamping on boards and clapping and also singing.
GROSS: That's amazing. Now, here's another really interesting thing to me about "We Will Rock You." It's the most famous song that you've written. It's a largely a cappella song. You come in for your guitar solo at the very end. So until, like, the very, very end, like, you're not even playing on it, and it's just kind of amazing that you as the guitarist would write a song that you're barely featured on.
Dr. MAY: Well, I'm featured stamping and clapping. And I'm featured singing, so...
GROSS: Well, yes, and you're very good at that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. MAY: Thank you, yeah. Well, we're all featured, yeah. Yeah, well, you see, songs aren't about guitars to me. Songs are about, truthfully, a song is about a singer in my opinion, and if the singer gets the idea across, then you're almost home and dry.
You know, you can make the most beautiful piece of production, and I love production. You know, production is a big part of my life. But I'm always aware that if you don't have the right singer, and he doesn't have the right feeling, that you're wasting your time.
So a song is a song to me, and it doesn't matter what song. It could be a piano accordion on it. You know, if it's the right song and the right singer, and you feel passion, that's what it's about.
The guitar - yeah, I didn't want us to be standard. I didn't want it to be like oh, here's a guitar solo, and then we sing another verse. I wanted it to be something stark and different. So it was very deliberate that I left the guitar solo to the end because that was a final statement and a different statement, taking it off in a completely different direction. It changes key into that piece, too, you know, so it's a whole different kind of shape. It was not a standard pop song.
GROSS: Okay, so let's just hear the end of "We Will Rock You," and we'll hear that guitar solo. Here it is.
(Soundbite of song, "We Will Rock You")
QUEEN: (Singing) We will, we will rock you. Everybody, we will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you. All right.
GROSS: So that's the end of "We Will Rock You," written by my guest, guitarist and singer and songwriter Brian May, who was one of the founding members of Queen. So...
Dr. MAY: I should - can I comment on the end of that?
GROSS: Yeah, please.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. MAY: Interesting that you play the end of the song. You can hear the guitar waiting in the wings. You can hear this little feedback note. And so the guitar is present, although it's not taking center stage, all through the last choruses, and then finally, it bursts upon the scene.
And you notice, Freddie goes all right, which means he's kind of handing over to the guitar, and we're in a different universe once the guitar starts, and that was the intention. And it's very sort of informal.
And you may notice - there's a lot of things to notice. You may notice that the last piece, the very last little riffs, are repeated, and they're not just repeated by me playing them again. They're repeated by cutting the tape and splicing it on again and again.
So - and that's deliberate, too. It's a way of getting a sort of a thing that makes you sit up towards the end. And then it stops. There is nothing after it, which I really enjoy.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. MAY: There's no big ending. It just stops and leaves you in mid-air, thinking, well, what happened there?
GROSS: My guest is Brian May, a co-founder and the lead guitarist of the band Queen. He's co-authored a new book featuring stereoscopic, 3-D photos from the 1850s. It's called "A Village Lost and Found." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of song, "Somebody to Love")
QUEEN: (Singing) Can anybody find me somebody to love?
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Brian May, founding member, lead guitarist of Queen, and he's since gone on to get his Ph.D. in astrophysics, and now he has a new book that features 1850s stereoscopic photographs of a small town in England. And it comes with a stereoscopic viewer...
Dr. MAY: It does indeed, which I designed.
GROSS: That you have to put together yourself, which he designed. It's kind of amazing.
Dr. MAY: Yes, we have an owl.
GROSS: So, you know, Queen is such an unusual mix of hard rock, music theater, and I'll throw in opera into that. And when you consider your average hard rock fan of the '70s and '80s, I would say most of them would be totally not caring about music theater or opera.
And it's amazing - it's surprising that you were all able to mix that together in a way that really just went over so big with hard rock fans. I mean, do you agree that that's an unusual mix?
Dr. MAY: It is an unusual mix. Again, it wasn't really deliberate. It wasn't planned. We were just sort of letting out all the stuff that's inside us. I think as kids, we were exposed to all kinds of stuff. You know, my parents were into classical music, and I heard a lot of that around me as I was growing up.
And radio, when we were kids, was incredibly different from what it was - from what it is today. I think our favorite program was "Uncle Mac's Children's Favourites." Now, a lot of English people will tell you about this.
Kids would write in and request their music, but it wasn't rock music. It wasn't pop music because it sort of didn't exist in those days. So people would write in and ask for something like "The Thunder and Lightning Polka."
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. MAY: Or "The Laughing Policeman," you know, or some kind of New Orleans jazz thing. All sorts of stuff was mixed in when we were kids, and we just lapped it all up. Mantovani - now, you probably don't know who Mantovani is.
GROSS: Oh yes, I do.
Dr. MAY: Oh, you do? Okay. He had the singing strings, you know, and it would be a vast sort of panoply of violins and cellos and violas, et cetera. And that was all influential on us. I know for a fact this all comes out in our music.
So on the one hand, we're influenced - we're spurred on by hearing the beginnings of rock music, Buddy Holly, bless his heart. You know, thank God for Buddy Holly. The Crickets. That's what just moved my body into wanting to do this.
But on the other hand, there's all this stuff which we'd been absorbing as kids, and it all sort of creeps back into our music.
GROSS: Now, when you teamed up with Freddie Mercury, who was of course the lead singer, the late lead singer of Queen, did he nevertheless push you in directions or, you know, nudge you in directions that you didn't expect to head in musically, theatrically, costumes?
Dr. MAY: Well, definitely costumes, yeah, I think. Yeah, Freddie was - I remember when Freddie first saw us play, before he was in our band, as it were. We were called Smile, and he came along, and he said it's great, it's wonderful, it's incredible. Your music's great. But you're not dressed right, you know, and you don't have enough lights, and you're not dramatic. You should be doing a show.
You know, so Freddie was very influential in moving us across into being something much more theatrical, much more designed to connect with an audience. And it was a great thing. Yeah, Freddie brought a lot of things to us, which I'm sure otherwise we never would have considered.
GROSS: My guest Brian May will talk more about Queen in the second half of the show. He's co-authored a new book featuring 3-D photos from the 1850s called "A Village Lost and Found." Here's one of his famous guitar solos, from the song "Killer Queen." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of song, "Killer Queen")
QUEEN: (Singing) Drop of the hat, she's as willing as, playful as a pussycat. Momentarily out of action, temporarily out of gas, she'll absolutely drive you wild. Wild. She's out to get you. She's a killer queen. Gunpowder, gelatine. Dynamite with a laser beam. Guaranteed to blow your mind. Anytime.
(Soundbite of music)
TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Brian May, a founding member and the lead guitarist of the band Queen. The lead singer, Freddie Mercury, died in 1991. Mercury was very theatrical in his performances and his songwriting. One of the most theatrical and unconventional songs Mercury wrote for Queen was "Bohemian Rhapsody."
How did he demo the song for you before the band started performing it?
Mr. MAY: He sat down at the piano and de-de-de-de-de-de-de, de-de-de-de-de, and he said and here's a bit where everything stops and there's an a cappella bit and then we come back in again. He had it all mapped out and that's the way it was done. The backing track was piano, bass and drums and I was sitting in the studio and it sounded great. It sounded intriguing and crisp and lively and challenging. And then, as the days went on and the weeks went on, we started overdubbing all the different vocal parts. And as you probably know, you |
You can set up a "local" account that lives only on the computer, but then you lose the ability to install apps from the Windows Store, among other key functions. By default, the account syncs settings to the cloud so that, if you log into another computer, preferences such as your Start menu, wallpaper, email account settings, calendar and contacts list come with you.
If you ask Cortana to "remind me to clean the toilet when I get home," and you have the digital assistant on your phone, it will tell you to clean the moment you arrive, but that only works if you have a Microsoft account. If you have more than one device in your life -- and who doesn't -- the benefits of using your free Microsoft account are obvious. Google's accounts provide a similar experience syncing your Chrome browser settings between different computers and your phone.
It is a little bit ridiculous that your kids need Microsoft accounts if you want to set them up as "child" users in Windows 10. If you don't want your elementary school student to have email, you can always register the child account yourself or you could give the kid a local account. However, the child accounts have really granular parental controls you won't get elsewhere. Having that account tied to Microsoft allows parents to log in, set restrictions and view a list of every website the kids have visited, every app they've used and what times they were on the computer.
Bottom Line
Yes, by default, Windows 10 sends some information back to Microsoft, but every piece of data it collects provides a tangible benefit to the user. Even collecting data to use in advertising is a user service, because it leads to higher quality ads. To its credit, Microsoft provides a way to turn off any of the data-collecting features, but you'd be better off leaving them in place.Oakland received some encouraging news to counter the approval of the team's move to Las Vegas.
Raiders general manager Reggie McKenzie confirmed Monday at the NFL owner’s meetings in Phoenix that quarterback Derek Carr is healing from his broken leg and will be ready for offseason workouts, ESPN reported.
Carr suffered a broken fibula in his right leg during the team's Week 16 win over the Colts and promptly underwent surgery three days later to repair the injury. He was initially given a recovery timetable of six to eight weeks, so he should be fully healthy when the team begins offseason activities April 17.
The Raiders finished last season with a 12-4 record and clinched a playoff berth for the first time since 2002 as Carr made his case for MVP honors before getting hurt.GENEVA (Reuters) - Iran and the European Union appeared to make progress in resolving outstanding differences on how to implement a landmark nuclear deal in talks in Geneva on Friday but the United States said discussions were not yet finalized.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani speaks to journalists during a news conference in New York September 27, 2013. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met a senior EU official in Geneva to iron out remaining practical details of the November 24 accord under which Iran agreed to curb its most sensitive nuclear work in return for some sanctions relief.
After the meeting, he told Reuters that the sides had found “solutions for every difference” but more consultations were needed before an agreement could be announced.
“Now we are taking the solutions... home, all of us. Hopefully tomorrow we can either confirm or not, but hopefully confirm,” he said.
The European Union liaises with Iran on behalf of six world powers - the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany - in diplomatic efforts related to Tehran’s nuclear work.
A spokesman for the EU, Michael Mann, said “very good” progress was made “on all the pertinent issues”, but added that results of the talks still had to be validated by more senior officials.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a news briefing that the technical talks were making good progress but reports that a deal had been finalized were inaccurate.
“There have been a few outstanding issues, but at this point, the reports that everything has been finalized are incorrect,” she said.
The seven countries need to agree when the nuclear accord goes into effect, meaning when the European Union and the United States ease economic sanctions in return for Iranian nuclear concessions, and how they will verify that Iran is meeting its end of the bargain.
PRACTICAL CHALLENGES
During years of on-and-off diplomacy, Iran has rejected western allegations its work has military goals, saying it needs nuclear power for energy generation and medical purposes.
In a series of implementation talks between nuclear experts and sanctions specialists from the seven countries and the EU, held since November 24, several issues linked to the accord have surfaced.
There appear to be disagreements over the sequence of how the sides implement the deal, and how much prior notice of Iran fulfilling its obligations should be given to western governments before they ease sanctions.
The talks have also run into problems over advanced centrifuge research, highlighting the huge challenges facing Iran and the six powers in negotiating the precise terms of the interim agreement.
Diplomats have said the sides aim to start implementing the agreement on January 20, to allow EU foreign ministers, scheduled to meet that day, to approve the suspension of EU sanctions covered by the deal. Preparations for that to take place were under way in Brussels, officials said.
The agreement is designed to last six months and the six powers hope to use the time to negotiate a final, broad settlement over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Underscoring skepticism about future diplomacy, one western diplomat said progress towards implementation of the November deal was a good sign, but difficulties remained in agreeing a broad accord to settle the decade-old dispute.
“It is welcome but we can’t lose sight of fact that it only really represents a cooling-off period,” he said.A Toronto couple is lucky to be alive after a large piece of ice was thrown from an overpass and onto their car in North York.
Late Tuesday night Millie Boella and her partner, Nicolas Piperno, were on Allen Road approaching Flemington Road when a huge piece of ice fell through the passenger side windshield and onto her lap.
The projectile shattered the front window and caused glass to spread around the interior of the car. Boella believes that someone deliberately tossed the ice onto their vehicle.
“We are both without any physical injuries, but I was very shaken up,” Boella wrote in a Facebook post.
According to the couple, when they reported the incident to police, they were told there wouldn’t be a criminal investigation because there were no witnesses.
No one was seriously injured.Genesis, Chapters 1–11
Summary
The Book of Genesis opens the Hebrew Bible with the story of creation. God, a spirit hovering over an empty, watery void, creates the world by speaking into the darkness and calling into being light, sky, land, vegetation, and living creatures over the course of six days. Each day, he pauses to pronounce his works “good” (1:4). On the sixth day, God declares his intention to make a being in his “own image,” and he creates humankind (1:26). He fashions a man out of dust and forms a woman out of the man’s rib. God places the two people, Adam and Eve, in the idyllic garden of Eden, encouraging them to procreate and to enjoy the created world fully, and forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
In the garden, Eve encounters a crafty serpent who convinces her to eat the tree’s forbidden fruit, assuring her that she will not suffer if she does so. Eve shares the fruit with Adam, and the two are immediately filled with shame and remorse. While walking in the garden, God discovers their disobedience. After cursing the serpent, he turns and curses the couple. Eve, he says, will be cursed to suffer painful childbirth and must submit to her husband’s authority. Adam is cursed to toil and work the ground for food. The two are subsequently banished from Eden.
Sent out into the world, Adam and Eve give birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain, a farmer, offers God a portion of his crops one day as a sacrifice, only to learn that God is more pleased when Abel, a herdsman, presents God with the fattest portion of his flocks. Enraged, Cain kills his brother. God exiles Cain from his home to wander in the land east of Eden. Adam and Eve give birth to a third son, Seth. Through Seth and Cain, the human race begins to grow.
Ten generations pass, and humankind becomes more evil. God begins to lament his creation and makes plans to destroy humankind completely. However, one man, Noah, has earned God’s favor because of his blameless behavior. God speaks to Noah and promises to establish a special covenant with Noah and his family. He instructs Noah to build an ark, or boat, large enough to hold Noah’s family and pairs of every kind of living animal while God sends a great flood to destroy the earth. Noah does so, his family and the animals enter the ark, and rain falls in a deluge for forty days, submerging the earth in water for more than a year. When the waters finally recede, God calls Noah’s family out of the ark and reaffirms his covenant with Noah. Upon exiting the ark, Noah’s family finds that the earth is moist and green again. God promises that from this new fertile earth will follow an equally fertile lineage for Noah and his family. But humankind must follow certain rules to maintain this favor: humans must not eat meat with blood still in it, and anyone who murders another human must also be killed. God vows never to destroy the earth again, and he designates the rainbow to be a symbol of his covenant.
One night, Noah becomes drunk and lies naked in his tent. Ham, one of Noah’s sons, sees his naked father and tells his brothers, Shem and Japeth. Shem and Japeth cover their father without looking at him. Upon waking, Noah curses Ham’s descendants, the Canaanites, for Ham’s indiscretion, declaring that they will serve the future descendants of Ham’s brothers. A detailed genealogy of the three brothers’ descendants is given. Many generations pass and humankind again becomes corrupt. Some men, having moved west to Babylon, attempt to assert their greatness and power by building a large tower that would enable them to reach the heavens. Their arrogance angers God, who destroys the edifice. He scatters the people across the earth by confusing their common language, thus forever dividing humankind into separate nations.
Analysis
The first eleven chapters of Genesis tell an authoritative story about the beginnings of the world that contains many contradictions. Scholars believe that the account is not the work of one author, but of a later editor or “redactor” who collected stories from various traditional sources into one volume. For instance, the author of the story of Cain and Abel shows a knowledge of Jewish sacrificial law that only a later writer would possess. Also, the narrator’s introduction of stories with phrases such as “This is the list of the descendants of Adam” (5:1) or “These are the descendants of Noah” (6:9) suggests these tales existed before the current writer or redactor collected them into their present form.The Chevy Bolt electric car will start at $29,995 after a federal tax credit of $7,500, GM announced today. For almost a year, GM had been saying that the car would start under $30,000, so it made that mark — just. That makes the Bolt the first electric car to achieve more than 200 miles of range for under $30k.
238 miles for $29,995
The catch is that buyers will need to pay at least $7,500 in federal income tax to receive the full benefit of the tax credit, as it is not a refundable credit. The standard disclosure about checking with your tax professional applies here, so it’s best to do your research before buying. For those looking to lease, the credit will get rolled into the price of the lease as the leasing company will receive the tax benefits. Some states offer additional credits as well.
Before the credit, the Bolt starts at $37,495 for the LT trim, with the higher-end Premier trim starting at $41,780. The base trim includes a number of standard features like a 10.2-inch touchscreen, the 60kWh battery that’s good for 238 all-electric miles according to the EPA, and the powertrain that’s good for 200 horsepower and 266 pound-feet of torque.
The Premier trim adds a 360-degree camera system, leather seats, several safety features like blind spot monitoring and rear cross traffic alert, and options for an upgraded audio system, forward collision alert, lane departure warning, and several other features.
The Bolt will go on sale later this year.
Correction: A previous version of the article listed the Premier trim at $40,905. That is before a $875 destination charge.At Hot Chips today, Microsoft's Xbox team unveiled details of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) that powers the newer, slimmer Xbox 360 250GB model. Produced on the IBM/GlobalFoundries 45nm process, it's fair to say that the new SoC (pictured above) is the first mass-market, desktop-class processor to combine a CPU, GPU, memory, and I/O logic onto a single piece of silicon. The goal of the consolidation was, of course, to lower the cost of making the console by reducing the number of different chips needed for the system, shrinking the motherboard, and reducing the number of expensive fans and heatsinks.
The SoC also makes the new Xbox design more power efficient, which is nice for consumers, but the real motivation behind boosting the console's efficiency is to reduce the size and cost of the power supply unit, and to realize the aforementioned savings on cooling apparatus.
Microsoft engineers presented the new SoC and apparently did a lot of the layout (or perhaps all of it) themselves. Given the unique requirement of consoles—the system must perform exactly like the original Xbox 360—and despite a five-year gap and multiple iterations of Moore's Law, the consolidation presented a few interesting challenges.
If you take a look at the block diagram above, you'll notice that most of the blocks are fairly obvious: the triple-core CPU is there, as is the ATI-designed GPU, and then you have the dual-channel memory controller and I/O. But the purpose of the "FSB replacement block" may not be obvious. This particular block essentially implements a kind of on-die "frontside bus" with the exact same latency and bandwidth characteristics as the older bus that connected the CPU and GPU when they were discrete parts.
It would have been easier and more natural to just connect the CPU and GPU with a high-bandwidth, low-latency internal connection, but that would have made the new SoC faster in some respects than the older systems, and that's not allowed. So they had to introduce this separate module onto the chip that could actually add latency between the CPU and GPU blocks, and generally behave like an off-die FSB.
Compared to the discrete, 90nm CPU/GPU combo in the original 360 from 2005, the new 45nm SoC draws over 60 percent less power and reduces the total silicon area by over 50 percent. The power and die area savings mean that Microsoft can do with a single fan and heatsink what previously required multiple heatsinks and fans.
The new SoC has only 372 million transistors, which is just not very many by today's standards. For reference, the old 65nm Pentium D 900 from 2006 has almost the exact same number (376 million), while the upcoming 45nm Core i5-760 has almost double the transistor count (774 million). So, despite the fact that the new SoC contains all the silicon brains of an Xbox 360, it's still very svelte by modern standards.
One thing that probably was not a factor in the new design is the infamous "Red Ring of Death" that afflicted earlier iterations of Microsoft's console. That problem has been solved for a while now, so the new SoC approach was really about making the console smaller, cheaper, cooler, and quieter.Connecticut state police are investigating an untimely death at Lime Rock park in Salisbury.
Police say Lee Duran, 73, of Archer Road in Lyme, died of injuries from crashing on the racetrack at Lime Rock Park Saturday afternoon during Lime Rock Park's Historic Festival 32.
He was competing in Group 2, Race 2 at about 2:15 p.m. when his 1934 MG PA race car veered off the track at the exit by Turn 7 and he lost control of the vehicle, according to Lime Rock. Witnesses reported that Duran's car flipped at least once before landing on its side. He was transported to Sharon Hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to Lime Rock.
The park released a statement Saturday expressing condolences.
"Lime Rock in particular and the world's racing fraternity in general are deeply saddened by the accident that claimed Lee Duran's life. A long time racer, Lee will be missed deeply," Lime Rock's statement said.
Other races were delayed as a result of the fatal crash, according to an event-goer.
The races, featuring vintage and historic cars, run through Monday and are part of a festival that has been a Labor Day weekend tradition at the park since 1983.
Duran was participating in a sanctioned race at the time, according to police. No other vehicles were involved in the crash.
The case is still under investigation.THIS IS JEFFK!!!!1 HAHAHA FOOLAD YOU, THIS IS JEFFK IN TOMORRROWINDS! I have been bringign you all of the hottast reviews of the new games for weeks and teh months to come, and now its time to talk about the upcoming MMORPGH "Tomorrowinds" from Betehsda Softwroks! I intarviewed Patrcik Haines and Tedd Howard from their a whale ago and they have finally gotten to the good idea of sending me the game to review. Which is what I did just today! TECHNICEL SPCEFICATIANS - Tommorrowwind is a game of powerful enterprases that requires a HI END computar from DELL. My mom wanted to get a COMPACT computer and I told her that there computars are crud on a cracker! They are too small to get anyathing done with except maybe some knitting software for GRANTMA! My system was the new Dell INTEL PEMPTIUM V GIGABIT WITH BLAST PROCESSAING. 500 MEGABITES OF RAM
BLAST PROCESSER
VGA MONITOR
NVIDIA GEE FORCE
AD LIB LIVE ENVIRONMENT ADIO
TV-D Drives AND CD-R DRIVES!
BEAT THAT PETAR MOLINEXU!
HARD DRIVES!
56 K MODEM WITH FACTS!!!!!!!!!!! This game won't play on your daddys hambone machine, so toss it out with the soup and get a Dell. Jerry asked if it could play on his speak and math and I told him no BUT MAYBE YOUR SPEAK AND SPELL FAGOT!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111 HAHA! PLOTS SUMMER - In this gaem you live anothers live and explore another world so there is no plot to be found on the horizons or on teh beaches. I made a cyclopses as my character and you can hit teh button and it says "CHARACTER STORAY" or something and I typed in this to get teh balls rolilng. I cruanched the numbars and came up with the maths to win. I AM A CYCLOPSEDS HALEING FROM TEH ISLEAND OF THE CYLCOPS KING. THE KING HAS LOST HSI BEERD AND IS SENT HIS NOBALIST WARRIOR TO FIND IT IN TEH MAGICAL LANDS OF TOMORROWIND. THAT IS ME, THE NOBALAST WARRIOR OF CYCOPS ISLAND. I AM TEH BRAWNIEST BRUTE TO EVER SET SAIL!!!!!!!!!!! I started out on teh boat from Cyclopse Island and a guard comes into tell me that the breakfast is on teh table and to get to the top of the boat. I went into a building and (we were at a dock for breakfast) talked to teh monk who asked me who I am and I said JEFFK! and I am rady to whaled my two fists of furry for the Cylcops King and his beerd! I picked skills galoar. I punchad this guy until the cows came home to roost and he never dorpped a health pack. Being a Cyclops Warrior is a hard job and the most improtant skill is obviously AXES. Also important is FISTS which in this fruity endevar is called "hands to hands". Cyclopses are also ATHLETIC and QUIOCK ON THERE FEET (ACROBADS). Magic is against the laws of the land on Cyclops Island! This part of the game is SO BORING. PEople tell you to go evarywhare and then you go and talk to this guy and he gives you SASS. So I punchad him in the head with my furry and he said "oh No JEFFK! YOUR CRAIMS AGAINST MY HUMINATY HAVE BEN REPORTED!" but he let me slide with a warning evary time I punched him. HE gave me a bunch of stuipd papers and told me to go outside and get some fresh air in teh town. SO MY QUEST FOR TEH CYCLOPS KINGS BEERD BEGAN! The town was vary crowded with nair do whales and they were very contrary when I was speekaing to them. "WHERE IS TEH HAT STORE BUSTAR?" I would say and they would say. "There are maany intaresting sites and smels in Sdayayeen, so haves a looksee in the booksee mistar cylcops!" Old pointy eared lady leads the chases and she was as meen as tehy come! The AI is bad to the bones. I got fed up with their attitude and gave them a sandwich to snack on...a NUCKAL SANDWICH!!!!!!!!1 First I punchad a little dwarf type guy with a pointy face and cat eyas and he chased me all around town, the guardss were also ni a tizzy by this point and I knew that as strong as a cyclops is I would not be a match for thes grimey guards!!1 They got stuck in the bogs for a whale but they figuraed out the lava tricsk! I yellad back at the people chasing me around the countrayside that if they caught up with me there would be a frightfall scare in there picnic biscuit! Unfortunateyl Tomorrowinds does not support my Dell voice to text microphone so they did not undarstand me like Jerry did when he chased me all over school for wiping a booger on his hypar collar shirt. He fell in a mud puddle when I tripped him and this gave me the source of insipiration. I ran around a bog and tricked the guards and the townspoeple into getting caught on teh trees in the bog! It works in the lava with the Quake bots but they figuared it out and came after me again! I ran around them and tried hiding out but they caught me peaking through the branches in the bog and it was Smokeys and the Bandits all ovar again! They were quite a gang on my heels and the pursuit was giving me heartbeeps. OH NO! They's spotted me hieding in the bogs and are onto my plans! Finally I lost them in the hills and I circaled back into teh town thinking that with evaryone gone I can search their housas for the Cyclops Kings Beard! They were smart customars with a GOOD AI though and they thought abuot locking their doors before chasing me into teh hills. Even my mighty psylcops strength could not batter through those hinjas. Finally I found a door that would opan and there was a smart lad with point elf fagort ears behind a counter with all sorts of odds and ends on it. I talked to this customar and he siad he had some warez to offar. Haha, no, not Doom II or Raise of the Triad, it was armors and swords this time. A Cyclosp like me has no use for armors and swords but a janty hat would come in handy whit the ladies so I asked him about his hat stocks. He has three hats for me and I tried on one but I accidentilly bought the hat insted of just trying it on and the transauction went awry! This was a raw deal for Cyclops JeffK and cyclopsis nevar stand for skulldougary. Down gose the heroe of teh tale! I punched him and he said "OHHH I KNOW YOU ARE TROUBLE MISTAR CYCLOPS JUST CALM DOWN AND I WON'T CALL THE GUARDSS!!!!!1" and I said "TOO BAD FOR YOU BUSTAR ALL OF THE GARDS ARE OUT IN THE HILLS LOOKING FOR A BEARD COMANDO WHO IS'NT THEREE!!!!!!!!111 HAHAHAA MORE PUNCHES ON TEH MENU FOR YOU SERVED UP FRSEH!!!!" My careful stratergy fell apart than becuase the game is gay and has peoiple who spawn upstares at the shops and houses when you start punching teh bad guys. They all came runing down and joined the fiesty farcas with me. I punchad one lady out cold but it was too much evan for my combat expartese and brave cyclopses honor. At last they brought me down to teh floor with their trickary. VAREITIES - First of all thsi game is vary short. From teh moment I stepped into my Cylcops boots to teh moment I fell on teh floor it was only twenty minuets. Even Toe Jam and Erals lasted an hour!!!1 There was no continues ether which makes the game HARD. I know it si coming out for Xbox ladeis but you could put some save crsytals or type wraiter ribbons in there for me, thank you sir. Teh fun of the game for most fagorts like Jerry is that you cna play all kinds of differant adverntures, althoguh why you would want to be anaything but a Cyclops is beyond me!! Here are some of the things you can play: A Ninja: You could recovar Jackie Chans Pajamas or something, I dont know, Jerray likes the Ninjas.
You could recovar Jackie Chans Pajamas or something, I dont know, Jerray likes the Ninjas. A Piraet: Yarrrrrr! There are not a lot of boats in teh town, just one, so you could make it your pirate ship and hiost anchers.
Yarrrrrr! There are not a lot of boats in teh town, just one, so you could make it your pirate ship and hiost anchers. A Polar Baer: Permanfrost means teh ground is always frozan undar the topsoils.
Permanfrost means teh ground is always frozan undar the topsoils. Peanut M & Ms: YUO ARE ON A QUAST TO PICK THE NEW MAND AND M COLOR!!!!!!!!!!! WILL IT BE RED?
YUO ARE ON A QUAST TO PICK THE NEW MAND AND M COLOR!!!!!!!!!!! WILL IT BE RED? JON OR ADRAIN CARMACK: Find yuor lost careers in teh mud you vidoe bugses!
Find yuor lost careers in teh mud you vidoe bugses! Maegaman: Doctor Whily has stolen the princess again, better charge up your swords yuo blue doarks!
Doctor Whily has stolen the princess again, better charge up your swords yuo blue doarks! A Navy SEAL: Go into teh cave where Osmar Ben Lauden is keeping his chest full of spell scrulls and set them on fyar. NEVAR FORGET: 8/11!!!
Go into teh cave where Osmar Ben Lauden is keeping his chest full of spell scrulls and set them on fyar. NEVAR FORGET: 8/11!!! Teh Matrix: Humans are a disease dwarevs and elves are teh cure!
Humans are a disease dwarevs and elves are teh cure! Max Paine: The bog crab killed my family and now I'm goaing to break up his drugs cartell!!
The bog crab killed my family and now I'm goaing to break up his drugs cartell!! Nevar Winter Knights: Cast Magik missle at teh girls lockar room and maybe your mom wont have to go to the mixer with you fagort. Teh list goes on but use yuor imagination like Colonel Laforge says on Star Trak: reading rainbow. THEAR ARE A LOT OF DISAPIONTMENTS: First of all and most improtantly you cant get fat, you can only drink potsions and not eat stakes and lam chops and it would take too long to drink potions to get fat. CYLCOPSES NEED A BIG BELLAY TO BE STRONG: I TOLD THEM TAHT IN TEH HORRABLE INTERVIEW AND THEY INGORED ME. No wondar I was in the grave in not ime, I was as skinny as a tadpole.
This wsa supposad to be a MMROPG, but ware were teh MMRs? Not O I can tell you taht budday!!1 I typed SOW PLZ at least five billian times and no one helped and no JMs ever came to healp me out of a tihgt spot. When I took my pants off I tried to auction them but no one was buying, THEY WHERE BRAND NEW PANTS, FRESH OFF THE BOAT!!!!! What is a clycops going to do with pants? Not sell them in this mess heap that's for sure! GAME REVAEIWED COPRYIGHT JEFFK 2002!!!! EMALE Me Your Questions HERE. HERE. HERE!!!11111 OR VOISIT MY HOAM PAGE!!!Kendall Waston was unapologetic for his controversial tackle on Timbers winger Dairon Asprilla after Sunday’s final whistle in Portland.
The Whitecaps defender said he didn’t hear the whistle. He also claimed his tackle was clean because he got the ball.
It’s highly unlikely the MLS Disciplinary Committee will take such a kind view of the incident, whether or not they believe that Waston didn’t hear the whistle, which seems plausible in the din of Portland’s Providence Park.
If Waston escapes with only the automatic one-game ban for the red card he was shown by referee Ted Unkel, the Caps (6-6-2) will have to consider themselves lucky.
Put the shoe on the other foot and Caps fans would be screaming for a multi-game suspension if a Timbers player tackled Kekuta Manneh, or anyone for that matter, in such a manner.
Waston launched himself into the challenge. It was from a bad angle, using both feet, using unnecessary force. You can keep going down the checklist of poor taste. Also: there was simply no need for it.
It was a moment of pure red mist at the end of a frustrating afternoon. Not that Waston saw it that way. He was asked if he needs to show more control in such a situation.
“Control? This is football,” he said. “And if I have to tackle in the first second I’m going to do it the same at the end. If we’ve got to defend, then we’ve got to defend.”
That’s maybe an admirable sentiment late in a close game, and against a player showing more than a mild interest to continue dribbling.
Carl Robinson, the Caps coach, said after the game that he hadn’t yet seen what happened. He conceded that Waston “without a doubt needs to show more emotional control,” although he couched that response in a thinly veiled commentary on the referee.
“In big games like this — 20,000 great fans, putting you under pressure, putting everyone under pressure — you need big people, big personalities to be involved,” Robinson said.
Tying a couple of bad calls and the resulting frustration to Waston’s tackle is of course hogwash, although it’s true that Unkel was out to lunch in the second half.
Waston’s been an easy guy for fans to rally behind because he’s so likable, and it does often feel as though he’s punished for being 6-foot-5 and 200 pounds. He’s racked up 21 yellow cards and three reds in 49 games. He might not have deserved some of those, but Sunday’s tackle is firmly on him.
We’ll wait and see how much it will cost the Caps. Waston leaves this week to join Costa Rica for the Copa America Centenario. He’ll serve his suspension after that.
Discipline problems?
Whitecaps suspensions in 2016
Christian Bolanos*
Jordan Smith (straight red)
Kianz Froese*
Masato Kudo*
Matias Laba (straight red)
Kendall Waston (two yellows)
Kekuta Manneh*
Fraser Aird (two yellows)
Kendall Waston (straight red)
*Retroactive bans by the MLS Disciplinary Committee
mweber@postmedia.com
twitter.com/ProvinceWeberFacebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is facing a US Senate inquiry over claims that the social network has been filtering conservative news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fallen under scrutiny from a US Senate committee over the alleged political bias of the site’s Trending news feature. A GOP senator questioned Facebook’s practice of filtering news, accusing it of “misleading” the public.
The chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Senator John Thune, has asked Zuckerberg to answer questions regarding allegations that Facebook’s team prevented conservative news stories from appearing in its Trending news section.
“If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook’s assertion that it maintains ‘a platform for people and representatives from across the political spectrum’ misleads the public,” Thune wrote, stressing Facebook’s “enormous influence on users’ perceptions of current events, including political perspectives.”
Facebook workers routinely prevented conservative news from trending – former employee https://t.co/F9DfryxWNWpic.twitter.com/cl68mO00lj — RT America (@RT_America) May 10, 2016
Zuckerberg has until May 24 at the latest to provide his response for the committee’s inquiry. In his letter, Thune has also asked the social network giant’s CEO to “arrange for your staff, including employees for Trending Topics, to brief committee staff on the issue.”
Thune’s questions range from covering Facebook’s organizational structure to “steps for determining included topics” into its news curation to the network’s management probe into claims about its team’s politically motivated filtering of news.
“Have Facebook news curators in fact manipulated the content of the Trending Topics section, either by targeting news stories related to conservative views for exclusion or by injecting non-trending content?” Thune asked.
Read more
In another question, the GOP senator asked what would be Facebook’s next “steps to hold the responsible individuals accountable” should the allegations be “substantiated.”
The senator also questioned Facebook’s statement issued Monday, following Gizmodo’s report exposing the “news curator” removing right-wing topics such as Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and the Conservative Political Action Conference from making the site’s Trending news list.
Facebook rebuffed the allegations saying that its “guidelines do not permit the suppression of one viewpoint or another or one news outlet or another.”
“How does Facebook determine compliance with these guidelines,” Thune asked.
Thune requested that Facebook provide a list of stories removed from the Trending Topics list since January 2014, along with whether the company has been monitoring such decisions. He asked the company to als share statistics about how many of the injected stories had not in fact been trending.
Facebook has released a statement in response to the committee’s inquiry, stating that it “looks forward to addressing” Thune’s questions. The company has vowed to “take immediate steps to fix” its operational practices if they are “inadequate.”
Here's Facebook's latest statement in full. pic.twitter.com/11u1U8Ok9W — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 10, 2016
The Senate Committee’s inquiry came a day after anonymous former Facebook employees accused the social media network of bias in news reporting.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” a former curator told Gizmodo. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic, or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” he added.Scott Ferguson has resigned as the CEO of Halifax's Trade Centre Ltd. to take a new job at the helm of the World Trade Centers Association in New York.
Ferguson said the opening first hit his radar six months ago and people within the organization encouraged him to apply; he recently learned he was the successful candidate.
He said the opportunity was one he couldn't pass up.
Opportunity comes calling
"I've learned in business and in life, timing is something that you don't control and when opportunities come along, you need to decide if you're going to take advantage of them or not," he said in an interview Tuesday.
While he leaves at a time when the new convention centre in Halifax is preparing to open, Ferguson said the move is in no way a reflection of doubt about the prospects of the new multi-million dollar project on Argyle Street. With dozens of conferences already booked, he said the new site is in good hands.
"We've been from the very beginning, I think, been very clear and open in a very transparent manner about what the business case was, what our business projections look like, how we were going to develop the centre," he said.
"I think we've done everything we said we would do over that period of time."
Tasks of the new role
At his new job, Ferguson will report to a board and manage an office of 15-20 people.
The World Trade Centers Association includes 300 world trade centres in 100 countries.
The mandate and focus is to promote trade and investment opportunities worldwide, which entails bringing in new members to the organization and also working with existing members to promote trade, Ferguson said.
"In one sense, it's similar to what I've been doing, which has been collaborating and connecting with |
racism and rape culture that cannot be challenged on campus without calls of "censorship", or "political correctness run amok".
8. Freedom of speech does not mean that we are never allowed to analyse or re-interpret culture. The occasional use of "trigger warnings" on campus, for example, has been wilfully misinterpreted by those who did not grow up with them as an attempt to censor classic literature. In fact, trigger warnings are a call for cultural sensitivity and a new way of interpreting important texts. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, is part of what studying the humanities has been about for decades. Back in real life, nobody is going around slapping "do not read: contains awful men" on the cover of Jane Eyre. There are no undergraduate mini-Hitlers burning books in Harvard Yard. The people who've got carried away by outrage here are the people devoting endless column inches to denouncing trigger warnings.
9. Freedom of speech does not mean that the powerful must be allowed to speak uninterrupted and the less powerful obliged to listen. Across Britain and America, students are organising to interrupt the speeches of transphobic and racially insensitive speakers. Black Lives Matter protesters have disrupted Democratic campaign events, demanding that their own agenda gets a hearing. Some of the most pernicious liberal attacks on the new radicalism imply that students and young people should never complain about the views of a particular speaker, educator or pubic figure, and that the place of the young is to listen, not to question, and certainly not to protest. ‘Respect My Freedom of Speech’ has become a shorthand for ‘shut up and stop whining.’
10. Freedom of speech is more than a rhetorical fig-leaf to allow privileged people to avoid thinking of themselves as prejudiced. Freedom of speech, if it is to mean anything, is the freedom to articulate ideas and the possibility that those ideas will make an impact.
11. Freedom of speech is the principle that all human beings have a right to express themselves without facing violence, intimidation or imprisonment. That’s it. That’s all. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it’s genuinely under threat in many nations and communities around the world. Somehow, those who are so anxious to protect the free speech of powerful white men and regressive academics fall silent when women are harassed, threatened and assaulted for expressing opinions online, or when black protestors are attacked by police.
There is, in fact, a free speech crisis in the West. The crisis is that the very principle of free expression is being abused in order to silence dissenting voices and shut down young progressives. The language of free speech is being abused in order to dismiss the arguments of those whose voices have been silenced for far too long.
These are truths that should outrage everyone who pays more than lip-service to liberalism. In the name of free speech, those who have always enjoyed the largest platforms and audiences are defending their entitlement to do so without challenge or criticism. The free speech delusion has gone unchallenged long enough. It’s time to end this wilful stupidity.The gaunt man was sitting on a bench in the overgrown park at the corner of Chene and Ferry streets in Detroit, drinking an Old Milwaukee tallboy he’d bought at a Yemeni party store, and trying to peddle an old point-and-shoot film camera for $3. He was an ex-con who’d served 15 years for using a knife to rob a chicken shack of $81, so he had no other way to make money.
“My name is J.C. Hood, all good in the neighborhood,” the man introduced himself. “My people have a house over here they let me stay in. It’s an old house, almost on its last legs. No utilities, no heat, no water, no lights. No phone. I got a propane heater and a bed. I eat out and I bathe out, at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen at Mount Elliot and St. Paul. I earn about $5,000 a year, hustling. I collect cans at Tigers games. I ride my bike, man, for hours, looking for stuff. I found a pair of boots. I can get $5. Houses, doors be open. You go in there, you can find a lot of stuff. Foreclosures, people just leave their stuff there. I’ve found TVs, stereos.”
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There was a time, Detroiters claim, when only New York’s Park Avenue generated more retail dollars per square foot than Chene Street. In the middle of the 20th century, Chene (pronounced “Shane” after the French habitant who farmed there when the land still belonged to the Sun King) was a Polish Broadway, a self-contained ethnic village where housewives bought furniture from Moliszewski, sausage from Jaworski’s Butcher Shop, and dressed the family at Rathenau’s. Every Saturday, Polish truck farmers and Jewish vegetable peddlers set up stalls at the Chene-Ferry Market.
The 20th century was simply an urban interlude in this part of Detroit, between colonial agriculture and post-industrial dereliction. The Chene-Ferry Market closed 20 years ago, leaving only a fading sunrise mural. The local bank slid down the retail scale, becoming a Coney Island stand, then an empty storefront. Since 1980, the neighborhood’s population has dropped from 2,571 to 623, while the ratio of occupied to vacant houses went from 9-1 to 2-1. The only difference between the East Side of Detroit and the rural South is reliable cellphone service.
J.C. Hood is trying to salvage every meager penny out of the wealth remaining in this impoverished city. Measuring his financial goals in minutes and hours, he’s looking for just enough money to pay for the next $1.99 can of beer, the next 99 cent bag of potato chips. On a larger scale, that’s exactly what Detroit’s state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr is doing, as he determines whether to declare the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Orr’s actions are just as short-sighted, and just as futile, as those of the hustlers at Chene and Ferry. Bankruptcy is not going to save Detroit, or solve any of its financial problems.
Orr has only to read his own Proposal for Creditors to see that Detroit is no longer a viable municipality. Since 1950, 1.2 million people have left Detroit – enough to constitute the 10th-largest city in the United States. (Detroit itself, with 684,799, is 18th.) Detroit is the poorest city in the United States: Its median household income of $27,862 is half the national average. Despite its population crash, Detroit is the same size it was in the ’50s. So the police still need to patrol 140 square miles of streets, the public works department needs to pave those streets, and the water system still needs to maintain the network of pipes underneath. But there’s no way a city of 680,000 people who work as short-order cooks, home healthcare aides and daycare providers can support an infrastructure built for 1.8 million who worked as autoworkers, engineers and mechanics. (And that’s those who do work – the official unemployment rate is 18.6 percent, according to Orr’s report, although some estimates put it at 50 percent.) Property tax revenues have decreased 20 percent over the last five years – even though Detroit has some of the highest tax rates in Michigan: a 2.4 percent income tax rate and a 1.3 percent property tax rate. As Orr notes, “this tax burden is particularly severe because it is imposed on a population that has relatively low levels of per capita income.”
(Detroit also got stiffed by the state, which promised revenue sharing if the city would cut its income tax from 3 percent to 2.4 percent. While Detroit kept up its end of the deal, the economic troubles of the 2000s, when Michigan was mired in a decade-long recession, prevented the state from making all its agreed-on payments. Detroit has missed out on $200 million a year in state money and about $50 million a year in income taxes. The city began running budget deficits in 2004-05, and is now $326 million in the red.)
For all Detroiters pay, 40 percent of their streetlights are burned out, and their understaffed police department solves only 8.7 percent of its cases – one reason Detroit has the highest crime rate of any big city. A small upper crust remains in Detroit, occupying beautiful Tudor neighborhoods on the city’s fringes. In East English Village – one of those Tudor neighborhoods – residents pay a private company to plow the streets. The city is in a financial death spiral: so overtaxed and unlivable that most people who can afford to get out are moving to the suburbs, further reducing the tax base and requiring more cuts. Detroit is no longer a city, in the sense of a self-supporting entity: It’s the lower-class district of a metropolitan area, abandoned to its dwindling devices. Demographers estimate the population will bottom out at a half-million, but a Detroit News poll found that 40 percent of Detroiters expect to leave in the next five years.
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John Givans, who lives in one of the few remaining sturdy houses near Chene and Ferry, would like to sell out and buy a farm in the country, where the schools are better for his tween daughters, but he doesn’t think his home will fetch enough – the median sale price in Detroit is $11,100.
“The city services out here are nonexistent,” he said. “It’s almost like a farm now. I got rabbits, pheasants, raccoons. If I could get rid of the crime, I’d never leave.”
Since Detroit can’t maintain the accouterments of a modern American city with its current tax base, the most practical solution to its problems is regional consolidation. Detroit should merge with its suburbs, as Miami, Indianapolis and Toronto did. A megacity composed of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties would contain 3.9 million people, making it the second-largest city in the United States. Detroit could consolidate its police and fire services -- which consume nearly 60 percent of its general fund budget -- with surrounding departments.
So far, that has been politically impossible, because of black-white resentment and urban-suburban enmity dating back to the 1967 riot, and encouraged by such race-baiting politicians as Detroit Mayors Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick, and Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson. Detroiters didn’t want to share power with the suburbs, and suburbanites didn’t want to share tax revenue with Detroit. Now that Detroit has become a ward of the state, with Mayor Dave Bing’s powers usurped by the emergency manager, the city’s objection is moot. Suburbanites would still resist, but they’d benefit from the efficiency of a single local government, and from a stronger central city, which would make the entire area more attractive to out-of-state business. As for complaints that the suburbs would be forced to subsidize the city’s underfunded-by-$3.5-billion public pension system, well, hundreds of thousands of suburbanites grew up in Detroit, where they were educated by schoolteachers and kept safe by cops and firefighters who are now in danger of having their retirement benefits cut. Moving across 8 Mile Road should not relieve them of all responsibilities to the city they fled.
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Unless Detroit and its suburbs start cooperating, Michigan will continue losing jobs, residents and college diplomas faster than any state in the nation.
The most hopeful Detroiter I know is a young Polish-American woman who grew up in the suburbs, graduated from Harvard and, in an act of reverse white flight, bought a Mies van der Rohe condo by the Detroit River. She believes that her generation can bridge the divide across 8 Mile, which is culturally, sociologically and economically even wider than the street’s name suggests.
“The younger generation is not as racially divided,” she said. “A lot of it is pop culture. If you grew up in the ’80s, 'The Cosby Show' was on TV. We didn’t fight those battles during and after the riot. We don’t carry those scars.”
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They don’t, but Detroit does.Japanese Title: JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken (2012)
Related: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders (sequel)
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood (old version)
Similar: Fist of the North Star
Gurren Lagann
Watched in: Japanese
Genre: Supernatural Vampire Action Adventure
Length: 26 episodes
Positives:
Humorous melodrama from over the top characters, particularly the villain, Dio.
Such MANLINESS.
Stylish retro throwback art.
Great opening theme for part one.
Negatives:
The comedic melodrama lessens the impact of serious moments.
The second half is weaker mainly due to a duller villain than the first half.
The rules of the supernatural power ‘Hamon’ are poorly established.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure may just be the manliest tale— No, it’s MANLIEST; if your beard doesn’t grow an inch when you say it, then you’re doing it wrong. So, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure may just be the MANLIEST tale ever told in anime. It follows Jonathan Joestar, JoJo for short, and his aristocratic lineage’s fight against a cursed mask that turns humans into vampires, MANLY vampires. 19th century England invaded by manga logic of blocking blades with bare hands, powering up, and sculpted arse cheeks, best sums up JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
The adventure starts with the arrival of Dio, the son of a thief, who helped JoJo’s father years ago. Dio is a douche, a MANLY douche intent on taking over JoJo’s life of luxury. In public, he acts a gentleMAN, but is aggressive and cruel behind the scenes – he burns JoJo’s dog alive – and will do anything for power. Once Dio dons the cursed mask, turning vampire, JoJo makes it his mission to defeat Dio. You really aren’t prepared for the levels of MAN involved in the conflict between JoJo and Dio. Even draining blood is MANLY; rather than the sexy bite to the neck, vampires sink their fingers into one’s flesh like hoses to extract blood. This anime is Gears of War if it embraced its homoeroticism.
They get into fights and have over the top rivalries with smack talk. It works well here because the anime makes its style clear and that you should not take it too seriously. The, let’s be honest, cheerleader of the group, Speedwagon, delivers lines of melodrama even Shakespeare couldn’t dream of. (He and the narrator could do with less telling of the action that we can already see.) Even the tragic moments are overly melodramatic on purpose. This does lessen the impact of serious and emotional scenes, however, which may bother some viewers.
To counter vampirism, heroes can harness the power of ‘Hamon,’ which seems to invent its rules as it goes along. Hamon starts as a Qi-like power that sends out energy waves, but later has magnetic properties and the power of foresight. Huh? This gives the impression that the writer didn’t plan the parameters of the power early in the series. Adding new effects at later stages is fine, but it needs to make sense. If you establish that a character’s superpower is ice control, you can’t add telekinesis out of nowhere. That said, this wasn’t a serious issue, just jarring each time.
My other complaint is the weaker second half when the story jumps two generations to JoJo’s grandson, Joseph Joestar – so, still JoJo – where the new villain isn’t as interesting as Dio. Without the personal connection between hero and villain, I found my engagement slipping, particularly when the narrative beats are so similar between parts one and two. It was still enjoyable, though I would advise against a marathon of both parts in succession. Have a break in between.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is such a campy series that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. Before I started, I didn’t know much about this anime beyond the supernatural premise in England. I expected a Brothers Grimm sort of adventure; instead, I got the MANLIEST anime in existence.
Art – High
JoJo uses a vibrant colour pallet that changes with the mood and tone of the scene. With turquoise, violet, scarlet, and many more, this anime has more colours than a Mardi Gras parade, suiting its campy style perfectly. The action is heavily stylised through texture, colour blocks, background streaks that don’t look awful (if you can believe it) and audio text, 60s Batman style. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is how you do a retro throwback without looking dated. My only real complaint is the inconsistency of animation; in calm scenes, the animation can be jerky, while it’s much smoother during action.
Sound – High
The audio quality is high in all departments. Of note are the first opening theme and the melodramatic voice acting.
Story – High
A multi-generational story of MANLY MEN fighting the undead with power of MANLINESS. The heroes and first villain are hilarious to watch, flexing at each other in the middle of a fight with more homoeroticism than a Mr Universe contest. I found the first half more engaging than the second.
Overall Quality – High
Recommendation: Watch it unless you dislike exaggerated characters and campiness. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a fun, retro anime that doesn’t take itself too seriously as it flexes its biceps the size of Britain in your face.
(Request reviews here. Find out more about the rating system here.)
Awards: (hover mouse over each award to see descriptions; click award for more recipients)
Positive:
Negative: None
AdvertisementsA couple of weeks ago I was teasing splendid Kotaku writer Jason Schreier after he tweeted describing Dishonored as “still underrated.” Underrated?! The PC version has a Metacritic rating of 91! There’s only one score (or “rating”, you might say) under 8/10, and that review is silly. This is one of the most highly rated games ever!
Since I’ve started replaying it, once again attempting to rescue the young empress from an evil regime, I keep thinking to myself, “Man, this game was underrated.” Sorry Jason.
I think I’ve ended up realising the game was primarily underrated by me, and I bloody loved it. As I once again explore its epic missions in intricate detail I’m noticing more and more that makes me recognise just how outstanding the game really is. Why isn’t this the game we cite when we complain about all other games?
For this first retrospective, rather than talk about the larger story or the details of the missions, I’m going to pick three of the features in the game that make me want to give the screen a round of applause. Celebrate them, because they deserve celebration.
The Background Conversations
Dunwall, Dishonored’s city setting, has been deservedly lauded for its depth and breadth, each sprawling mission location replete with hidden routes, secrets to discover, and multiple paths to take on any situation. You can sneak to the rooftops and silently leap and Blink your way to your goal, or tramp through sewers, or possess rats and sneak through tiny passageways, or blunder in guns blazing, or push your luck and attempt to stealth your way along the streets busy with guards. It’s madly rare that a game genuinely gives you such choice, and just so well delivered here. But there’s something else that becomes very apparent as you do this.
The chatter. Now, nearly all games offering any notion of player freedom tend to have banter between NPCs. Indeed, the games of which this is a spiritual successor, like Deus Ex and Thief, had guards nattering away, dropping tasty tidbits of information or amusing anecdotes. But Dishonored raises the bar very significantly. Firstly, there’s quite so much of it. So many defined characters despite being stock-guards, their informal conversations well worth stopping to hear. Second, it’s well acted, smartly written – these chats give so much life to the city, so much background to the major characters, or just a pleasing laugh. Rather than being filler, they feel like welcome story, stuff you’re glad you didn’t miss.
And thirdly, it adds a real effect to how you want to play the game. Being offered the freedom to be a wanton murderer, zealous pacifist, or anything in-between, I often find my decision is driven far more by my own proclivities or mood than anything offered by the game. Here, hearing these people with lives and thoughts and questions – now there’s a far greater sense of consequence to my actions over the more usual headshotting to have them shut up. Playing entirely pacifist as I am (I plan to write a lot more about this in another post), I’m even feeling some guilt about tranquing some of these people. (With others, the arseholes, I’m taking great delight.)
So much personality in the city, stuff that is entirely ignorable, requires a lot of dedication from the developers – to write and record quite so much that you know most players will never hear is a big deal. It really pays off in Dishonored. Which brings us to…
The Heart
There is no chance that I can improve upon Paul Walker’s stunning article about Dishonored’s Heart from 2012 but I shall jot a few thoughts of my own here.
Where the conversations mentioned above give so much life to the city, the Heart gives it – well – it gives the city its heart.
I so love that what is ostensibly an in-game compass, designed to point toward hidden upgrades, ends up being something so much more, something so much deeper. The Heart, gruesomely an actual human heart clutched in Corvo’s hand, augmented with twisted wires and tubes, tells you of the city and city inhabitants’ souls.
Point it at anything in the game and the incredible voice acting of April Stewart will describe it to you in distinctly emotional tones. This can be a building, an area of the city, a random faceless guard, a major enemy or ally, anything. And what you hear doesn’t just flesh things out, but changes your mind.
Take Admiral Havelock – an organiser of the Loyalist Conspiracy, owner of the group’s meeting place, the Hound Pits Pub, and the man who arranges your freedom from prison at the start of the game. He appears, early on, to be an austere and grave good man. But use the Heart on him in those first few hours and you’ll learn of a man who has seen more corpses than anyone else in the story put together, and, we’re told, “killed whales and men for profit, and pleasure.” He’s a monster. Click again, and you might learn about his younger brother, a gentle child and artist, who died aged 9. “Havelock loved him truly.” He’s a broken man. Then, “He has the bloodlust. He tried to seize control of the military after the empress… she… the empress was murdered.” Then what are his real motives? Who is this man who’s leading the cause for which you’re fighting?
Finding this out this way is unique. I need not have used the Heart on him at all, nor indeed on anything else in the game. I could have taken him at face value, worried at some of his conversations with Lord Pendleton, but not known more. In learning more, I’ve learnt not crucial plot information, but conflicting emotional knowledge about a complex man.
Oh, and that last line I quoted? That’s fascinating too. Those ellipses are the Heart’s usually authoritative and mellifluous voice catching, hesitating, seemingly not sure whether to share something, emotionally wrought and fragile.
The Jump Button
I had planned to write about Blink, one of Dishonored’s many mystical abilities that allows Corvo to leap forward, upward, downward in a particular unobstructed direction. I adore it. Teleporting to a nearby ledge, onto a rooftop, then placing myself on the ground immediately behind a guard so I can throttle him unconscious (it’s a weird form of pacifism) and pop his snoring body onto the pile I’ve been collecting. Blink is one of the most satisfying mechanical features in any game I’ve played. But instead I’m talking about just the basic jump.
Having recently struggled through the very broken Homefront: The Revolution, one of the most frustrating aspects of the game was the clumsy and woefully inaccurate jump. The game wanted you to scramble through ruined buildings, but just wasn’t good enough to let you. And as I was frustrated with it, I realised how common this frustration is, how normal it seems for a game’s jump feature to be a troubling mess.
So rediscovering just how well Dishonored’s works was a revelation for me. “Oh, right, THIS is what it should be like!” Even without augmentation, the basic spacebar-to-jump here feels so effortlessly lovely to use when navigating the streets. Mantling isn’t a timing-based stab of a key or mouse button, it’s automatic, because you obviously didn’t want to jump up in front of the crate and then watch it slide past your face on the way down – you were trying to get on top. Movement feels smooth, almost liquid, as you scarper and scamper, darting up rocks or obstacles to escape a mob of hungry rats or to avoid the gaze of an alerted guard. Rather than being conscious of the mechanic with which you’re engaged – John playing a computer game – you remain in-fiction – Corvo scrambling for his life.
And that’s not my favourite thing about it! My favourite thing is so simple, so small, it almost feels petty to describe it. And yet. It’s that when I’m crouched, and jump, I land crouched. I’m sure there are other games that have realised that jump is not synonymous with walking upright afterward, but I’m struggling to think of them. And it makes such a difference! Well, after I’ve gotten used to its being the game that gets it right, and not over-compensating by accidentally standing up again once I’ve landed.
And this is indicative of the game Dishonored is. A game that wants to be played, not fought against. A game that understands how people play games, and adjusts itself for that. Of course these should be things we expect, not things to celebrate in jubilant articles, but there we are.
Jason was right. Lots of high scores and critical acclaim do feel like underrating! This is a game that ought to have joined the Mighty Lists containing names like Deus Ex and Thief. It’s one of them, and deserves to be revered as such.A polystylist, Shostakovich developed a hybrid voice, combining a variety of different musical techniques into his works. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality ; the composer was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler.
Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Soviet chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the government. Nevertheless, he received accolades and state awards and served in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947) and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (from 1962 until his death).
Early life Edit
Birthplace of Shostakovich (now School No. 267). Commemorative plaque at left
Born at Podolskaya street in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Shostakovich was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. Shostakovich's paternal grandfather, originally surnamed Szostakowicz, was of Polish Roman Catholic descent (his family roots trace to the region of the town of Vileyka in today's Belarus), but his immediate forebears came from Siberia. A Polish revolutionary in the January Uprising of 1863–4, Bolesław Szostakowicz would be exiled to Narym (near Tomsk) in 1866 in the crackdown that followed Dmitri Karakozov's assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II.[4] When his term of exile ended, Szostakowicz decided to remain in Siberia. He eventually became a successful banker in Irkutsk and raised a large family. His son Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, the composer's father, was born in exile in Narim in 1875 and studied physics and mathematics in Saint Petersburg University, graduating in 1899. He then went to work as an engineer under Dmitri Mendeleev at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg. In 1903 he married another Siberian transplant to the capital, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina, one of six children born to a Russian Siberian native.[4]
Their son, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, displayed significant musical talent after he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine. On several occasions he displayed a remarkable ability to remember what his mother had played at the previous lesson, and would get "caught in the act" of playing the previous lesson's music while pretending to read different music placed in front of him.[5] In 1918 he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party, murdered by Bolshevik sailors.[6]
In 1919, at the age of 13, he was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov, who monitored Shostakovich's progress closely and promoted him.[7] Shostakovich studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev after a year in the class of Elena Rozanova, composition with Maximilian Steinberg, and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolay Sokolov, with whom he became friends.[8] Shostakovich also attended Alexander Ossovsky's music history classes.[9] Steinberg tried to guide Shostakovich on the path of the great Russian composers, but was disappointed to see him 'wasting' his talent and imitating Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. Shostakovich also suffered for his perceived lack of political zeal, and initially failed his exam in Marxist methodology in 1926. His first major musical achievement was the First Symphony (premiered 1926), written as his graduation piece at the age of 19. This work brought him to the attention of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who helped Shostakovich find accommodation and work in Moscow, and sent a driver around in "a very stylish automobile" to take him to a concert.[10]
Early career Edit
Shostakovich in 1925
After graduation, Shostakovich initially embarked on a dual career as concert pianist and composer, but his dry style of playing was often unappreciated (his American biographer, Laurel Fay, comments on his "emotional restraint" and "riveting rhythmic drive"). He nevertheless won an "honorable mention" at the First International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927. He attributed the disappointment at the competition to suffering from appendicitis and the jury being all-Polish. He had his appendix removed in April 1927. After the competition Shostakovich met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by the composer's First Symphony that he conducted it at its Berlin premiere later that year. Leopold Stokowski was equally impressed and gave the work its U.S. premiere the following year in Philadelphia and also made the work's first recording.
Shostakovich concentrated on composition thereafter and soon limited his performances primarily to those of his own works. In 1927 he wrote his Second Symphony (subtitled To October), a patriotic piece with a great pro-Soviet choral finale. Owing to its experimental nature, as with the subsequent Third Symphony, it was not critically acclaimed with the enthusiasm given to the First.
1927 also marked the beginning of Shostakovich's relationship with Ivan Sollertinsky, who remained his closest friend until the latter's death in 1944. Sollertinsky introduced the composer to the music of Mahler, which had a strong influence on his music from the Fourth Symphony onwards.
While writing the Second Symphony, Shostakovich also began work on his satirical opera The Nose, based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. In June 1929, against the composer's own wishes, the opera was given a concert performance; it was ferociously attacked by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM).[12] Its stage premiere on 18 January 1930 opened to generally poor reviews and widespread incomprehension among musicians.[13]
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was first performed in 1934. It was immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as "the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party", and as an opera that "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture".
Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in 1932. Initial difficulties led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child, Galina.[15]
First denunciation Edit
On 17 January 1936, Joseph Stalin paid a rare visit to the opera for a performance of a new work, Quiet Flows the Don, based on the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, by the little-known composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky, who was called to Stalin's box at the end of the performance and told that his work had "considerable ideological-political value".[16] On 26 January, Stalin revisited the opera, accompanied by Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov and Anastas Mikoyan, to hear Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. He and his entourage left without speaking to anyone. Shostakovich had been forewarned by a friend that he should postpone a planned concert tour in Arkhangelsk to be present at that performance.[17] Eyewitness accounts testify that Shostakovich was "white as a sheet" when he went to take his bow after the third act. In letters written to Sollertinsky, Shostakovich recounted the horror with which he watched as Stalin shuddered every time the brass and percussion played too loudly. Equally horrifying was the way Stalin and his companions laughed at the love-making scene between Sergei and Katerina. The next day, Shostakovich left for Arkhangelsk, and was there when he heard on 28 January that Pravda had published a tirade titled Muddle Instead of Music, complaining that the opera was a "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds...(that) quacks, hoots, pants and gasps."[19] This was the signal for a nationwide campaign, during which even Soviet music critics who had praised the opera were forced to recant in print, saying they "failed to detect the shortcomings of Lady Macbeth as pointed out by Pravda".[20] There was resistance from those who admired Shostakovich″, including Sollertinsky, who turned up at a composers' meeting in Leningrad called to denounce the opera and praised it instead. Two other speakers supported him. When Shostakovich returned to Leningrad, he had a telephone call from the commander of the Leningrad Military District, who had been asked by Marshal Tukhachevky to make sure that he was all right. When the writer Isaac Babel was under arrest four years later, he told his interrogators that "it was common ground for us to proclaim the genius of the slighted Shostakovich."[21]
On 6 February, Shostakovich was again attacked in Pravda, this time for his light comic ballet The Limpid Stream, which was denounced because "it jangles and expresses nothing" and did not give an accurate picture of peasant life on a collective farm.[22] Fearful that he was about to be arrested, Shostakovich secured an appointment with the Chairman of the USSR State Committee on Culture, Platon Kerzhentsev, who reported to Stalin and Molotov that he had instructed the composer to "reject formalist errors and in his art attain something that could be understood by the broad masses", and that Shostakovich had admitted being in the wrong and had asked for a meeting with Stalin, which was not granted.[23]
As a result of this campaign, commissions began to fall off, and Shostakovich's income fell by about three-quarters. His Fourth Symphony was due to receive its premiere on 11 December 1936, but official intervention prevented it, and the symphony was not performed for 25 years, until 30 December 1961. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was also suppressed. A bowdlerised version was eventually performed under a new title, Katerina Izmailova, on 8 January 1963. The anti-Shostakovich campaign also served as a signal to artists working in other fields, including art, architecture, the theatre and cinema, with the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, the director Sergei Eisenstein, and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold among the prominent targets. More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of the composer's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. These included Marshal Tukhachevsky (shot months after his arrest); his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks (a distinguished physicist, who was eventually released but died before he got home); his close friend Nikolai Zhilyayev (a musicologist who had taught Tukhachevsky; shot shortly after his arrest); his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar (sent to a camp in Karaganda); his friend the Marxist writer Galina Serebryakova (20 years in camps); his uncle Maxim Kostrykin (died); and his colleagues Boris Kornilov and Adrian Piotrovsky (executed).[24] His only |
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The text still needs to be ratified in the individual countries before the treaty becomes binding.
“The E-Commerce chapter has serious implications for online privacy,” said Peter Maybarduk, of non-profit consumer rights organization, Public Citizen, in a statement on TPP. “The text reveals that policies protecting personal data when it crosses borders could be subject to challenge as a violation of the TPP.”
Public Citizen says the agreement puts a requirement on countries to allow unregulated cross-border transfer of Internet users’ data and prohibits governments from requiring companies host data on local servers — with what it says is no express protection for privacy and data protection policies to be exempted from the rules.
Rather it says policies would be subject to review by TPP tribunals to determine if they meet what it dubs “highly subjective, restrictive standards”.
This means governments seeking to protect consumer privacy via conditioning international data transfers on compliance with data protection regulations could find their policies exposed to challenges by other governments under the TPP — as well as via extra-judicial tribunals agreed via the treaty’s controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism.
“In some cases, our data may be vulnerable in another country – to surveillance or marketing abuses — in ways that it is not at home,” continues Maybarduk. “The TPP could limit governments’ ability to protect us against such threats.”
TPP seeks to govern multiple aspects of trade and economic policy, with a stated goal of lowering barriers to trade and promoting economic activity. However, as with other such expansive international trade agreements — such as the still-being-negotiated TTIP, between the European Union and the U.S. — there has been plenty of controversy already, not least over the secrecy of the negotiations.
The scope of proposed measures in TPP has also caused major alarm, after portions of the agreement were leaked during negotiations. For example, the EFF has slammed TPP’s stance on copyright, such as the extension of copyright terms and prohibition on circumvention of DRM, writing in an analysis last month: “If you look for provisions in the TPP that actually afford new benefits to users, rather than to large, rights-holding corporations, you will look in vain.”
Responding to the publication of the full text today, the EFF is no less damning — saying, for example, that the copyright chapter contains “dangerous threats to the public’s rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online” (the full text of the IP chapter can be read here) — and describing the Investment chapter‘s definition of intellectual property as “an asset that can be subject to the investor-state dispute settlement process” as “shocking”.
“What this means is that companies could sue any of the TPP nations for introducing rules that they allege harm their right to exploit their copyright interests — such as new rights to use copyrighted works for some public interest purpose. A good example of this might be a country wishing to limit civil penalties for copyright infringement of orphan works, which are works whose authors are deceased or are nowhere to be found,” the EFF writes on the latter point.
The digital rights organization is also — like Public Citizen — critical of the treaty’s bid to restrict the use of data localization laws. “Although we generally agree that data localization is an ineffective approach to the protection of personal data, a trade agreement is the wrong place for a sweeping prohibition of such practices,” the EFF writes. “For particularly sensitive user data, regulating cross-border transfer of that data or its storage on vulnerable overseas servers may be a valid policy option.
“The E-Commerce chapter does not prohibit recourse to this option altogether, but imposes a strict test that such measures must not amount to ‘arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade’ — a test that would be applied by an investment court, not by a data protection authority or human rights tribunal,” it adds.
So the EFF is basically making the same critique as Public Citizen — that corporate interests are trumping privacy and human rights in TPP.
It’s also notable that measure to enforce international data flows are driving in the opposite direction vs the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice invalidating the fifteen year old Safe Harbor data-transfer agreement between the U.S. and the EU — on the grounds that Europeans’ data was not being adequately protected under a self-certification regime. (It remains to be seen what TTIP will have to say on data flows. Truly that will be a *gets popcorn* moment.)
The EFF says TPP takes the same “flawed approach” as the old EU-U.S. Safe Harbor — i.e. that it tries to “streamline” cross-border data-flows between regions with “comprehensive data protection laws” and those with “weak or voluntary arrangements” by encouraging the former to treat the latter “as in some way equivalent to their own”.
“Data flows often are beneficial. At the same time, rules mandating data flows should be narrowly tailored with exceptions that clearly and explicitly allow for the protection of privacy and individual liberties,” adds Public Citizen’s Maybarduk. “The memory of misuse of data and National Security Agency surveillance is so fresh, and we should be careful about giving up control of our data.”
Other criticisms of TPP by consumer and digital rights organizations include: weak provisions on net neutrality (and empty provisions on spam); inadequate definitions of personal information; weak protections for personal data — such as allowing companies to define their own “self-serving standards” (as the EFF puts it) when it comes to privacy; a lowering of consumer protection standards, given that ‘unfairness’ has been left out of the consumer protection section — leaving only ‘fraudulent’ and ‘deceptive’ conduct to be specifically proscribed; prohibitions on government requiring the disclosure of source code for mass market software or products containing the software, thereby limiting the ability of countries to take steps to, for example, bolster the cybersecurity of such products.
The EFF also attacks the Telecommunications chapter for subordinating the security and privacy of users to the commercial interests of business — noting that the former are “only allowed to be taken into account if it can be established that they are not ‘a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade in services’.”
“This is completely backward,” it adds. “There is no value in having telecommunications services if they do not protect the privacy and security of end users; in fact, such services can be positively harmful, causing serious human rights infringements of users. In any other context, human rights would trump commercial considerations — in fact, this would go entirely without saying — but in the topsy-turvy world of trade negotiations, it’s the other way around.”On late Friday, The Washington Post broke the explosive story that the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Russians intervened in the U.S. election to help Donald Trump win. This morning, President-elect Donald Trump was up tweeting indignantly—about the Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump hasn’t held a press conference in months and instead uses Twitter to issue statements and go after critics. Media analysts have long noted that Trump will go off on unrelated tweet storms after a major, and potentially damaging, news story breaks about him. For example, after Donald Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a Trump University fraud lawsuit, Trump tweeted attacks on the cast of the Broadway show, Hamilton. Distracting people from Trump’s fraud settlement was exactly the point, argued Jack Shafer in a Politico article entitled “Stop being Trump’s Twitter fool.”
This morning would seem to be another case in point. Yes, it was big news when Variety disclosed Thursday that Trump would continue to serve as executive producer of NBC’s reality-TV show and collect probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that was completely eclipsed by the bombshell report that Russia had an espionage operation to get Donald Trump elected president. Trump has been famously friendly to Russia’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin, calling him a better leader than President Obama, and Russia apparently concluded that Trump would more likely to relax economic sanctions than would Hillary Clinton.
The report of Russia’s meddling also included the revelation that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell played a key role in keeping the explosive information under wraps during the election. According to The Post, which cited unnamed sources, McConnell voiced doubts about U.S. intelligence and threatened to publicly accuse the Obama administration of partisan politics if the White House challenged the Russians publicly.
After the election, Trump chose McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao to be secretary of transportation. Chao served as secretary of labor in George W. Bush administration. Her appointment requires approval by Congress; McConnell has rejected calls to recuse himself from the confirmation process.
Even more explosive, the New York Times reported that intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that Russians hacked the Republican National Committee but “conspicuously released no documents” related to Republicans. Which raises the disturbing question: Is Russia holding onto these materials to use as leverage, perhaps over the Trump administration?
Julian Assange of Wikileaks, which published the hacked Clinton emails, has denied that it received the materials from the Russian government. Russia also has denied the allegations.
The latest news, however, immediately set off a firestorm. Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent who was a Republican presidential candidate, tweeted:
Republican leaders knew Russia was undermining our democracy during the election and they chose to ignore it. — Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) December 10, 2016
Donald Trump’s team issued a brief, stunning statement Friday—attacking the CIA’s credibility. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the transition team said in an unsigned statement. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.'” (Note: Trump’s electoral victory was no landslide; he actually won by one of the slimmest margins in U.S. history.)
And here’s what Trump said on Twitter:
Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue – FAKE NEWS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2016
I have NOTHING to do with The Apprentice except for fact that I conceived it with Mark B & have a big stake in it. Will devote ZERO TIME! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2016
(I won’t be Trump’s Twitter fool by explaining The Apprentice contretemps. You can read about it here and here. )
Trump has said he’ll have a press conference on December 15th. It would be his first since July 27th. At the last conference, he told reporters that he hoped Russian intelligence agencies had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails and would publish whatever they found. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”It is that time of year when schools begin to jockey for position on where each team will land in the postseason as the Stanford Football Program and the PAC-12 schools anxiously awaits where they might land this year.
First, here is what everyone needs to know to gain a better understanding of the Bowl season and where teams might go:
1. The first item to realize is that the seeding charts given out for Bowl games is merely a “guide” as it is up to the Bowl organizers and committees to decide who goes where and why. For an example, UCLA went to the Foster Farms Bowl last year and finished 6th, while the Utes of Utah finished 3rd and went to the Las Vegas Bowl. If the committees went by the guide, the Utes should have been at a minimum in the Foster Farms game. However, due to the committees, they were leap frogged by a team with a lesser record.
2. A lot of where the final Bowl decisions will be determined after the PAC-12 Championship on Friday evening at Levi’s Stadium. If Washington wins, convincingly, the Huskies should have enough on their resume with wins over Stanford, and Washington State, as well as winning the PAC-12, to get them into the 4-team College Football Playoff.
3. However, here is where things can go haywire in a heartbeat. The CFP committee can say that the Huskies lack of competition out of conference, and recent play may keep them out of the playoffs, and put another school in. Right now, several are saying that Ohio State’s tough schedule and lone loss to a top 10 team on the road, as well as if Wisconsin wins the Big 10 title game may be enough to vault both programs over Washington due to the lack of quality opponents. Can this happen? Surely we remember when Texas was vaulted over Cal during the 2004-05 BCS era due to committee voting by the AP.
The key to remember: It is all up to the voters on the committees at this point in the season.
Now that the scenarios are explained, here are likely scenario options for the Stanford Cardinal and the rest of the PAC 12 on where they will land for their Bowl games.
If Washington wins, and becomes PAC-12 Champions, there should be enough on their resume to garner a berth in the College Football Playoffs. This will lead to the games as follows:
College Football Playoffs: Washington Huskies – Washington has had a stellar year, and only lost to arguably the hottest team in the country, the USC Trojans, in a hard fought battle. The Huskies are solid on both sides of the ball and Head Coach Chris Petersen has steadily rebuilt the program in the Pacific Northwest.
Rose Bowl: USC Trojans - The Trojans are so hot right now, that Dan Patrick would say they are “en fuego”. USC has rebounded from a terrible start to run roughshod over the competition, and have risen to a top 10 ranking for the first time all season. With their current streak, following and victory over Colorado; look for the Rose committee to extend an invitation to the men of Troy.
Alamo Bowl: Colorado Buffaloes – The Buffs had a renaissance this year under Coach MacIntyre and their first berth in the PAC 12 title game. The Buffs have played well against stiff competition, but the head-to-head loss to the Trojans will drop them to the Alamo Bowl.
Holiday Bowl: Stanford Cardinal – The Cardinal will more than likely end up here for three main reasons: CFP rankings, strength of schedule and Christian McCaffrey. The Cardinal do not have the biggest traveling circus, but when you can promote the game with a ranked team and a candidate for the Heisman Trophy; look for the committee to overlook the fact that they lost to the Washington State Cougars and finished with a better record overall. The Cardinal are hot, and decisive winners in their last 5 games.
Foster Farms Bowl: Washington State Cougars – The Cougs had arguably one of their best seasons in years, but faltered down the stretch with losing their last two games. Also, the Cougs lost one of their best players, River Cracraft, to injury, and have not played well since his absence from the lineup. The Cougars deserve better after their hot start to the season, and strong play in conference, but will more than likely be dealt the same fate as the Utes last year and be leap frogged by another team.
Sun Bowl: Utah Utes – The Utes had an up and down season all year, and ended on a low note losing 3 of their last 4 games. The Utes should be in line for a step up in Bowl competition this year however, and will more than likely with this scenario be heading to El Paso.
Now if Washington loses in the PAC 12 title game, here are the likely landing places for the PAC 12:
Rose Bowl: Colorado
Alamo Bowl: USC
Holiday Bowl: Washington
Foster Farms Bowl: Stanford
Sun Bowl: Washington State
Las Vegas Bowl: Utah
Reason: Colorado will leap into the Rose Bowl as conference champions, USC will go to San Antonio for the Alamo Bowl, and Washington should go to the Holiday Bowl due to the “head-to-head” loss with USC. Stanford, WSU, and Utah will all drop down a Bowl due to the Huskies loss.
Now here is where it all gets tricky.
If Washington wins, yet is leap frogged in the final CFP polls, which can very well happen, here is where the bowl scenarios will change and likely new landing spots:
Rose Bowl: Washington
Alamo Bowl: USC
Holiday Bowl: Colorado
Foster Farms Bowl: Stanford
Sun Bowl: Washington State
Las Vegas Bowl: Utah
Reason: If Washington wins, at a minimum, they are guaranteed the Rose Bowl Game as conference champions. USC will still be in the Alamo Bowl as they leap frog Colorado due to head-to-head match-up and rankings. The rest of the PAC 12 should follow suit.
Now, many will ask, do the California Golden Bears have a shot at an “at-large” bid for a Bowl game, even though they finished 5-7? The Bears did have wins over Texas and Utah, but losing 5 of their last 7 games will surely hurt. Last year there were three teams with 5-7 records in the postseason, and all played well. Do not be shocked if Cal gets an “at-large” berth this year to something like the Cactus Bowl in Arizona.
Also the question may arise if Stanford can get the shaft, and be sent to a lesser bowl because of record or lack of huge fan base? This surely can happen. All postseason match-ups will first be in the hands of the CFP committee, then the bowl committees after this weekend.
Fans of the Stanford Cardinal should know that nothing is for certain when it comes to the polls, and to expect the un-expected.
The good news is that the Cardinal, after struggling mid-year due to injuries and poor play, still ended with a solid record and national ranking. Let’s all hope for the best, and be proud that the Cardinal are in the postseason again and keeps their streak going for the past 8 seasons.By Emily Lynn | USA
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has refused to support the nomination of Alex Azar for the Secretary of Health and Human Services unless he upholds Trump’s promise of allowing safe import of prescription drugs for lower costs.
During the hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Senator Rand Paul urged Alex Azar to be a representative of the people instead of Big Pharma.
“Big Pharma manipulates the system to keep prices high. It is not capitalism, and it’s big government, and we’ve got to fix it. You need to convince those of us who are skeptical that you’ll be a part of fixing it and won’t be beholden to Big Pharma”
The very passionate senator went on to state that he would not support Azar’s nomination unless he could provide a plan to keep President Trump’s campaign promise. Paul also went on to say that there is no generic alternative for insulin, which is included on the list of essential medications by the World Health Organization. This is what allows the manufacturers to sell the drug for any price they want for the important medication, which is believed to have been abused.
President Trump called for eliminating “barriers to entry into free markets for drug providers that offer safe, reliable and cheaper products” as a part of his health care plan. He also mentioned “allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers.”
Dr. Paul hopes to keep healthcare and medication affordable for all and to replace our current healthcare system.
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Like this: Like Loading..."They deserve to die," he writes in National Review. "Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rustbelt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs… Support for Donald Trump among white males is falling. Credit:AP "The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin." There is some sympathy at the other end of the spectrum, but judgment there is harsh too – like this from John Marshall, in his Talking Points Memo blog: "Let's put this clearly, the stressor at work here is the perceived and real loss of the social and economic advantage of being white." In the face of such dehumanising contempt, how were these communities to respond?
As it turns out, they have a voice. His name is J.D. Vance and his new book is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoire of a Family and a Culture in Crisis – which one review describes as "a civilised reference guide for an uncivilised election". J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, mourns lost senses of purpose and community. Much like the lone survivor in a massacre, spared only so that he might tell the world of the ferocity of the attack, Vance beat the odds – and so has come down from the hill country with a message for America. Helped by his grandmother, he got himself through school; into the US Marines; next to Ohio State University and then, something of a precedent, through Yale Law School. Age 31, he hangs out in Silicon Valley these days. A biotech executive, he writes: "I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the north-east. Instead I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. Then US president Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1985. Credit:AP
"To these folks, poverty is the family tradition – their ancestors were day labourers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbours, friends and family." Complex and human, Vance's elegy serves at times as a rebuff to Trump's wrecking-ball attacks on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the embodiment of all that is wrong with Washington. Vance keeps economic hardship in the mix as a cause of his peoples' grief. But he argues that a much bigger issue is "hillbilly" culture, which "increasingly encourages social decay, instead of counteracting it". Pat Buchanan wins the New Hampshire primary in 1996. Credit:AP Vance is articulate and empathetic in this unvarnished account of a hardscrabble life in Appalachia – he is tender about values held dearly, like loyalty, love of country; he's unapologetic about physical and verbal abuse; and about alcohol and drug abuse. As well, he mourns lost senses of purpose, community and even spiritual identity. Spruiking the book on National Public Radio, Vance says of life in Ohio: "People used to rely on automotive jobs, steel mill jobs, coal jobs – and those things, for the most part simply don't exist. [Last year] in the county where I grew up, deaths from drug overdoses outnumbered deaths from natural causes – which is kind of extraordinary."
Supporters of Donald Trump during a campaign town hall in Daytona Beach. Credit:AP Vance's mother was a cot-case – violent, addicted to drugs, too many husbands and too many boyfriends. His grandmother was a saviour – as a child, she shot a man who stole the family cow; and as an adult, she'd douse her drunken husband with petrol and set him alight. But she also made the boy do his homework. Alluding to the family confrontation by which he came to live with the grandmother who was known also as mamaw, Vance writes: "[She] told me that if mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of mamaw's gun. This was hillbilly justice, and it didn't fail me." Samuel Francis, a conservative academic, foretold the rise of a Trump-like character. In Middletown, where he grew up in Ohio, a fifth of kids don't finish high school and only a few of the few who get to set foot in college, graduate. He writes of Middletown: "[It's] a town where 30 per cent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and … not a single person [is] aware of his own laziness."
Vance writes of a neighbour "who was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car, or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she'd blather on about the importance of industriousness. 'So many people abuse the system, it's impossible for the hard-working people to get the help they need,' she'd say." But in complaining of laziness, Vance addresses a sense of despair and what he calls "learned helplessness" – a term used by psychologists to describe how, after systematic pain, a victim surrenders control in a belief there is no way to avoid further pain. And so the group cling to the likes of Trump who says they will have jobs and a good life and he'll have their backs – it helps too that the New York realtor and reality TV star repeatedly smacks down big corporations and big government as the roots of evil in today's US. Despite, or because of the 1980s success by Ronald Reagan in luring them away from their long-held support for the Democratic Party, Vance reserves strong criticism for the conservative political movement. He writes of a fatalism in "hillbilly" culture, saying that from a young age they are taught that the cards are stacked against them, it's best to keep expectations low and they can't expect to overcome the bigger forces that shape their lives. This is how Vance rips into conservatives: "They foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. The message of the right is increasingly, 'it's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault'.
"Trump is telling many [in these parts of the country] that society and government is to blame for all their problems. A more helpful and hopeful message would encourage the white working class to take responsibility for their conduct and work ethic, and to act as good role models for their families, churches, and communities, rather than becoming enraged by divisive political debates." Sadly, Trump wasn't looking for this underclass so that he might help them, so much as identifying a block of votes that could be manipulated in an ideological war that has simmered in American conservative political circles for decades – and in which Trump's success in the primaries revealed the extent to which the party has to remake itself to survive. Even before Trump came on the scene, a small Republican movement, dubbed the "Reformicons", was demanding a policy and philosophy overhaul to acknowledge that middle and lower income earners were dudded by so much of what was enshrined as GOP orthodoxy, especially on taxes, trade and immigration. That the 16 other contenders for the GOP nomination clung to those policies even as Trump was winning by shredding them, was a revelation. Trump at that stage was funding his own campaign, which meant he could do as he liked; the rest of the field was beholden to rich donors who demanded policies that served the billionaire class, not the working class. The general election is becoming a referendum on Trump – and that's an arena in which he struggles. But the primaries were a referendum on the GOP establishment's stewardship of the party and its policies – and that the establishment lost is read by Columbia University historian Timothy Shenk as proof of the resumption of a guerrilla war against the party's "managerial elite".
And if Trump is the victors' standard-bearer, their bible is a weighty, 700-page tome published in June 2016. Titled Leviathan and Its Enemies, Shenk describes it as "digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor" – but he also describes it as one of the most impressive books to come out of the US right in a generation – "and the most frightening". Its author was the late Samuel Francis, an academic, sometimes congressional aid and writer for right-wing publications, who was driven by a belief that society was controlled by managers and experts who were a threat to traditional American values – "morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times, racial integrity and identity". These he argued were sacred principles of a new "post-bourgeois proletariat" drawn from America's working class and the lower ranks of the middle class who were driven, according to the coded language of Francis' book, by "immutable elements of human nature [that] necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning". If his meaning was unclear, he was perfectly clear in a speech he gave while working on the book, declaring: "What we whites must do, is reassert our identity and solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites." In the early 1990s, Francis teamed up with CNN host Pat Buchanan who mounted a failed challenge to President George H. W. Bush for the GOP nomination in 1992. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the nomination in 1996 – as a champion of protectionism, foreign policy isolationism and anti-immigrant. Sound familiar?
Despite Buchannan's very limited success – he won the New Hampshire primary and nothing else – Francis was convinced that his so-called post-bourgeois proletariat understood increasing US diversity to be a measure of the dwindling power of white Americans. When Buchanan did bomb out, Francis explained it away, arguing that Buchanan had been too deferential to the party bosses. "Don't use the word 'conservative'," he told Buchanan. "It doesn't mean anything any more." Buchanan faded and so did Francis, who spent a lot of time denying that he was a white supremacist – even as he campaigned against interracial sex, warned of what he called "incipient race war", and drafted a nationalist manifesto which argued: "The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character." Fast-forward to the 2016 primaries. Trump declares: "I'm a conservative, but at this point, who cares?" At the same time, he makes a series of provocative speeches, which were read as deliberate stirrings of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment; and he rolls out anti-immigrant and isolationist policies. Earlier this year, right-wing radio-talk heavyweight Rush Limbaugh joined the dots while reading some of Francis' articles on-air. "What's interesting is how right-on it is in foretelling Trump."
The bad news for Trump is that the general election is not the same as the primaries and support for him, even among white men, is falling. Clinton seems to have closed the gender gap – she's ahead 43-42 in one poll of white men, she has cut Trump's lead back to just a few points in another. Trump has made the white male vote so crucial in 2016 that Brookings Institution demographer William Frey is running through election simulations based on every possible level of white male turnout on election day – and by his reckoning, even a virtual full turnout by non-college educated white guys, Clinton would win the popular vote by just over a million votes. Based on Frey's number crunching and opinions polls as they now stand, it seems Trump's race-based gamble is not paying off – as the electorate becomes more diverse, whites are a smaller portion of the whole, down from 88 per cent in 1980 to 72 per cent in 2012. What a pity then that he has been so crude and cruel to Hispanics and Muslims, so tin-eared with African-Americans. He claims to be a great businessman, but it seems Donald Trump can't count.A former inmate is suing the Nevada Department of Correction because she says she was forced to wear shackles while in labor.
Valerie Nabors told KTNV that officials at the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center in North Las Vegas violated state law when they put her in shackles while she was being transported to University Medical Center to give birth.
“They go by their own rules, they do their own thing and the reason why, is because they always get away with it,” she explained.
Nabors said that prison guards ignored the advice of an emergency medical technician who cautioned them not to bind her ankles with the shackles.
“She [an ambulance EMT] explained to him, you can’t do this because I still have to check her and he just said ‘oh well’ and proceeded to put the leg shackles on and went back into the facility,” the former inmate recalled.
Nabors is being represented by American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada attorney Staci Pratt.
“When you shackle a woman at her ankles, making it difficult for medical personnel to check her, you’re sending a message that our primary obligation in society is not taking care of women, but to punish them needlessly and I think it’s cruel and sadistic,” Pratt said.
“This is not a time when a woman is thinking about escape. This is not a time when a woman is thinking about injuring anyone. This is a time when a woman is trying to get through the process of child birth with dignity and with respect for her health and the health of her child.”
After giving birth the shackles were again placed on Nabors, who was serving a 12- to 30-month sentence for stealing about $250 in casino chips.
“I understand that I did break the law, I understand that,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I should get treated unfairly. Women have babies everyday and there’s certain procedures for that.”
Nabors’s lawsuit also alleges that prison officials confiscated her prescribed breast pump after being returned to the facility.
“My hope is that Valerie’s strength and courage will be a vehicle for making sure this does not happen to any other women in Nevada or anywhere else in the United States,” Pratt said.
Watch this video from KTNV, broadcast June 28, 2012.A starry-eyed young lad like many of my peers, I often dreamed of the almost tangible hi-tech spacefaring future oft-touted in the fictional literature of my childhood.
In that future, things would be different. Things would be easier. Robots would do all the work. Computers would think for us. We’d live in space and float freely without a care.
We wouldn’t even have to do our homework!
Oh, the innocence of youth…
(sigh)
Of course things turned out somewhat differently than expected. We lost our passion for space, but we gained the Internet. Flying cars and floating cities hit the backburner, but we have pocket-sized computers that make the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seem a mere toy. As much as we escapists hoped it would happen, virtual reality never really quite took off.
But maybe that will change now that we have Teledildonics.
Wait… What?
That’s right. You heard me.
Teledildonics.
WTF?
For those unaware, the term “Teledildonics” was coined in 1975 by Ted Nelson.
That’s right, the same guy who coined “Hypertext” and “Hypermedia”, terms which underpin the very fabric of the Internet, also came up with “Teledildonics”.
Coming from such a visionary, that’s a hard thing to ignore.
Though the etymology of the word “Dildo” is unclear, anyone with a technological bent or an interest in Latin knows that “Tele” means “Distant.” So it’s not much of a stretch (pun not intended) to discern the meaning of Teledildonics.
It’s basically sex-at-a-distance.
How does it work?
At its most fundamental, the term encompasses devices designed to accommodate the sexual needs of men and women, both to stimulate a remote partner and receive reciprocal input in a variety of ways, with the input to the stimulating device controlled by another person.
Early attempts were crude but effective — hydraulic pistons, lubricated belts and simple controls for speed and vigour.
Step 1. Buy lawnmower…
Flash forward to more modern technology where it’s now becoming possible for the slightest touches to be transmitted almost instantly anywhere in the world. It gives a whole new definition to the term “lag”, and the sense of a human presence is stronger than ever before.
Strap on a VR headset and you’re almost there.
At first glance one could write off these developments as the mere playthings of sad lonely perverts seeking a cheap thrill in their otherwise sad and socially impoverished lives. Indeed that’s the reaction of most people when first exposed to the concept, and I don’t doubt that a small portion of the target demographic fits within these bounds.
However beyond this, the realms of possibility that Teledildonics on the modern Internet opens up are startling.
One can already imagine a cornucopia of weird and wondrous configurations, givers and receivers networked in a variety of fashions, one-on-one, daisy chained or in parallel. Broadcast intercourse. You could join global leaderboards of sexual practitioners rated by prowess in their areas of expertise. A new angle could be added to online dating. The pre-date “preview” experience could determine your chances of actual human contact with a potential mate. Anonymous interaction will be available at one of humanity’s most intimate levels which reaches beyond the confines of race, color, gender and language.
Admittedly, like everything in tech it could be a passing fad, but whenever sex is involved there’s a good chance that it will be the multi-billion dollar industry of the future, perhaps even democratising sex-at-a-distance and seriously challenging the giants of pornography with huge opportunities for disruptive capitalism. We’ve already reached a point in history where virtual reality porn has its own parody videos:
So let’s explore.
Are you Tele-sexual?
Pornography was by far the biggest source of traffic consumption on the internet, surpassed only very recently by social networking.
From the dark corners of the early web, thousands of niche providers rose to suit every taste and fetish, arguably mostly harmless and consensual (for the most part). Arguably, that is, if the conjunction of borderline poverty with offerings of cash could be considered to be informed and free consent. Some of these early adopters rose to become business giants, serving the “needs” of the world’s sexually impoverished on a daily basis.
Now with virtual reality experiencing a second renaissance, it’s not difficult to imagine a horde of consumers eager to experience the next generation of self-gratification.
Imagine, in the comfort of your own recliner, being pleasured by the most beautiful person you could imagine, their hair caressing your shoulders as they kiss your neck, their hands working their magic in pleasant and arousing ways, responding directly to your movements and voice because thanks to VR and Teledildonics you’re there with them, virtually in the same room together.
Beyond Virtual Reality, Imagine being in a surreal fantasy scene with visuals and sensations never before felt by humankind. Virtual Unreality.
Who would ever dare venture a relationship in-person again, with all the personal emotional risk that entails?Former Nokia boss Stephen Elop is assuming control of Microsoft's Devices |
ated with missionary societies, or itself built local day schools? Had never established large, ambitious off-reservation boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania?
Would things have been better or worse for Indian peoples then and now? It is difficult to define “better.” A missionary might claim that Indians converted to Christianity were immeasurably “better” than before. The term is used here in a more secular sense: would more Indians would have physically survived, for example; have adapted to the new world growing up around them; have lived in a greater physical health and comfort; and, significantly, have maintained more of their lands, languages, cultures and identities?
In comparative context, had the British government ignored Irish educational needs after 1800, would the people have been better off then and later? Parliament might have continued its earlier policy of working with Protestant missionary organizations, further exacerbating denominational tensions. Or it might have cut loose from any educational policy for Ireland. Deprived of denominational education by the discriminatory eighteenth-century Penal Laws, many Catholic children attended the famous but irregular “hedge schools.” Would these have filled the gap left by the absence of a state-supported elementary education system - the “national schools”? As the Penal laws were repealed, would the new Catholic parish schools, and teaching orders of priests, brothers, and nuns? Would schools of other denominations, such as the Presbyterians and Anglicans, especially? If not, would Irish boys and girls have been better prepared for life in the new Ireland – or out of it, in the Empire or the United States – without the national schools? Would Irish national identity have blossomed as it did? And, finally, would the absence of government schooling have had similar or different effects in Ireland and America?
These, then, are the issues “I’d rather not contemplate.” Rather not, because doing so threatens to undermine many of my Irish nationalist assumptions, and my claimed sympathies for Native American cultures and peoples. The enterprise is worthy, nevertheless: little Irish-Indian comparative educational history has been attempted; nor, to my knowledge, have historians counterfactually compared developments in the two nations.
III
There has, however, been a spate of academic counterfactualizing over the last decade or so. [5] In his 1997 introduction to a collection of carefully-researched and rigorously-argued “what if?” essays, Niall Ferguson rejects many forms of historical determinism, pointing to the importance of contingency in history. He concludes that valid counterfactual exercises can be more than pointless “parlour games,” as British historian E. H. Carr famously claimed. “The counterfactual scenarios we therefore need to construct,” writes Ferguson, “are simulations based on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world (hence ‘virtual history’).” [6]
Lamenting the hostility to counterfactualizing among historians – unlike scholars and scientists in other fields – the editors and contributors to Unmaking the West (2006) take a similar stand on the need for rigorous use of evidence, and argue against the dangers of “hindsight bias.” Further, the editors suggest a number of “quality control questions,” one of which particularly applies to my study: can we identify ways that counterfactualizing “ either undermines or reinforces the particular interpretations of history one held at the outset ” (emphasis in original). [7] Similarly, Steven Weber claims that, among other functions, counterfactual approaches “can also be used to open minds, to raise tough questions about what we think we know, and to suggest unfamiliar or uncomfortable arguments that we had best consider.” [8] Even more recently Simon T. Kaye argues that “counterfactualism” may help us avoid “three categories of common ahistorical errors... assumptions of indispensibility, causality, and inevitability.” He too believes that an explicit counterfactual approach “begs a historian to consider the extent of his or her own sureness ” (all emphases in original). “It is my assertion,” he writes, that such thought experiments “constitute an extremely useful ‘toolkit’ in the field of historical analysis.” [9] By setting up plausible scenarios that test my own nationalist and “tribal” prejudices, the present counterfactual study does discomfort me, and certainly undermines some of my own earlier sureness.
IV
A short essay comparing educational developments in two nations cannot, as a more focused counterfactual study might, speculate in detail about possibly different outcomes over a century for literally millions of children in thousands of local communities. It can but suggest broad counterfactual similarities and differences – including one dramatic difference – between possible Indian and Irish outcomes. Further studies could focus in on many such details.
Before moving to consider what might have happened, we need to present what, according to my and other historians’ understanding of the sources, most likely did happen. Scholars who have examined assimilationist education in both Native America and Ireland broadly agree on the nature and result of these campaigns. [10]
Indian peoples of course possessed their own, highly institutionalized forms of education for boys and girls. [11] White colonists were generally ignorant of such practices, and from the early sixteenth century Catholic and Protestant missionaries began the schooling of tribal children. Imperial and colonial governments saw the usefulness of schooling for the “civilization,” Christianization, and pacification o f the tribes. [12]
To achieve an acceptably humane solution to its "Indian problem," the new United States began to put its prestige, power, and increasing amounts of its money behind far more ambitious efforts. In 1794 the nation negotiated its first Indian treaty specifically mentioning education, and many more treaties would contain similar offers and even demands for compulsory schooling of tribal children. [13] In 1819 Congress provided a specific "civilization fund" of $10,000 for the "uplift" and education of Indians, and the assimilationist campaign continued to employ legislation, treaty-making (until 1871), and other expedients to achieve its goals. Initially the United States Government depended upon missionary societies, but after establishing its boarding school at Carlisle in 1879, the BIA came to dominate the educational effort. Government and missionary school curricula strove to erase tribal cultures, languages, and spiritual concepts. The goal was to Americanize Indian children and transform them into citizens of the republic, "cultural brokers," who would carry the new Christian Civilization back to their own peoples. Education into American life, wrote commissioner William A. Jones 1903, would “exterminate the Indian but develop a man.” This approach persisted until the introduction of more culturally-sensitive policies during the Indian New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. The assimilationist campaign did not totally end then, but the decade of the 1920s marks a logical cut-off point for the American side of the present study. [14]
Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century Indian elementary schooling expanded impressively. By the 1820s missionaries working under BIA oversight and benefiting from tribal treaty payments, had established 32 schools among the Indians, enrolling perhaps 900 boys and girls. A century later in 1930 enrolments at “mission and other private schools” had grown to 6,000, but BIA schools enrolled over 34,000 boys and girls. Statistics suggest, writes historian Margaret Connell Szasz, that education was one of the most successful programs of the Bureau. An explosion had occurred in attendance at another kind of institution. Aided by federal government financial support to many white communities in which Indians did not pay taxes, over 38,000 tribal children then attended state public schools. [15] Despite the far greater “cultural distance” between Indians and their teachers than between Irish pupils and their teachers, the United States had achieved a near-universal level of Indian elementary schooling, one similar to that reached by the Irish national schools during their existence. [16]
V
When the Norman kings of what would later become England first established a claim to Ireland in the twelfth century, the country was broken into many competing sub-kingdoms and over-kingdoms. Even by early modern times no native national state had developed and so the new centralizing English Tudor state (1485-1603) achieved a military conquest of the island. During the sixteenth century Reformation the English became predominantly Protestant, but most Irish people remained Roman Catholic. There followed major Protestant plantations and population movements, especially of Scottish Presbyterians to Ulster, and the dispossession of most Catholics of their lands. The eighteenth-century Penal Laws sought the subjugation of Catholics (and dissenter Protestants) to a minority Anglican – State Church - Protestant ascendancy, which in turn remained firmly under the domination of Westminster. By the 1780s the colonial élite in Ireland, as in the American colonies, sought greater freedom within the British Empire while similarly ignoring the claims of "native" peoples. By 1783 American colonists had broken completely with the British Empire. After complex and bloody rebellions in 1798, however, Britain decided to solve its "Irish problem" by fully absorbing the country into the United Kingdom through the (1800) Act of Union.
Like colonial regimes in the Americas, English governments early realized the assimilatory potential of education. From the time of Henry VIII in the 1530s they established schools in Ireland to prevent English settlers from going native, and to Anglicize and convert the Irish to Protestantism; later British governments gave some support to independent missionary societies. Yet by the early decades of the nineteenth century a more systematic approach was needed to integrate a predominantly Catholic people as subjects into the Union. After a number of commissions reported during the 1820s, Parliament in 1831 agreed to fund an Irish elementary school system. Run by the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland (CNEI), the new national schools would be open to all boys and girls. Whereas traditional Indian spiritual values – “heathenism” – generally merited contempt from white educators, the home religion of Irish children would be carefully respected. This toleration of local religious sensibilities did not extend to other areas of Irish culture. Until late in the nineteenth century all instruction was through English, although initially a high percentage of pupils were monoglot Irish-speakers. Like that of the BIA, the CNEI curriculum also ignored most "native" cultural knowledge, and would have suited any English-speaking population. [17]
With the partition of the island into the Irish Free State (later Republic of Ireland) and Northern Ireland in the early 1920s, the National Board passed out of existence, making this decade an equally logical cut-off point for the Irish part of the present study.
The statistics for Irish national school expansion are also impressive. By around 1820, for a total population of seven million, there were close to six hundred thousand pupils attending 11,823 schools of all kinds. About 9,000 of these were in fact “paying schools,” the vast majority of them “hedge schools” still in existence ever after the end of the Penal Laws. About 400,000 children irregularly attended the latter. Another 150,000 attended various Protestant denominational schools (mostly Anglican, one third Presbyterian). About 33,000 attended Catholic day schools, with tens of thousands of other Catholics attending Protestant missionary schools. Various Catholic orders of clergy, brothers, and nuns were also beginning to educate Irish children, but only a few 1,000 attended all such institutions in the early nineteenth century. Despite these apparently impressive statistics, perhaps no more than two-fifths of Irish children then attended any kind of school, and not all of them did so regularly. Even if the National Board had not been established in 1831, however, a proportionately larger number of Irish than Indian children were then receiving some sort of schoo ling. [18]
By the early twentieth century, in a much less populous Ireland (about 4,000,000), decimated by the Great Famine (1845-48) and massive emigration, the National Board dominated the Irish schooling scene. There were then 8,674 national schools in Ireland, claiming an enrolment of over 700,000 pupils. In the words of historian John Coolahan, the CNEI school had become “a landmark institution in the life of the Irish countryside, so much so that by 1900 every parish and many townlands could boast of having their own national school.” [19] Thus by the 1920s elementary schooling was near-universal for both Irish and Indian peoples: convergence from very different beginnings. In each case, the role of the “alien” government was crucial.
VI
So what if those governments had decided not to put money and effort into the mass education of “problem” peoples? Parliament only instituted mass elementary education for English children in 1870 – indeed the Irish system probably served as a social laboratory for later English developments. [20] And in the American nation then, education was a state, rather than federal responsibility. Thus it is not implausible to speculate that majority populations in Britain and the United States would certainly have forgiven the authorities had they simply subjugated and then ignored these problem peoples.
Without BIA support, some Christian missionaries would still have gone to the Indians. Had treaties and legislation ignored education, however, less money would have been available to the missionary societies. [21] Cooperating with missionaries, acculturative elites among, for example, “The Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) quickly realized the adaptive importance of modern education, and established impressive and multi-leveled school systems. [22] Had fewer missionaries entered their lands, without government funds, such hybrid Native-white school systems might still have developed, but hardly as impressively as they did. These Native peoples would thus have been far less prepared – especially in terms of English language competence - to defend their interests and evolving identities in the face of on-rushing white settlement.
Indeed, one of the most terrible of initial shocks for young Indian boys and girls attending many missionary and, especially, government schools, was the rigid insistence upon the English language for all teaching and communication. [23] Yet, gradually, some learned a little English, and some a lot. And some, such as Francis La Flesche (Omaha), Dr. Charles E. Eastman (Dakota) and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin Simmons, a Nakota) went on to become spokesmen and women for their own and other Indian peoples, addressing white Americans in spoken, written, and published English, rather than through interpreter s. [24]
Considering the near-universal school attendance of Indian children by 1930, it is highly likely that large numbers of younger men and women and increasing numbers of their adult kin understood and spoke some English. This development would weaken the positions of tribal languages. It would also give Indian people a new and vital adaptive weapon. Although the Cherokees lost their battle against removal to Oklahoma in the 1830s, they had come to realize the importance of English, both to allow communication with the dominant society and also to keep themselves informed of development outside the Cherokee Nation. [25] Further, English also gave a common language to those who traditionally spoke many mutually incomprehensible tribal languages, one through which to develop pan-Indian awareness and alliances. By the early twentieth century, activists and journalists were establishing periodicals such as the American Indian Magazine to proclaim adaptive forms of tribal and pan-Indian identity. [26]
Although highly critical of the BIA and missionary educational campaigns, the famous Meriam Report of 1928 noted how Indian literacy had markedly improved in the previous decad es. [ 27] This literacy was not entirely in English. [28] Much of Native American literacy was in the language of the conqueror, however. As an adaptive mechanism for confronting an expanding, modern America, literacy has also been vital. For example, according to Jeffrey Anderson, by the early twentieth century among the Northern Arapahoe of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, “the ability to talk to whites and to manage literacy became a prerequisite for political leadership, as determined by traditional forms of decision-making within the tribe.” Such movements towards literacy in English have been strategic and personal, rather than implying full assimilation into the dominant society. [29] Above all, they have been adaptive, and helped these and other Indians adjust to modern life. In decades of research I have never come across an Indian who regretted learning English or acquiring literacy in that language. [30]
Along with missionary efforts, federal schooling produced most of this literacy in English. The “half and half” BIA and missionary curricula combined so-called literary studies with manual labor in and for the school. The literary “half” placed great emphasis on the “3 R’s” – along with a fourth, religion – in order to “uplift” their charges. At large boarding schools the curriculum often became highly demanding, featuring English, history, geography, mathematics, and other such subjects. It employed increasingly difficult graded readers, such as the famous McGuffey Readers, all of which demanded improving levels of literary in English. [31]
From today’s perspective – indeed from that of the early twentieth-century Progressive Education movement that emphasized pupil-centered and community-centered education – the rigid discipline of both day and boarding schools was especially blameworthy. Tribal children were forcibly washed, the boys’ long hair cut, all were dressed in “civilized clothes,” some in military-style uniforms, implying military-style obedience. Rote memorization of knowledge, drill, marching bands, physical punishments, occasional brutality - all demanded that pupils internalize the regimentation of the school, and by extension, of modern societ y. [32]
After classroom activities, boys worked in the carpenter’s shop, or on the farm, and girls learned to cook, knit, sew, and do other supposedly gender-appropriate jobs. Some detested this physical work and some enjoyed it, especially when paid small amounts of money. [33] Theoretically such duties would teach “savage” children the importance of the Protestant Work Ethic, and provide them with skills useful on the reservation or in white society (mostly at lower levels). In fact, student labor often became vital to school survival, and even contemporaneous white critics (such as those who wrote the 1928 Meriam Report) pointed to the gross exploitation of children involved. [34]
Yet again we might consider the adaptive value of such regimentation and of the “half-and-half” curriculum. As well as providing English literacy the schools imparted valuable lessons for survival in modern civilization: clock-watching, “the bell” (to divide the day into productive units), basic and sometimes advanced forms of arithmetic; and, most important, the earning and use of money. The small sums students received for physical labor often went directly into a school bank. Pupils thus learned even more of the capitalist ethic. This is not to argue for the inherent worth of rigid regimentation or of capitalism – merely to acknowledge the adaptive value of much of the curriculum in nineteenth-century America.
Ex-pupils noted how tribal leaders could become aware of such value. Geronimo has achieved fame as the last Indian hold-out, not vanquished militarily until 1886. Yet, according to Asa Daklugie, it was Geronimo who ordered him and other young Apaches to attend Carlisle. “Without this training in the ways of the White Eyes our people could never compete with them,” wrote Daklugie much later. “So it was necessary that those destined for leadership prepare themselves to cope with the enemy. I was to be trained to become [an Apache] leader” – at the BIA’s Carlisle Indian School! [35] Such elders, supposedly mired in tradition, would later be proved right in many tribes.
Indians also began to realize the importance of the American legal system. In their efforts to stave off removal in the 1830s the Cherokees not only exploited literacy and English; they developed, in the words of Sidney L. Harris, “a carefully planned legal strategy” of repeatedly bringing their case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Removal took place, yet a pattern was being established in this and other tribes. Hoxie specifically notes how the first generation of Indians educated at boarding schools used “their facility with English,” along with their “civilized” appearance and understanding of American institutions to enter tribal political life and circulate petitions attacking BIA policies. “Through such actions,” he writes, “the political leaders of a supposedly vanishing race began to define the legal limits of federal and state intrusion into their commun ities.” [36]
Further, by the early twentieth century large numbers of Indians gained salaried employment in the BIA as monitors, officers, teachers, and in other such roles; Ely S. Parker, a Seneca, actually served from 1869 to 1870 as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. [37] Although many Indian pupils sickened and died, the schools could also become, as Scott Riney notes, “welfare providers of last resort.” [38] Apart from jobs – and further adaptive training - they offered regular food and clothing for thousands of tribal children, decade after decade, during crisis times of inter-tribal warfare and clashes with white Americans, while the buffalo rushed to near-extinction.
Of course, as by 1930 over half of all school-age Indian children were actually attending state public schools, perhaps the Federal government effort was not so important? However, this dramatic increase in attendance partly occurred because, as we have seen, the BIA financially supported many such Indian children. Moreover, without the federal effort, the whole idea of modern schooling would have been far less visible to remote tribal peoples. If they had rarely seen or even heard of schools, or had never encountered recruiting teams from distant boarding schools (often including students dressed in military-style uniforms, yellow stripes on their arms and legs!), would Indian kin have been sending 38,000 of their children to white public schools in 1930? [39]
Thus, whatever the destructive effects of the BIA and missionary school upon Indian cultural values, tribal identity, kin cohesion, and even on the very health of tribal schoolchildren, things might have been worse without this educational institution. In area after area – language, literacy, work habits, the use of money, incipient knowledge of the legal system, even of physical well-being – the schools brought things that Indians needed, and increasingly knew they needed, to survive in modern American society.
Because Indian peoples had choices. Not until the 1890s did schooling become compulsory, and then only sporadically so. [40] While some Indian children were literally dragged to school by tribal police, others went voluntarily, or at the behest of their kinfolk. [41] By 1930 most Indians had got the school habit; they realized that, although their children still needed traditional knowledge and values, they needed the school too. Indeed, a concluding comparative section will make even stronger claims for the crucial contribution of government schooling to Indian survival. But first let us turn again to the Irish case.
VII
How might the Irish have fared without the British-financed national school system run by the CNEI? The hedge schools were never anything more than a haphazard collection of educational expedients. [42] The self-consciously regimented national schools suffered continually from irregular attendance, for example, and inadequate facilities – all documented in the CNEI’s annual Report. It is highly unlikely that the hedge schools could have been better off in such respects, or come anywhere near to filling the gap, had the national schools not been built.
With its greater resources and small percentage of the total population (about one tenth), perhaps the (Anglican) Church of Ireland could have successfully educated its own. Nevertheless, after its disestablishment as the Irish state church in 1869, Anglican children more and more gravitated towards the national system, making up perhaps one tenth of the pupils by 1880. Presbyterians, living mostly in parts of Ulster, could probably have covered their own educational needs. Yet, significantly, once the national system had been reorganized to suit them, Presbyterians too joined. [43]
Emerging from sporadic persecution under the Penal Laws, the Roman Catholic Church first worked with hedge school masters, then organized its own parish school system. Significantly, this Church also co-operated with the national system, once it had been molded to Catholic needs. “The hierarchy was conscious,” write Judith Harford and Deirdre Raftery in a recent study, “of the fact that it could not afford to boycott the scheme since it was not in a position to finance its own system of primary education.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, then, the Catholic and major Protestant Churches had joined the system and all exploited it for their own ends. Without government support they would have struggled on, but with far smaller resources for educating the millions of mostly poor Irish children. [44]
As in the Indian case, much of the CNEI curriculum ignored local and national culture. This was perhaps less a problem for Anglicans and Presbyterians, generally English-speaking and loyal to the Union. Pupils from the predominantly Catholic, Irish-speaking, and rural society suffered more, as initially all learning was through English. Except in the area of religion, where the CNEI rigidly adhered to a policy of denominational neutrality, Irish children were often as baffled as Indian s. [45]
National school pupils, nevertheless, and through them their communities, benefited massively from pragmatic British government largesse. Literacy levels had apparently been rising throughout the century, to something under 50% at 1850, and here the hedge schools, along with denominational and other schools, must take some credit. There were further impressive improvements by 1900. The CNEI claimed 85% literacy by then, and by 1910 almost all young adults could read and write. Surely the widely-attended national schools, with their carefully structured curricula, graded reading books, and inspectorial visits, could claim much of the credit for these improvements? [46]
As with Indian literacy, this Irish literacy was almost entirely in English. Much has been written in recent years about the death of vernaculars. In 1800 perhaps 3 ½ million Irish people, mostly in the northwest, west, and southwest of the country, spoke only Irish. By 1900 perhaps one tenth of this number, an ever-diminishing minority, used the vernacular. [47] British imperialism was of course crucial. Yet nineteenth-century observers, even CNEI inspectors sympathetic to Irish, along with later historians, see the mass of Irish people voluntarily deserting the old language, for the new and more widely-useful English: “language suicide,” rather than “language murder.” [48]
The process had begun well before 1831. By their millions of individual decisions – voluntarily sending children first to hedge schools and later to the new national schools, or by talking Irish to each other, but English to the children – Irish people themselves decided the fate of their language. [49] If their children migrated to Dublin or other Irish cities; if they sought work in Scotland or England or further afield in the British Empire; if, as millions did, they sailed for the United States to compete for jobs and political power with non-English speaking immigrants – what use was Irish? To millions of Irish people who found themselves working away from local, Irish-speaking areas, then, the English language conferred a massive adaptive advantage, just as it did for Indians in different circumstances. Drawing on a native aphorism, Tony Crowley notes how “the Irish loved their language, but they loved their children more.” [50]
As with the Indian case, only in the 1890s did elementary schooling become compulsory in Ireland, and the results there were equally sporadic. [51] The Irish people also had choices, then, and they overwhelmingly chose to send their children to schools that taught through the foreign language. Even in the absence of the national schools the vernacular would most likely have declined. Yet the CNEI can surely claim much of the credit – if that is the appropriate term – for the mass desertion of the Irish language by the Irish people. This was a tragedy; indeed, many see language loss as constituting loss of cultural and national identity. Yet, as Anderson writes of an Indian people: “Language is [only] one among a number of ways of being Arapaho.” [52] The predominantly Catholic and nationalist Irish people could also pragmatically switch languages while intensifying their ethnic identity and indeed nationalism; they would oppose British rule in Ireland mostly through the English language.
Language shift is thus a complex issue. It would be myopic, nevertheless, to deny the immediate and indeed long-term advantages that command of the English language has brought. Surely some of Ireland’s recent prosperity (at least to mid-2008) can be attributed to the fact that it is an English-speaking country.
The sides of national school life that now strike the historian as most oppressive – the regimentation, the rote learning, the schoolyard drill designed to teach loyalty and unquestioning obedience to authority – also had their adaptive value. If nineteenth-century rural Irish children did not face the onrush of alien settlers, many faced the demanding journey not just to foreign lands, but into modern, urban life. So the school also prepared them for the discipline of the factory or of domestic service, or of the teaching profession. In attempting to teach agricultural knowledge and practices, the CNEI also showed awareness of Ireland’s economic needs, horrifically evidenced by the suffering of the Great Famine years. Even when its commitment to such manual labor teaching diminished in the later nineteenth century, girls, especially, continued to learn such “feminine” skills as cooking and sewing as part of the regular curriculu m. [53] A lso, by teaching geography, and (later) history, by informing them about the world (often more about the distant world than about Ireland [54] ), the schools were broadening the minds of Irish children, many of whom would soon have to live in that broader world.
As with Indians, the national schools also provided immediate concrete benefits. The brighter pupils might become monitors, and even earn a little money. William O’Malley, later a Member of Parliament for the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, remembered his youthful pride at receiving a few pounds sterling per year for monitorial duties. [55] Some would themselves become teachers within the system, occasionally principals or even inspectors, enjoying far greater sense of security than those (mostly) men who traveled the country to set up hedge schools. Girls may have been even greater beneficiaries of the national schools than boys. The daughters, and to a lesser extent sons, of those who emigrated to America sometimes entered the teaching profession there, gaining a measure of security and prestige as “servants of the poor.” [56]
Therefore, we can also make a strong case for the immediate and long-term importance of government schooling in Irish life. Despite, or perhaps because of their anglicizing goals, they achieved widespread acceptance by Irish people, and prepared generations for life in their own changing communities, for migration to English-speaking Irish areas, and for emigration all over the world. Ironically, they may even have helped prepare the road to the independence of most of the country from British rule. Would a less modernized, less literate, Irish-speaking people – thus less exposed to contemporaneous ideas of Enlightenment and Romantic nationalism - have been as likely to rise against Britain? Would such a population have succeeded in winning independence in 1922, as did a partly-Anglicized, predominantly literate, modernizing, yet ideologically nationalist people, heavily the products of the national schools? [57]
VIII
Both BIA/missionary and CNEI schooling campaign were nakedly assimilative. However, Indian and Irish peoples learned to adaptively manipulate the school. Perhaps ironically, both employed the new knowledge, especially literacy in the new language, towards defining powerful and on-going senses of self-identity. Note, for example the cultural and historical pride expressed in many contemporary Indian tribal/national web sites – mostly through the English language. Note, too, how such corporate expressions of Indian identity valorize the education of youth through all levels, from pre-school to university. [58] And although Irish remains the first official language of the Republic, and is enjoying something of a minor renaissance, Ireland is an overwhelmingly English-speaking nation. And much of Irish national pride is also expressed through English.
The regimentation, curricular offerings, the oppressive regimes that made the schools on both continents places of misery for countless boys and girls, also taught powerfully useful –if generally “proletarian” - adaptive skills. These facilitated the encounter with modern life, whether it be working in a factory or serving as a domestic for an American family; or teaching the children of their own or other communities.
Indian and Irish people were not just passive recipients of such learning. Indians, as the Hopi example suggests, could divide bitterly over schooling, particularly over having their children taken far away to distant, unhealthy boarding schools. Yet tribal and Irish adults were highly pragmatic. In the Indian case many realized that their own money, treaty annuities, helped support the schools. One Kiowa Apache told how a tribal leader instructed the U.S. agent not to distribute annuity money to those who refused to send their children to school. [59] Such people, in America and Ireland, must have been aware of official contempt for their ancient, sacred, but supposedly backward ways of life. Yet, whether on the Blasket islands off southwestern Ireland or in Oraibi, Arizona, many came to accept that their children needed modern education to face the future.
IX
In one very significant way the effects of government schooling may have been decisively different. Perhaps a million Irish people died as a direct result of the Great Famine, from starvation and disease; a further million immediately emigrated, thus dramatically escalating a process that had begun much earlier, and would continue beyond the mid-twentieth century. [60] Yet at no time during the nineteenth century was the actual physical survival of the Irish people at stake. By 1900, apart from the 4 million on the island, millions more Irish-born and of Irish descent lived abroad. At no time was the phrase “The Vanishing Irish” a truism on peoples’ lips. Without the national schools Irish people at home and abroad would have been far less-well prepared for the future, but they would have survived as a people.
The case appears shockingly different for Indians. From 1800 to 1900 the population of the United States expanded from about 5 to 80 millions – a population explosion perhaps unique in human history. By 1930 it had grown to 100 million. During the same period the Indian population decreased from perhaps a million to about one third of a million, and Indians really did appear to be vanishing. [61]
How many would have survived if, as the BIA commissioner suggested to the Hopi, the federal government had turned its back on Indians, and left them wholly at the mercy of settlers, territorial, and state governments? If it had not put its money and Indian treaty money to work by building and funding schools, and employing thousands of teachers, including Indians? Would a “benign” or perhaps callous neglect have been better or worse in terms of Indian physical survival? [62]
My speculation is this: not only would the result have been worse for Indians; it would have been catastrophically worse. Had the government not acted as it did, “The Vanishing Indian” might have become a terrible reality; at the very least, far fewer Indians would have survived into the twentieth century. And when we consider how few actually survived until 1900, “far fewer” suggests very few inde ed. [63 ]
By attempting to erase almost all tribal values, the United States government and its missionary allies committed “culturecide” against Native Americans. Nevertheless, their major goals for Indians were Christianity and citizenship of the United States. By providing the pragmatic Indian peoples with a degree of protection and with exploitable adaptive tools, the federal/missionary schooling campaign may have helped to prevent the genocide – the physical extermination - of Indian peoples in the United States.
Although the government’s educational role was vital in both Ireland and America, then, its significance was even greater in the latter case. The school may have been pivotal in helping Native American peoples in their struggle for actual physical survival as the ocean of settlement threatened their very existence. [64] This conclusion suggests the need for further counterfactual studies, focusing on the actual or possible effects of schooling/lack of schooling in areas such as India or Africa or Australia; or in Canada or Scotland, for example. The present unavoidably broad study also suggests the need for micro-studies following through in detail the effects of schooling/lack of schooling on individuals and small communities /groups in many of these areas.
This study thus reaches conclusions that I, still an Irish nationalist, [65] still deeply sympathetic to the struggles of indigenous peoples everywhere, would rather not contemplate. And this counterfactual interrogation certainly “ undermines...the particular interpretations of history [I] held at the outset ” (emphasis in original) of my project many decades ago. Despite their ethnocentric assimilationist policies and practices, the BIA and missionary schools, and the CNEI national schools, may have done more good than harm. “Bad an’ all” as the schools were, things might have been a lot worse for Irish people, and inexpressibly worse for Native Americans, without them.
I have also tried to follow through on the arguments made by Ferguson and other historians that, if grounded in credible use of sources, and not too implausible, counterfactual “what if” history has things to teach us. It has forced me to examine assimilationist education from the perspectives of colonialists and imperialists with whom I find it difficult to empathize. I still regard Francis Leupp’s “colloquay” to the Hostile leader in Oraibi as unctuous, self-righteous, self-serving, imperialist cant. But I have to concede that the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had a point.
Acknowledgements : Sirkka Coleman, Markus Coleman, Tiina Coleman, Aiden Coleman, Toni Kosonen, Patrick Long, Margaret Connell Szasz, Jane Weiss, and the referee for IJASonline.
Notes
1. This and next paragraph: Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter ARCIA followed by year) (1906), House Documents, Vol. 15, 59 Congress, 2 session, serial 5118, 118-25. “Colloquy,” 119-20. The commissioner perceptively noted that the Hopis were manipulating white Americans. See also ARCIA, Reports of the Department of the Interior (Washington, 1907), 80-87; Peter M. Whiteley, Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture Through the Oraibi Split (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Margaret D. Jacobs, "A Battle for the Children: American Indian Child Removal in Arizona in the Era of Assimilation,” Journal |
have been posting various stories about what you should do about it, when the truth is you really can't do much. A lot of people are likely going to deal with an awful lot of bad stuff almost entirely because of this leak by Equifax. Not surprisingly, the FTC has weighed in with some suggestions, most of which won't actually help very much. Most of them are the standard suggestions everyone's giving -- including checking your credit reports, putting a credit freeze on your files and basically watching very closely to see if you're fucked over by whoever has access to these files.
But the FTC's very last suggestion is the one I wanted to focus on today. It's basically "um, well, maybe try to file your tax returns early next year, so you beat hackers trying to do the same?"
File your taxes early — as soon as you have the tax information you need, before a scammer can. Tax identity theft happens when someone uses your Social Security number to get a tax refund or a job. Respond right away to letters from the IRS.
As someone who has been a victim of someone filing fake tax returns to try to get your refund, it's a really shitty process to go through. The problem here, though, is the whole setup of our tax system, which makes it pretty damn easy for someone to fake your tax returns -- now made even easier thanks to this breach. If the FTC really wanted to help, it should be pushing for a complete overhaul of how tax filing works, such that merely knowing your Social Security Number and address isn't enough to file tax returns in your name. Among the many problems here, it starts with the idiotic idea that we use SSNs as an identity tool -- but there's also the fact that we continue to have the IRS force every American to play a guessing game with their taxes just to keep tax prep companies like Intuit and H&R Block happy.
I recognize that the FTC isn't directly in a position to fix this, but the fact that it's best suggestion is "race the hackers to filing your tax returns and hope you get there first" should highlight just how totally fucked up our income tax system is in the US.
Filed Under: ftc, hackers, social security numbers, tax returns
Companies: equifaxDAVID NEALE: “I design and analyse pylons for a living so have a genuine interest in them." Picture: PETER STILL
A STRUCTURAL engineer from Kent claims he was held in a police cell for 18 hours after being mistaken for a terrorist.
David Neale, who lives in Rainham, says he was driving through Cornwall when he stopped with a friend to take a picture of a pylon and suddenly found himself surrounded by armed police.
Mr Neale says he was arrested under the Terrorism Act, but, after 90 minutes sitting in a police car, the charge was dropped to conspiracy to commit criminal damage.
Police have denied his arrest had any link to the act.
The 32-year old was arrested with housemate Jay Curtis and taken to Newquay Police Station where they were questioned and left in the cells overnight before being released without charge.
Mr Neale suffers from a rare form of epilepsy and says he suffered a fit during the night.
He also says he returned home the following day to find police had raided his home and seized his computer.
The engineer had been enjoying a holiday in Cornwall with Mr Curtis when he spotted the pylons and stopped with his camera.
Mr Neale said: “I design and analyse pylons for a living so have a genuine interest in them. That’s why I stopped, but the next thing I knew six cars had pulled up and police were brandishing guns.
“They just didn’t believe it when I told them what I was doing. They were convinced I was trying to blow them up.
“I was standing in a bright red fleece and Jay was sat in the car so it wasn’t as if we were trying to be secretive. We weren’t doing anything wrong.
“There are lots of people out there interested in trains and airports. Does that mean they’ll be arrested for taking an innocent photograph?”
A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police confirmed David Neale was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage on April 4, at 3.50pm.With changes to the rules of the game already confirmed, it’s being reported Everton are one of the Premier League clubs looking at increasing substitute numbers for match days.
With the International Football Association Board (IFAB) already announcing changes to the powers of match day referees for 2016/17 and general rule tweaks to how 90 minutes can play out in terms of punishable indiscretions from players, Sky Sports have reported this week that Premier League clubs are meeting next month to discuss the possibility of increasing the substitute options on the bench for the coming season as well.
With the Premier League already boosting the regulation five a few years back in 2008 to seven options, mainly with the argument of being allowed to incorporate a keeper without impinging on outfield tactical and injury choices, the Football League obviously followed suit for the 72 clubs under their umbrella, but freedom was given to not force clubs below the top flight to name seven or forfeit a game – and it’s common (ish) in League Two, for example, for clubs to only name the five.
It’s a far cry from three substitutes being named – I would say back in the good ol’ days but I’m not that old.
Anyway, Sky are reporting that clubs are set to meet for a summer pow-wow over seeing if there’s agreement and good argument for lifting that number of seven to nine (almost a Star Trek reference for anybody interested) for the clubs campaign – with the proviso being clubs still only utilise three players from the bench.
They say Manchester United and Chelsea are leading the meeting in wanting a boost – albeit not claiming they are alone in wanting the change – and it is set to be discussed at this summer’s AGM in June.
For the big hitters in the division – I imagine one of the arguments is with the introduction of naming a 25 man squad now for Premier League use, increasing substitute options would naturally increase playing time for people who may otherwise find themselves left out of a match day squad but in hindsight could’ve seen themselves used given how any game could play out – it makes perfect sense.
If you have to name a maximum 25 man squad why can’t 25 make up a match day squad.
But on the counterside, with less Sky rich and rich in general clubs already in the division, added to Burnley and Middlesbrough taking seats at this AGM, and the fact they will be joined by either Hull City or Sheffield Wednesday – even with the 25 man squad argument, they have a clear counter that it serves as a disadvantage for them as in instances where somebody may not be fit enough to figure on a seven man bench they could a nine, and players being rested and ruled out of a seven man bench could come into play on a nine man bench.
As we’ve seen from IFAB’s latest changes, tweaks to the game are supposed to be about fairness and proportionality (even if not perfect) and extended benches would clearly benefit bigger clubs fighting on more fronts.
Not so much tighter squads really though and those who haven’t even named a full 25 man squad since its introduction. The argument would be it would force some sides each match day to name youngsters that aren’t ready and haven’t played themselves into that kind of reward.
But would that be a bad thing?
And again, even then you have to come back to 25 man squads – why can’t that regulated squad choice have an opportunity each week to get game time.
And for the younger element, if a match day is going particularly well for a given side, if shining Development Squad players have been forced to naturally take up a place on the bench, would they benefit from 5-10 minutes because they were an option they otherwise wouldn’t have been?
You could argue it’s win, win for all sides on that basis.
Which brings up a different topic – if substitute numbers are to be increased by two – should one or both of those additions have conditions, for example:
Sub 8 – has to be in 25 man squad but with less than % appearances.
Sub 9 – has to be a Development Squad player with less than % appearances.
Would that improve game time, plus youngster development as opposed to two extra substitute places going to multi million pound signings and the perceived ‘spending’ to the title?
Other changes for next season’s Premier League are already known, and we will now have ten games on a Friday evening for the first time in top flight history.
There will also be a brand new substitute board with sponsor – but they aren’t paying me so I’m not mentioning them.
Another company will also be launching the 2016/17 official football later this summer – but naming rights again I’m not getting a penny of – but I can exclusively reveal that as per IFAB rules it will be ‘spherical’ and made from ‘suitable materiaal’.
Some of us will call it ‘that thing you kick’ and with fair playing reigning, I don’t mean opposition players.
With the Premier League also rebranding their logo this summer, that’s another change fans will see and for the first time, the Premier League won’t be sponsored by a single company in terms of ‘title sponsorship’, it will instead be sponsored by a satellite of non title sponsors which certainly won’t decrease the revenue the Premier League takes.
Oh and despite the millions – away fans have to be happy with a £30 cap on ticket prices.Election is probably a word that most American’s are sick of hearing about at this point. But hopefully it’ll be different for most this time around. Starting today Founder of Amori’s Casino & Burlesque, Paul E. Amori also known to all those who attend the Lightning in a Bottle Festival (in Bradley, CA) as “The Mayor of Lighting in a Bottle” has announced that he is running for the Mayor of Los Angeles. Paul will be running on the Vote 4 Love campaign in which he asks his constituents the simple question of “How do we create the most love for the most people?”
Amori first won the honorary title of “The Mayor of LiB” back in 2012 at the festival backed by his legendary “Vote 4 Love” campaign. The following year he launched a crowd-funding campaign to bring a vision of his own Casino & Burlesque to the festival. In a huge push from his enthusiastic supporters who donated more than fifteen thousand dollars to build a home for Love at LIB, Amori found a new home for his Casino & Burlesque.
On the “Vote 4 Love” campaign, Lightning In a Bottle Co-Founder Josh Flemming has been quoted with saying, “We are humbled and excited to see one of our own out there being a voice for good. In the dynamic and all too often disheartening landscape of American politics, it’s refreshing to see someone from the local community of artists leading the charge to bring hope to areas and people that need it most. For this reason, we’re proud to support Paul E. Amori for Mayor of Los Angeles in 2017.“
Some of the key points of Amori’s platform are:
LOVE AS A CORE VALUE – Many of the issues faced by Angelenos and local governance today, like homelessness, traffic, the housing shortage and the rising cost of living – can be solved through a dedicated and intentional focus to spread love.
– Many of the issues faced by Angelenos and local governance today, like homelessness, traffic, the housing shortage and the rising cost of living – can be solved through a dedicated and intentional focus to spread love. IMPROVED VOTER TURNOUT – Less than 20% of registered voters are expected to turnout for LA’s 2017 mayoral election. We want to engage voters by showing them how to become involved in policy creation.
– Less than 20% of registered voters are expected to turnout for LA’s 2017 mayoral election. We want to engage voters by showing them how to become involved in policy creation. CROWD-SOURCED SOLUTIONS – One main reason people are disenchanted with politics is they feel no candidates are offering a voice that truly represents them. By sourcing ideas from the community, real solutions can be made to address real issues.
To find out more about Amori, the “Vote 4 Love” campaign, and everything else you may need to know visit Vote4Love.com and learn all about how to “Love Your Vote” on March 7th, 2017.
Lightning in a Bottle (LIB) is a transformational festival in the Central Coast region of California presented by The Do LaB. The Do LaB seeks to promote sustainability, social cohesion, personal health, and creative expression.
“About Do LaB Inc.: Do LaB™ is an events production company based in Los Angeles, CA. Since its inception, Do LaB™ has designed, produced and introduced iconic festival experiences from psychedelic structures to interactive theater and a cavalcade of the best emerging music talent across an array of genres. In addition to winning the Greener Festival Award six years in a row, and running what the Rolling Stone has called “The Best Dancefloor at Coachella”, their flagship event, Lightning In a Bottle Arts and Music Festival has been widely celebrated for its intimate environments and intentional offerings, which are often recounted as personally defining, life-changing experiences.”
iTunes / Stitcher / Google Play / TuneinWomen in Lac Simon are still fearful of provincial police, two years after allegations of officers abusing Indigenous women first surfaced, a Quebec inquiry heard Wednesday.
Chief Adrienne Jérôme of the Lac Simon Anishnabe Nation, just east of Val-d'Or, Que., was testifying on the third day of the commission looking into relations between Indigenous people in Quebec and government services, notably policing and justice.
"Our women don't believe in the justice system," Jérôme told retired Superior Court justice Jacques Viens, the inquiry's commissioner.
"They're afraid of the police, afraid to make a complaint. They don't feel protected."
The Quebec government launched the inquiry last December, a year after CBC/Radio-Canada reported several Indigenous women said they'd been physically and sexually abused by provincial police officers stationed in Val-d'Or.
Montreal police investigated the complaints but no charges were ever laid.
Jérôme said that wiped away what little faith Aboriginal women had left in the justice system.
"The anger is still there. The injustice is still there," she said.
Chief Adrienne Anichinapeo of Kitcisakik, a tiny Algonquin community 120 kilometres south of Val-d'Or, said women who spoke out about police abuse feel betrayed by the system's failure to act on their complaints and have been left to fend for themselves. (Viens Inquiry) Adrienne Anichinapeo, the chief of Kitcisakik, another Algonquin community 120 kilometres south of Val-d'Or, said the women who had the courage to come forward to complain about police treatment in 2015 feel betrayed.
They need psychological and social support, Anichinapeo said.
"These women have been left to fend for themselves."
Children fear police
Jérôme said the mistrust of police is often established in childhood.
She said social workers for the government's youth protection agency ask too much of Aboriginal parents and are too quick to seize children from their homes.
She testified youth protection workers are often accompanied by police on home visits.
"Our children are afraid of police," she said. "When they see a police car, they burst into tears inside their homes."
She said Lac Simon faces a host of social problems, including substance abuse, suicides, school bullying and a major housing shortage.
She said policing, education, social, health and psychological services are all chronically underfunded.
Jérôme said the First Nations communities are left begging for money, and they're often caught between two levels of government.Puca Stunts
Skill: Puca
Here's a bit of a bestiary entry for Crux. This is my own version of the Puca, a Welsh/Irish/English faery. The goal was to create black-furred sadists. They worked out well in a recent session of the Crux game I've been running at home (the Keepers of Crux). They didn't put up too tough of a fight, but their creepiness really made a splash in the game.These fey are the size of Ferrets, and they specialize in crawling through extradimensional spaces.They are akin to gremlins and other such fey fauna. In the case of the Puca, they also are irreverent shapeshifters, capable of shifting from one to a dozen of different animal forms. They have a preference for rabbit, goat or horse forms. Almost always, their forms are black-furred, with antlers that look like twigs.Normally they worship and obey the lordship of the Fey Lord known only as the Stranger, but others stuck between realities can garner them as servants too. They are easily controlled through magic, although they are amenable to working as unseen servants as long as they are provided with servings of milk.The Puca once shared a world with the Fomori. They invited the Ursyklon to take the world after the Fomori had started to worship the dark Void between stars. After that, they came to dwell almost primarily in the Spaces Between. The Puca have found the Spaces Between more dangerous in the last centuries. Things are stirring in the dark, things that scare the black-furred fey.Puca have an addiction to causing pain, a sort of taste for Sadism that can drive them to torture those they come across. They don't always act on it, as milk often keeps their more sadistic or tricksy instincts in check.Quick Average (+1), Forceful Fair (+2), Sneaky Average (+1)Puca Good (+3), Brawl Fair (+2), Stealth Average (+1), Knowledge Average (+1)Puca can crawl between the spaces between worlds. They treat different planes and realities as different zones for purposes of movement.Puca can change forms into any animal, not just the normal ones associated with them. It costs them a Fate point. When they change forms, they gain an aspect reflective of that animal in addition to their other aspects.Puca gain a +2 bonus to any roll that inflicts pain on another. This just makes them giddy.Puca gain a +2 bonus on Sneaky rolls made in the shadows.The Puca Skill is for managing the shapeshifting abilities of the Puca. It also covers their crawling through realities and self-control in regards to milk and sadism.Shareholders in MotoGP and World Superbike’s organising body Dorna are set to take a payday worth nearly a billion Euros from the company, after using a dividend recapitalisation to take a profit expected to be in the region of €889 million from the Spanish-based business.
The two organisations set to benefit most are private equity investors Bridgepoint Capital and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the two biggest shareholders in the company.
A dividend recapitalisation is standard business practice where companies take profits from companies by lumping them with debt. That in turn means that future profits from the company are likely to be piled into repaying the debt rather than investing in the future of the sport – but may not be a significant issue with one source describing Dorna as a ‘cash cow’ to industry experts Reuters.
It’s also not the first time that Dorna have been subject to a dividend recapitalisation by their owners, either, with €420 million taken from the company in 2011 and a further €715 million in 2014.
Dorna hold the rights to promote MotoGP until 2041 and World Superbikes until 2036.The Dallas shootings give Californians reason to take a closer look at the six new gun control bills signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on July 1.
They won’t make us instantly safer. But they are a good step in what should be a decades-long campaign to change the state’s gun culture.
Dallas made it clear that widespread guns and open carry laws aren’t the answer. There were armed citizens among the peaceful demonstrators, carrying rifles. Yet five police officers died.
This has to be an evolution, and it has to be based on independent research of what works and what doesn’t work. That’s why a University of California firearms violence research center approved by lawmakers in June will be important: $5 million is allocated for research on the impact of gun violence and of state laws intended to curb it.
Gun research should be a bipartisan cause. In fact, the National Rifle Association should welcome it if it believes regulation makes people less safe. But Congress has refused to authorize federal agencies to study the effects of gun violence, which the American Medical Association calls a public health epidemic. California can lead the way.
The most significant action in the six-bill package Brown just signed makes California the first state to require background checks to buy ammunition. The legislation also bans high-capacity magazines — and requires people to turn in ones they already own — as well as banning “bullet buttons,” which make it easy for shooters to detach magazines and quickly reload.
The NRA, prone to hyperbole, calls the new laws “draconian” and “Stalin-esque.” None threatens the right of law-abiding citizens to own weapons, but the organization does have a legitimate point about one element. It outlaws lending guns to anyone but immediate family members without having the borrower go through a background check. Previously, guns could be loaned between people who are personally known to each other for as long as 30 days without a background check.
The change is a direct response to crimes like the San Bernardino mass shooting in which the guns were purchased legally by one person and then lent to a killer. It clarifies responsibility for how your gun is used. But hunters commonly loan guns to friends to try them out. It’s part of the sport.
The Legislature should look at whether this law can be tweaked to make it clear that lending guns will be prosecuted only when a crime is committed with one. That way friends will know they’re taking personal responsibility for legal use of their firearms but aren’t subject to arrest for letting a pal try out a new hunting rifle.
Brown vetoed bills that would have limited purchases of long guns to one a month, made gun theft a felony, required speedier reporting of lost or stolen guns, made gun violence restraining orders available to more groups and attempted to curb the proliferation of “ghost guns” without serial numbers. His rationale was reasonable.
The legislative package did not convince Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom to drop his Proposition 63 from the November ballot, since it goes farther to regulate guns. It will require intense scrutiny this fall because if it passes, and unforeseen problems arise with its enforcement, voter-approved laws are almost impossible to fix. By contrast, laws passed by the Legislature can more easily be tweaked, as we’ve suggested with the gun-lending law.
Mass shootings and gun violence are escalating. California has an obligation to try to stem that tide while protecting the rights of its law-abiding gun owners. The Legislature has approached this responsibly — especially since it has had the foresight to sponsor independent study of the results.Last week, I spent my time in these Ramblings going through the rankings released from Yahoo given that they opened their fantasy hockey lobby. Remember that the purpose of this exercise isn’t necessarily to denigrate the rankings of another but rather to gauge where the public might be moving with their draft picks. Also, too often, the focus is on the specific ranking of a player rather than the relative ranking of a player, the tier of similar options this player falls in, and what all this tells us about public perception. If I could impart one piece of advice, it is to be less concerned about what the ranking of a player is, and more about what that rankings tells us about the perception of that player.
Before we dig in, I would like to mention that a lot of the information used here will be gleaned from Ian Fleming’s site Dispelling Voodoo.
With all that aside, it’s time to finish up the Yahoo rankings by discussing the goaltenders. Keep in mind that these thoughts are construed with Yahoo’s default roto categories in mind: wins, goals against average, save percentage, and shutouts. It is also assumed that 12-team leagues are the standard.
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With September just around the corner, be sure to get prepped for your fantasy drafts by grabbing Dobber’s Fantasy Guide!
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Jake Allen – 32nd overall, 6th goalie ranked
For the entire 2016-17 season, Allen finished as the 15th-ranked goaltender in this format which, all things considered, is good for a guy who was left at home by St. Louis for a stretch because of poor performance. If anything, this should show how long of a season it is, and that even a goalie who struggled as he did at times can still be valuable in the fantasy game.
My guess is that he’s ranked as high as he by Yahoo because of his performance when he returned; over his final 27 games of the season, Allen had a.935 save percentage in all situations. He was also a.920 goalie in 2015-16. Of course, if he can maintain anything close to that for an entire year, he would be nearly a top-5 goalie in fantasy hockey.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is so important that a goalie have a good defensive team in front of him to increase his fantasy value. For example: last year, Robin Lehner had a.920 save percentage while Tuukka Rask’s was.915. However, Lehner’s goals against average has nearly a full half-goal higher (0.45 to be exact) because he faced so many shots. Even though Lehner saved pucks more often, he saw so many pucks that his GAA was murdered.
That is what makes Allen intriguing as a fantasy option. Last year, the Blues allowed the fourth-fewest adjusted shot attempts per minute, pretty much neck-and-neck with Washington. If the team repeats that performance, and Allen can be around league-average, his GAA should hover around 2.40 again and that’s fine for fantasy.
By Fleming’s adjusted goals saved above average and other measures (please go to his site, his work is phenomenal), Allen is about a league-average goaltender. That is good enough with a solid team like St. Louis in front of him. However, given the options available at a later draft cost, this feels like drafting him at his ceiling, and that is a recipe for fantasy disaster.
Devan Dubnyk – 56th overall, 12th goalie ranked
This is truly bizarre to me. In 168 starts since joining the Wild, Dubnyk has an overall save percentage of.924. He’s finished top-5 in Vezina voting twice in three seasons, is playing behind a team that allowed the second-fewest adjusted scoring chances per 60 minutes at five-on-five last year – a team whose roster is largely the same – and yet is ranked in the same vicinity of much bigger question marks like Ben Bishop and Jonathan Quick.
If there is one concern, it’s that perhaps his overall season looked better than it was. When looking at things like his high-danger save percentage or expected goals saved above average, they were slightly below the league average:
If you go to Mr. Fleming’s site, you can check previous seasons, and 2016-17 was definitely a downgrade. However, as alluded to in the opening paragraph in this section, the Wild did a wonderful job at limiting high-danger shots against; for reference, his 4.79 faced per 60 minutes was considerably lower than guys like Allen (5.38), Carey Price (6.25), Braden Holtby (6.81), and Matt Murray (8.33). If Minnesota can perform similarly defensively this season as they did the last, it’s a great way to artificially inflate his save percentage by giving him easier shots to face. I don’t see any reason why there should be a big drop-off in play from the team, so another good season from Dubnyk seems likely.
As I mentioned in the opening, it’s not specifically where a player is ranked, but what that rank is relative others. Aside from a small handful of goalies like Price and Holtby, how many net minders are in a better situation with a solid track record than Dubnyk? Not many. I do wonder if there will be a discrepancy between his actual ADP and this ranking, but if he’s going anywhere near the 10th goaltender off the board, it seems like a strong option to me.
Scott Darling – 120th overall, 23rd goalie ranked
I suppose there are two concerns with Darling in Carolina:
Can his limited but stellar track record be relied upon for fantasy owners? Does he end up in some sort of timeshare with Cam Ward?
As for the second question first: please, god, no. I can’t possibly imagine a team using a 33-year-old goalie with a.907 save percentage over his last 206 starts in any sort of timeshare beyond purely a backup. However, I also thought the same thing last year, and the year before. Coaches are weird and sometimes can’t let go of their binky. Ward is the binky in Carolina.
But I just truly, madly, deeply cannot fathom Ward eating into Darling’s starts in a significant manner. If that does happen, though, it’ll break me, shake me and force me to crash and burn.
As for the track record, I get it. Goalies are notoriously difficult to predict, and beyond maybe three or four goaltenders, how many can really be relied upon? That’s even with guys like Tuukka Rask, Corey Crawford, and Henrik Lundqvist having several excellent seasons over the last five years or so. With the sample we do have, though, Darling has been very good; in his 3272 minutes of five-on-five over the last three years, his high-danger save percentage is.847. For reference, Holtby’s is.833, Murray’s is.842, and Price sits at.865. All of them are above average.
For another reference, here is how he compares to Cam Talbot over the last three seasons:
Assuming Ward doesn’t start more than 20-25 games, and that Carolina is a team on the rise (they are), the concerns are Darling handling a full workload for the first time, and the sample size of what he’s done so far. I think those concerns are built into this ranking. I do not have these concerns. His stats are solid, my extremely amateurish eyes saw when he was in net for Chicago said the same, and he’s now the man for a franchise. If I can get him anywhere in the same tier as Jaroslav Halak or Marc-André Fleury, I consider that a gift.
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Those are three guys that really caught my eye for their rankings. Here are a few more quick hits on some others that piqued my interest.
Frederik Andersen – 76th overall, 17th goalie ranked
The Leafs starter going somewhere in the middle of the goalie 2 rankings feels about right. This isn’t hating on the Leafs, so put those pitchforks away (for now). It’s just the Leafs played at a very high pace last year which meant not only did they generate a lot of shots, but they allowed a lot in return. It is possible to win that way (they made the playoffs doing it!), but it also should jack up the goals against average for Andersen. He could still have a solid season personally but if he’s barraged by shots night in and night out, being much better than this ranking will be difficult.
Roberto Luongo – 198th overall, 27th goalie ranked
This is likely a situation that I’ll just completely avoid this year, which is a change because this was a situation I was all-in on last year, drafting both he and James Reimer in more than one league. Luongo wasn’t outright bad last year as a.915 save percentage is fine when the league average is.913. I don’t think this team improved in the off-season though and he’ll still, at best, be in a timeshare with Reimer. It’s nice that he won’t cost much at the draft table but even at that cost, I think I’d rather a backup on a good team like Phillip Grubauer or Aaron Dell.
Antti Raanta – 251st overall, 36th goalie ranked
The Coyotes are another team on the rise like Carolina, but they have further to go. I think the Hurricanes have a chance to push for a playoff spot while Arizona would do well just to stay out of the lottery. Speaking of lottery, though, I think this spot is well worth the risk when taking Raanta. He, like Darling, doesn’t have a huge track record, but has been stellar. We’ve seen goalies on bad teams have very good seasons before (Semyon Varlamov a few years ago, Robin Lehner last year), and that speaks to the randomness of the position. I would not want to rely on Raanta as one of my top two goalies, but if I can grab him as a third, that’s a risk very well worth taking.Which brings up the larger issue of Kickstarter as a whole. Most of these campaigns aren't people who need the money, they're people who just want it. The same could be said for lots of actual charities, sure — if you boil the word "need" down enough, nothing but food, water, and air is left. But here in the bourgie, comfy confines of wealthy Western society, we're talking about people like the indie musician Amanda Palmer, who raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to make and distribute a folk album. That's all. Amanda Palmer, who is married to successful author Neil Gaiman and has been a prominent musician for a decade or so. Handed $1.2 million because she asked for it. People are free to spend their money however they want, but there's something so unseemly about the asking, isn't there? Maybe that reaction is owed to some overly reserved New England quality in me that I should fight against, but I can't help but feel that Kickstarter campaigns for stuff like this, that is stuff people are having no trouble selling elsewhere, are a bit gauche. Plus it's too easy.
Sure there might be some campaigning to be done on, I dunno, Twitter or whatever, but mostly Kickstarter is a passive thing. You set up the page, set certain reward levels, and then sit back and watch the dough roll in. Well, that's if you're prominent enough, I guess. Anyone can start a Kickstarter for just about any reason. I guess my ire is really directed at the famous and semi-famous people who, rather than hustle around town drumming up the money from proper backers and investors and then hoping money from their fans will roll in, just make some cutesy video instead and figure their work done. There's an arrogance to it that I find extremely unbecoming. You need look no further for evidence of that arrogance (in the guise of doing a Super Cool thing) than the reward for a $400 donation to the Veronica Mars movie: "If you kick in $400 to the cause, we will love you so much that Kristen (@IMKristenBell) and Rob (@RobThomas) will follow you on Twitter for an entire year." I mean ugh, right?? This is the kind of thing that Kickstarter facilitates. It's the height of tacky.
Another part of my revulsion is, yes, likely to do with the simple fact that art-related Kickstarter campaigns strip away the pretense that art and commerce aren't inextricably linked. Money has always been part of the commercial art game, but the budgeting and haggling is usually done out of view, by a few select professionals. Kickstarter, though, puts the economic reality right out in the light for all to see. Someone like Amanda Palmer is essentially telling us that she doesn't want to work on spec, so if we want to hear something new, we have to pay in advance. At a moment when we're discussing the complexities of for-pay creativity, Kickstarter openly democratizes the compensatory system. I intellectually know that's probably a good thing, but my gut still finds all the upfront money talk to be a bit unrefined, let's say. Art should exist for art's sake! Crassly bringing money into the conversation sullies everything.Narendra Modi at the National Education Summit in Gandhinagar Friday. (IE Photo: Javed Raja)
The age-old tradition of schools issuing character certificates will soon be replaced by aptitude certificates in Gujarat, said Chief Minister Narendra Modi during his inaugural address of the National Education Summit held at Gandhinagar on Friday.
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“We are trying to bring in a little change to the age-old tradition, perhaps introduced during the British rule. When we leave a school, we are given a character certificate and wherever we go we show the same character certificate. Ironically, none of those accepting it understands its requirement or utility,” he said.
“I have made this suggestion known to my colleagues and work is in progress regarding this. There should be a facility, where children will undergo regular observation and monitoring while in school. With the help of technology, their daily routine and family members will also be put under observation.”
Debunking the existing system of field visits, he said students should be taken to visits to army camps, industries, manufacturing companies. “Do we need to pass a resolution in the Parliament and make a law for this,” Modi said, while addressing representatives from 33 states and Union Territories, including more than 100 vice-chancellors and directors, 84 scholars and more than 1,500 professors and teachers. Over 3,000 students, who attended the event were from outside Gujarat and 200 of them were from 40 countries.
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Those who shared the stage with Modi included Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh, Mumbai Vice-Chancellor Dr Rajan Welukar, Charles Zukoksi provost and executive vice-president for Academic Affairs University of Buffalo, State University of New York, Dr Kishore Singh, who was responsible for the right to education at UNESCO and appointed as special rapporteur on the Right to Education by the UN Human Rights Council, Italian Ambassador Daniele Mancini and Gujarat Education Minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama.50 Weapons will release the German techno artist's next album in July.
Tracklist
Details have been revealed for the next album by Rene Pawlowitz, AKA Shed, entitledPawolowitz is a man of many monikers—Wax, EQD, The Panamax Project and most recently The Traveller—but Shed is usually a channel for his most stylistically open-ended productions, as seen on his past albumsand. Due out in July on Modeselektor's 50 Weapons, the album will be Pawlowitz's first full-length on a label other than Ostgut Ton, the Berghain-associated imprint that's been his most consistent home to date. It comes hot on the heels of |
atter/spread/broadcast
1276 朗 19288 92.6541463341 lang3 clear/bright
1277 杜 19246 92.6640923808 du4 (surname)/fabricate/restrict/to prevent
1278 奶 19219 92.6740244743 nai3 breast/lady/milk
1279 季 19211 92.6839524335 ji4 season/period
1280 丹 19171 92.6938597213 dan1 red/pellet/powder/cinnabar
1281 狗 19093 92.7037266999 gou3 dog
1282 尾 19076 92.7135848931 wei3 tail
1283 仪 19064 92.7234368849 yi2 apparatus/rites/appearance/present/ceremony
1284 偷 19006 92.7332589032 tou1 to steal/to pilfer
1285 奔 18989 92.7430721361 ben1/ben4 to hurry or rush/to run quickly/to elope, go to/towards
1286 珠 18916 92.7528476437 zhu1 bead/pearl
1287 虫 18909 92.7626195338 chong2 insect/worm, an animal/an invertebrate/a worm/an insect
1288 驻 18901 92.7723872897 zhu4 resident in/stationed in/located at/to station (troops)
1289 孔 18890 92.7821493608 kong3 (surname)/hole
1290 宜 18833 92.7918819753 yi2 proper/should/suitable/appropriate
1291 艾 18825 92.8016104554 ai4 (surname)/Artemisia vulgaris/Chinese mugwort
1292 桥 18815 92.8113337678 qiao2 bridge
1293 淡 18779 92.8210384758 dan4 insipid/diluted/weak/light in color/tasteless/fresh/indifferent/nitrogen
1294 翼 18710 92.8307075257 yi4 wing
1295 恨 18702 92.8403724413 hen4 to hate
1296 繁 18699 92.8500358065 fan2 complicated/many/in great numbers
1297 寒 18684 92.8596914199 han2 cold/poor/to tremble
1298 伴 18678 92.8693439327 ban4 a partner/companion or associate/to accompany/comrade
1299 叹 18587 92.878949418 tan4 to sigh
1300 旦 18569 92.8885456012 dan4 dawn/morning/day-break/day
1301 愈 18540 92.8981267976 yu4 heal/the more...the more/to recover/better, heal
1302 潮 18532 92.9077038597 chao2 tide/current/damp/moist/humid
1303 粮 18528 92.9172788546 liang2 provisions
1304 缩 18495 92.9268367957 suo1 to withdraw/to pull back/to contract/to shrink/to reduce
1305 罢 18492 92.9363931864 ba4/ba to stop/cease/dismiss/suspend/to quit/to finish, (final part.)
1306 聚 18458 92.9459320064 ju4 form gathering/gather
1307 径 18428 92.9554553229 jing4 path
1308 恰 18420 92.9649745051 qia4 exactly/just
1309 挑 18417 92.9744921369 tiao1/tiao3 carry on a pole/choose, incite
1310 袋 18381 92.9839911645 dai4 a pouch/bag/sack/pocket
1311 灰 18298 92.9934472989 hui1 gray/ash
1312 捕 18236 93.0028713926 bu3 to catch/to seize/to capture/to catch
1313 徐 18175 93.0122639624 xu2 slow/gentle/Xu (a surname)
1314 珍 18144 93.0216405119 zhen1 precious thing/treasure
1315 幕 18138 93.0310139607 mu4 stage curtain/tent
1316 映 18102 93.0403688052 ying4 reflect/shine
1317 裂 18093 93.0497189986 lie4 crack/split
1318 泰 18069 93.0590567892 tai4 safe/peaceful/most/Thai(land)/grand
1319 隔 18056 93.0683878616 ge2 to separate/to stand or lie between/to divide/to cut off
1320 启 18041 93.0777111822 qi3 to open/to start
1321 尖 18036 93.0870319189 jian1 point (of needle)/sharp/shrewd/pointed
1322 忠 18021 93.0963449038 zhong1 loyal
1323 累 18017 93.1056558216 lei2/lei3/lei4 cumbersome, accumulate, implicate/tired
1324 炎 17971 93.1149429672 yan2 flame/inflammation/-itis
1325 暂 17968 93.1242285625 zan4 temporarily
1326 估 17943 93.1335012382 gu1/gu4 estimate, old/second-hand (clothes)
1327 泛 17928 93.1427661621 fan4 broad/vast/float/pan-, float/general/vague
1328 荒 17924 93.1520290188 huang1 out of practice/uncultivated
1329 偿 17919 93.1612892917 chang2 to compensate/pay back/to recompense
1330 横 17912 93.170545947 heng2/heng4 horizontal/across/(horizontal character stroke), unruly
1331 拒 17892 93.1797922666 ju4 to resist/to repel/to refuse
1332 瑞 17869 93.1890267002 rui4 lucky/auspicious/propitious/rayl (acoustical unit)
1333 忆 17829 93.1982404624 yi4 remember
1334 孤 17817 93.2074480231 gu1 lone/lonely
1335 鼻 17773 93.2166328453 bi2 nose
1336 闹 17764 93.2258130165 nao4 make noise or disturbance
1337 羊 17763 93.2349926708 yang2 (surname)/sheep
1338 呆 17746 93.2441635398 dai1 foolish/stupid/no expression/stay, stay/stupid
1339 厉 17726 93.2533240731 li4 severe
1340 衡 17719 93.2624809889 heng2 to weigh/weight/measure
1341 胞 17702 93.2716291193 bao1 the placenta/womb
1342 零 17675 93.2807632966 ling2 remnant/zero
1343 穷 17672 93.2898959235 qiong2 exhausted/poor
1344 舍 17647 93.2990156308 she3/she4 give up/abandon, residence
1345 码 17626 93.3081244856 ma3 a weight/number/yard/pile/stack
1346 赫 17613 93.3172266221 he4 (surname)/awe-inspiring
1347 婆 17603 93.3263235909 po2 grandmother/matron/mother-in-law
1348 魂 17535 93.3353854182 hun2 soul
1349 灾 17531 93.3444451784 zai1 disaster/calamity
1350 洪 17526 93.3535023547 hong2 flood
1351 腿 17509 93.3625507456 tui3 leg
1352 胆 17486 93.3715872505 dan3 the gall/the nerve/courage/guts/gall bladder
1353 津 17470 93.3806154868 jin1 TianjiIt’s a time of a meteor shower tonight. You won’t need a telescope, Binoculars or a mountain to have a stargazing party!! You just need to step ;out pof your house in the middle of the night. Lie down in the backyard and enjoy the show. A meteor is a space rock that or a dust particle or fragments from a comets or asteroids that enter the earth’s atmosphere. As the space rock falls towards the Earth, the resistance of the air or rock makes it extremely hot. That what we see as a shooting star. The bright light emitting from it, is not actually the rock but the glowing hot air as the hot rock sparkle through the atmosphere.
When the Earth is encountered with many meteoroids then it is called as Meteor shower. Now the question arises that why this thing happens? The comets also revolves around the sun,.like the other planets like earth, mars etc. The orbit of the comet is usually lopsided. As the comet come closer to the sun, some of the icy stuff or surface boils off and release a lots of particles of dust and rocks. Then several times, each year when earth makes its journey around the sun, its orbit crosses the orbit of the cmet therefore Earth is bombarded with lots of meteoroids of the comet. Now let us see some interesting things and facts about a meteor shower.
15 Things You Need To know about Meteor Shower 12 August 2017In her latest attempt on Thursday afternoon to dodge questions from her press corps in extending her streak of days without a press conference to 264 days, Hillary Clinton tried some chocolate from a local store after blasting Donald Trump and the despicable alt-right movement and implored the employees to feed the assembled press because they’re “so wonderful, so cooperative, [and] so hardworking.”
Clinton tried a piece of chocolate from a Dorinda’s Chocolate employee before someone off-camera halfheartedly remarked that “[n]ow it’s a good time for questions, right” and so she responded by motioning toward the press that she “want[s] to offer it all to the press.”
When a female employee informed reporters that she “brought out 12 plates” for them to try samples from, Clinton gushed that her faithful, liberal entourage of journalists “are so wonderful, so cooperative, so hardworking” and therefore, “they all deserve a piece of chocolate.”
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As an unidentified reporter shouted to Clinton about why she didn’t come out and label Trump himself a racist, the Democratic presidential candidate fired back that “you’d love this” piece of chocolate that Clinton herself just tried.
With that, Clinton was whisked away as another reporter shouted a question about the Clinton Foundation but not before she bid farewell to her adoring fans by imploring them: “Here, everybody, try one!”
The transcript of Hillary Clinton interacting with the press corps following her Reno, Nevada speech on August 25 can be found below.In the spirit of tasty entrepreneurship Hester Street is back with its third annual Test Kitchen!
EVENT DETAILS
Hester Street Fair, over nine years, has established itself as the go-to jumping-off point for brands, businesses, and restaurants based in NYC looking to promote and build their consumer base with a seasonal pop-up. Fueling the spirit of entrepreneurship, and keeping true-to-form with our thematic weekend events, we are throwing our third annual ‘Test Kitchen’. This day is dedicated to all first-time chef creations— from first time food vendors to established businesses attempting new ideas for cookbooks.
The Test Kitchen winner will be determined at 4:30 by a panel of predominant culinary industry figures, including Emily Eisen of Bon Appetit and Healthyish. The winners will be judged based on the following categories: most original hot food, tastiest hot food, and most original hot. Winners will have the chance to show their stuff with a free booth at a Bryant Park Picnic this summer.
WHAT’S ON THE MENU
Bold Foods
Here’s your chance to join the future trend of alternative protein in america— crickets. Not just any old crickets though, Bold Foods will be serving up their beautiful and tasty cricket pasta.
mrfishsauce
We aren’t going to try and word this better than the founder himself, who is launching his food cart built on a tricycle, to push around Brooklyn late night in the Summertime. So here is Anthony Ha’s vision for mrfishsauce: bring Vietnamese food to the street, to try and emulate the smell of Saigon in New York.
Manju
First time vendors at Hester Street Fair destined to dominate the NYC street food scene, Manju will be featuring their signature Bahn Mi Burger and a unique Shrimp Katsu burger that will keep you coming back week after week.
Memphis Seoul
Sometimes a name says it all. Memphis Seoul is the brainchild of a texan native adding korean influences to some serious soul food. This Saturday, a combination of Cup-A-Noodles and Texan fall-off-the-bone pulled pork bring a revelation able to revive any and all of your sweat-induced Summertime stress.
Janie Bakes
Hester Street fave Janie Bakes delivers classic American baked goods with updated looks and flavors. For Test Kitchen, Jane will be showcasing her pie crust cookies which have been deemed the next Cronut by the baking world.
Sauce and Destroy
Love Grandma’s red sauce but can’t take the meaty, oily, cheesed up heat? Sauce and Destroy have perfected a classic for everyone to enjoy, even those with dietary restrictions.
Ocka TrEATs
New vendors Ocka TrEATs believe healthy eating doesn’t have to mean denying yourself of pleasures. Using unconventional plant-based ingredients to whip up treats that better serve our bodies and the planet, Ocka will be competing with their chocolate mousse made with avocado and sea algae.
Vagaband Kitchen
The coffee addicts behind Vagaband Kitchen care about the quality of treats in your favorite cafe’s bake case. Their wheelhouse of vegan eats will be rolling out an incredible carrot cake that convinces you that maybe doing the whole vegan lifestyle change thing wouldn’t be so hard.
Camellia’s Pies
Grab 2 or 3 of these mini-pies and snack your way through the day, no plate and fork required. For this weekend, Camellia is test driving her new cookie butter pie. Cookie. Butter. Pie. Get it.
RE-THINKING FOOD WASTE
Artist YoungGun Lee’s mantra for the day is “you eat what you bring,” asking the neighborhood and other vendors to bring forth their potential food waste, turning something usually wasted into visually stunning and edible sculptures. YG will also be sorting the day’s refuse, forcing us to examine our consumer footprint on the ecosystem and consider the many ways in which we can reduce, reuse, and recycle.
MUSIC
Groove your insane food coma off to Mike Mossibee’s DJ set
VENDOR HIGHLIGHTS
Popped
“Light up” in a legal way with Popped’s CBD products that promote mental and physical wellness, alleviate pain naturally, and are rather fun to indulge in. This week Popped is offerring a savings discount of $10 when you buy a battery and cartridge together and 20% off of 3 or more cartidges. Stock up and chill out!
VENDOR LINEUP
Adelante Shoe Company, The Alley, Beba’s kitchen, Bold Foods, Cake Plus, Camellia’s Pies, FiligreeNYC, Gigi’s Mimos, Hatzumomo, In Common, J.Papa, Janie Bakes, Joe’s Apron’s, Katmama Accessories, LeBlam NYC, Lifestone, Manju, MassPop, Megan Phillips Collection, Memphis Seoul, Mrfishsauce, New York Handcrafted, Ocka Treats, Once Loved Laundry, Ovando Salvi, Pilot Kombucha, Popped, POPTEA, Prickly New York, Rollie, Rosey Jamaican, Sauce and Destroy, Scoops in Cahoots, Tribeca Trinkets, What We Eat, Vagaband Kitchen, Village PsychicLast night, an overwhelming majority of UK parliament voted to begin military airstrikes on Syria, proving Jonathan Littell right when he wrote, "it is the fear, even the psychosis, of another jihadi backlash against Western interests – of another September 11 or July 7 – that is driving European and US decision making." Airstrikes will have devastating effects on the Syrian people and can only act as an incentive to further radicalise rebels.
The below extract from Littell’s Syrian Notebooks traces the political climate and violence in Syria from 2012, documenting the first stirrings of IS.
(Photo: Al Jazeera)
The world is not yours alone
There is a place for all of us
You don’t have the right to own it all.
- An anonymous Syrian yelling in the night at a regime sniper
It starts, as always, with a dream, a dream of youth, liberty, and collective joy; and it ends, as all too often, in a nightmare. The nightmare still goes on and will last much longer than the dream: struggle as they can, no one knows how to wake up from it. And it keeps spilling over, infecting ever wider zones, all the while seeping through our screens to come lap up against our gray mornings, tingeing them with a distant bitterness we do our best to ignore. A vague and remote nightmare, highly cinematographic, a kaleidoscope of mass executions, orange jumpsuits, and severed heads, triumphant columns of looted American armor, beards and black masks, and a black banner all too reminiscent of the pirate flags of our childhoods. Spectacular images that have served to mask, even erase, those forming the undertow of the same nightmare: thousands of naked bodies tortured and meticulously recorded by an obscenely precise administration, barrels of explosives tossed at random on neighborhoods full of women and children, toxic gasses sending hundreds into foaming convulsions, flags, parades, posters, a tall smiling ophthalmologist and his triumphant “re-election.” The medieval barbarians on one side, the pitiless dictator on the other, the only two images we retain of a reality far more complex, opposing them when in fact they are but two sides of the same coin, one coin among many in a variety of currencies for which no exchange rate was ever set.
The notes that form this book are a record of a brief fragment of the dream: a dream that was already assailed on all sides and subjected, as we will see, to unutterable violence, but one that the dreamers still clung to, with all their heart and all their strength. Publishing them now, reopening this small window on three weeks lost in the distant past – three years ago, an eternity – may at least serve this purpose: to remind the reader that before the nightmare, a nightmare so dense and opaque it seems to have no beginning, there had been the dream. And that whereas nightmares are a roiling magma of individual pulsions, deriving their shape only from the hollow molds of ideology, and adding up to nothing but death, dreams are collective, political, spiritual, social. Perhaps then, these notes might help provide a touchstone, a reference point, to show that all this did not happen by chance; more importantly, that all this did not have to be, that there were other paths, other possibilities, other futures. That the mantra so tirelessly repeated by our solemn leaders, “There is nothing we could have done,” is simply not true. And that without our callous indifference, cowardice, and short-sightedness, things might have been different.
When the photographer Mani and I arrived in Homs, in mid-January 2012, the Syrian revolution was reaching the end of its first year. In the city and the surrounding towns, the people were still gathering daily to demonstrate – calling for the fall of the regime, loudly asserting their belief in democracy, in justice, and in a tolerant, open, multi- confessional society, and clamoring for help from outside, for a NATO intervention, for a no-fly zone to stop the aerial bombardments. The Free Syrian Army (FSA), made up mostly of Army and secret services deserters disgusted by the repression, still believed its primary mission was defensive, to protect the opposition neighborhoods and the demonstrations from the regime snipers and the feared shabbiha (mafia thugs, mainly Alawite in Homs, formed into militias at the service of the al-Assad family). The Syrian citizen-journalists, like those that helped, guided, and protected us during our stay, still believed that the constant flow of atrocity videos they risked their lives every day to film and upload on YouTube would change the course of things, would shock Western consciousnesses and precipitate strong action against the regime. The people still believed that song, dance, slogans, and prayer were stronger than fear and bullets. They were wrong, of course, and their illusions would soon drown in a river of blood.
America, traumatized by two useless and disastrous wars to the point of forgetting its own founding myth – that of a people rising against tyranny with their hunting guns, helped only by indomitable spirit and idealism – stood back and watched, petrified. Europe, weakened by economic crisis and self-doubt, followed suit, while the regime’s friends, Russia and Iran, occupied every inch of the political space thus made available. And geopolitics is always written with the blood of the people. The day after I left Homs, on February 3, a series of mortar shells targeted the neighborhood of al-Khalidiya, where I had spent so much time, killing over 140 civilians. As Talal Derki, the Syrian director and narrator of the magnificent documentary Return to Homs, comments at that point in his film, this mass murder was the turn of the revolution: “The dream of a revolution with songs and peaceful protests ended.”
I have already described, in the epilogue I wrote a few months after my stay in Homs, the events that followed: the Army’s total destruction and occupation of the “free neighborhood” of Baba ‘Amr, and the beginning of the bitter siege of the opposition neighborhoods in the center. This siege, which leveled large parts of the city, lasted over two years: finally, in May 2014, the exhausted and starved survivors brokered a deal, and were allowed to evacuate the city alive, abandoning the empty ruins to the triumphant regime. This event was hardly noticed in the West; others were captivating our attention. Just as we only woke up to the threat of Ebola when the first cases hit Texas and Madrid, shrugging helplessly and even indifferently as long as it was only killing Africans, so did we only finally react to the horror engulfing Syria and then Iraq when images of Western journalists and aid workers, kneeling in orange jumpsuits to have their heads sawed off by some masked British psychopath, were forcefully shoved down our throats, in all the perfection of their sickening mise-en- scène. A year earlier, on August 21, 2013, the Syrian government had shelled rebel Ghouta suburbs of Damascus using sarin, a lethal nerve agent, killing hundreds, perhaps even more than a thousand civilians and blatantly violating every single “red line” set by Western democracies. France (who to its credit always seems to have had a more lucid vision than its partners regarding the perils of an extension of the conflict), was prepared to join an international coalition and engage in punitive airstrikes against key regime bases and facilities, but was forced to stand down when first the UK and then the US, for mostly internal political reasons, backed off and brokered a vague chemical disarmament deal with Russia, granting the regime a new lease of life as the only power in the region technically capable of carrying out such a disarmament, and in the process permitting it to continue mass-murdering its civilians using more conventional weaponry, such as Scud rockets, artillery, and barrels crammed with explosives. Meanwhile, more and more voices were rising, in the West and elsewhere, to suggest that the real peril was not al-Assad and his oppressive regime, but the growing Islamist threat, most violently incarnated by the self-proclaimed “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” Da‘esh in its Arabic acronym.
Mani and myself happened to be in Homs, and were able to document what seems to have been the first deliberate sectarian massacre of the conflict, the murder with guns and knives of an entire Sunni family in the Nasihin neighborhood on the afternoon of January 26, 2012. Many more would follow, first of other families, then of entire Sunni communities in the village belt surrounding Homs to the West, in the foothills of the Jabal an-Nusayriyah, the so-called “Alawite mountain” from which the regime continues to draw its main support. Up to that point, as all our interlocutors kept repeating to us and as we witnessed in the demonstrations, the revolutionaries were doing everything in their power to prevent the descent into sectarian warfare; the FSA response to this massacre was not to slaughter an Alawite family, but to attack the Army checkpoints from which the murderers had come. Yet provoking widespread ethnic and sectarian conflict was clearly becoming one of the main regime strategies. It made a perverse kind of sense. Even though the al-Assad power structure was founded not, as is often said, on an exclusively Alawite basis, but on an alliance between the Alawite ruling clique and a Sunni bourgeoisie – already established or newly promoted and granted key posts in the economy, the bureaucracy, and even the Army and security services – the regime felt it could no longer trust the Sunni, and banked its survival on the mass mobilization, in its favor, of the country’s numerous small minorities: not just the Alawites but also the Ismaelites and the Christians, as well as the Druze and the Kurds if possible. Not even all the Alawites, at the beginning, fully supported the regime; the Christians, as can be seen in this book, were often neutral, as were other minorities. And after being forced to purge most of its unreliable Sunni troops, to the point of disarming entire divisions, the Army desperately needed fresh recruits. The opposition sought to resist these sordid provocations as best it could, but in vain. By mid-2012, uncontrolled FSA elements were also carrying out sectarian massacres in Alawite villages, and the downward spiral accelerated dramatically. Most minorities, whether they wanted to or not, found themselves taken hostage by the regime: the Kurds brokered their tacit support in exchange for near-total political autonomy; as for the Alawites, hesitant or not, the cycle of massacre and counter-massacre turned the regime’s survival into an existential question for them, making the entire community into accomplices.
But transforming a popular, broad-based, proletarian and peasant uprising into a sectarian civil war was not the regime’s only card. From the very beginning, the Damascus propaganda machine had sought to paint the revolutionaries as terrorists and Islamist fanatics. What was missing were the real ones; but the regime would do everything in its power to draw them into the game. As soon as the uprising gained momentum, in the spring of 2011, the mukhabarat, Syria’s feared secret services, released scores of jihadist cadres detained in their jails. And there is much anecdotal evidence that they favored the rise, throughout 2012, of the radical Islamist armed groups that would soon enter into conflict with the more secular FSA. When Da‘esh first began conquering territory in Syria, in January 2013, “they never fought the Damascus regime and only sought to extend their power over the territory freed by our units,” as an FSA fighter, the son of a landowner from the powerful Syrian al-Jabour tribe, explained in September 2014 to a journalist from Le Monde. “Before their arrival, we were bombed each day by the Syrian air force. After they took control of the region, the bombing immediately stopped.” Little wonder that in spite of their very un-Islamic reign of terror many civilians living under Da‘esh control, in towns such as ar-Raqqah, now feel “safer” there than in other parts of Syria. And when in December 2013 the FSA, newly allied with other Islamist rebel groups such as the Al-Qa‘ida spin-off Jabhat al-Nusra, finally launched an offensive against Da‘esh, triggering a new and ultra-violent “war within the war,” the regime artillery and air force continued bombing only the anti-Da‘esh forces, sparing once again the troops of the “Islamic State.” It is facts such as these that finally led French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to publicly denounce, in the summer of 2014, the “objective complicity” between Damascus and Da‘esh. Yet no matter how cynical, none of this is very surprising. As Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad wrote in a May 2014 portrait of the leader of Da‘esh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi:
The Syrian secret services, who have spent most of their time since 2003 managing, infiltrating, and exfil- trating jihadists transiting to Iraq [to fight US forces], know their “clients” very well, when they are not directly manipulating them. They know that the first objective of most of them is the creation of a Caliphate strictly applying sharia law, rather than the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.
Playing the extremists against the moderates – the basic idea being that, having little or no social base, radical forces will be easy to eliminate once they have helped with the far harder job of crushing a main opponent deeply rooted in society – is a strategy that certainly has its lettresde noblesse. Practiced ineptly, as it usually is, it has an unfortunate tendency to turn against its initiators, as in the case of Israel when it quietly fostered the rise of Hamas in the hope of bringing down Arafat’s PLO, or the United States when it armed the more radical jihadists against the Soviets in Afghanistan, sealing the doom of the moderate mujahideen factions and unleashing forces still not contained to this day. But on occasions it can bring a measure of success, at least in the short term. Chechnya is a case in point. After Russia’s humiliating defeat there, in August 1996, at the hands of a few thousand rebels armed only with Kalashnikovs and RPGs, the Russian special services, FSB (the successor organization to the KGB) and GRU (military intelligence), immediately began preparing the grounds for the next con- flict. The three years during which a de facto independent Chechnya managed its own affairs rapidly turned into a disaster: the systematic kidnappings of foreign journalists and aid workers, culminating in the spectacular decapitation of four British and New Zealander telecom engineers in December 1998 by the well-known Islamist commander Arbi Barayev, ruined any good will abroad for Chechnya and generated an effective media blockade as journalists ceased travelling there; rising political and even military pressure by rogue Islamist rebel groups on the freely elected nationalist president Aslan Maskhadov forced him to radicalize his position, eventually declaring a “shari‘a law” no one really wanted or even understood; further decapitations of Russian captives and other atrocities, conveniently filmed by their Islamist perpetrators, continued to feed Russian anti-Chechen propaganda, with compilations of these videos being distributed to all foreign embassies at the start of the 1999 reinvasion of Chechnya to help justify the inevitable excesses of the “anti-terrorist operation."
What followed is well known: the total destruction of Groznyi, the mass killings and disappearances, the waves of refugees. What is less so, though it has been extensively documented by a handful of courageous Russian journalists, is the sinister pas-de-deux played by the special services and the Islamists throughout the years. This is no place to go into details, but a few examples might serve. Documents leaked by frustrated GRU officials to the Russian media revealed that the FSB paid Barayev 12 million dollars, out-bidding the four telecom engineers’ employers, to have them gruesomely killed in a manner maximizing the propa- ganda impact; in the spring of 2000, after the Federal Forces had occupied Chechnya, Chechen colleagues of mine saw Barayev – officially one of the most wanted men of Russia – freely driving through Russian checkpoints using an FSB accreditation; and it was only when his chief FSB protector, Rear-Admiral German Ugryumov, mysteriously died in May 2001 that the GRU was finally able to corner him, in an FSB base, and kill him. On a military level, when Groznyi finally fell in late January 2000, the Russian services manipulated or paid the Islamist rebel groups, which had been sent ahead to the mountains to prepare the withdrawal of the remaining forces from the city, to betray their comrades, leading to the nationalist forces being decimated during the retreat. The evidence is also strong for a form of direct complicity, or at least mutual manipulation, between the services and the Chechen Islamist commando that occupied a Moscow theater in October 2002, resulting in the death of over a hundred hostages and further discrediting president Maskhadov and his remaining guerilla forces. In spite of a succession of disastrous incidents, the most notorious being the hideous school massacre in Beslan in September 2003, this insidious strategy would bear fruit: after Maskhadov was finally killed, during a Russian operation in 2005, his successor Doku Umarov renounced the drive for national independence in favor of the creation of a pan-Caucasian Islamic Caliphate – a move that drove virtually all the remaining nationalist commanders into the arms of Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s puppet in Chechnya, thus bringing to an effective and squalid end the long-held Chechen dream of independence. Chechen rebel activity has now been reduced to almost nothing, and Doku Umarov was killed in turn toward the end of 2013; the fact that the Islamist uprising continues unabated in neighboring regions, especially Daghestan, seems to be considered by Russia as a “manageable” problem, for now.
It would be tempting, given this history, to see the hand of Bashar al-Assad’s Russian advisors in the shop-worn idea of allowing radicalized Islamist factions totally to discredit the popular revolt, all the more so as the wave of kidnappings and murders of foreign observers that accompanied the rise of the Islamists closely resembles the Chechnya model. There are also some potentially direct links. The appearance in the Syrian theater of several Chechen brigades, aligned either with Jabhat al-Nusra or Da‘esh, has gained quite a bit of media attention, as has the main “Chechen” commander ‘Umar al-Shishani, now a military emir of Da‘esh, who is in fact a former Georgian special forces officer of mixed Christian-Muslim descent whose real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili. Less well known, however, is the fact that behind Omar al-Shishani stands a certain Isa Umarov, who left Chechnya to join him in Da‘esh territory and has given him his daughter in marriage. Umarov, one of the oldest and most influential (albeit highly discrete) Chechen Islamist leaders, whose links to the KGB go all the way back to the 1980s when he was one of the founders of the Islamic Rebirth Party, the first anti-Soviet Islamist organization, is a man who played a key role in the interaction between the Russian services and the Islamists he godfathered all through the two Chechen wars; and his role within Da‘esh certainly raises interesting questions. But as a Syrian friend pointed out to me, the mukhabarat too are old hands at these games, and have no need of lessons from their Russian patrons. Their strategic philosophy is explicitly stated in graffiti now very common around Damascus: “Assad or we burn the country.”
Yet ever since the beheading of the journalist James Foley, Da‘esh has become the overwhelming obsession of Western governments, clouding all other issues. The regime and its Russian friends can be proud: their goal of, if not quite rehabilitating, at least bringing al-Assad back into the game as a key player, is now within reach. It is no accident that the Syrian air force’s very first bombardments of Da‘esh coincided with the beginning of Coalition airstrikes (although they have now gone back to bombing moderate rebel positions, especially in Aleppo, leaving Da‘esh to the Americans); nor that the French intelligence services, as Le Monde recently revealed, have been making overtures to Damascus and the mukhabarat, requesting assistance in tracking Da‘esh and al-Nusra jihadists that might pose a direct threat to Europe – overtures that fortunately were disavowed by President François Hollande and his Foreign Ministry, but for how long? Even more than the fate of the broader Middle East, including Lebanon and Jordan, or the sickening executions of a few brave Western journalists and aid workers, and especially since the killing of four people at the Brussels Jewish Museum by Mehdi Nemmouche (a lost French banlieue delinquent who somehow ended up torturing Da‘esh’s Western hostages in their Aleppo dungeon before returning to Europe to become the new terrorist hero and martyr), it is the fear, even the psychosis, of another jihadi backlash against Western interests – of another September 11 or July 7 – that is driving European and US decision making. From there to working with al-Assad is only a step, no matter how much our leaders deny it. Sadly, this won’t benefit the Syrian people much. A recent set of statistics published by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, usually considered one of the most reliable independent observer of the conflict, might serve as a useful reminder even if the |
But we don’t want to skew data by only selecting Esri forums. What are “neutral” GIS discussion forums? We looked at only 2 – GIS Subreddit and GIS Stack Exchange. When you aggregate the discussion topics from these two communities, this sums up community forum voice.
What’s Next?
If you’re in the geospatial industry, your choice in GIS software is critical. We’ve mapped out the GIS software landscape for you. You have 30 options to choose from based on employers, researchers and the voice of the GIS community.
Quality is often, but not always, a cause of popularity.
Does McDonald’s really have the best hamburgers even though they sell millions every day? Marketing, branding, advertising, consumer perception contribute to what the consumer will buy.
We’ve developed a formula to rank the different GIS software products. However, this formula is not “magic” and should not dictate your choice in GIS software.
What a formula can do is give you a basic structure on the perceptions of GIS users of the world.
What the formula cannot do is teach you the point of intersection between your needs and the desired product.
Only you, as a GIS professional, can do that.
More GIS Software ResourcesThe voice actress unit TrySail announced on Sunday that they are performing the opening theme song for the television anime of Petosu's comedy manga Interviews with Monster Girls (Demi-chan wa Kataritai). The three unit members made the announcement at the first performance of their 1st live concert tour.
The opening theme song is titled "Original." Clammbon band guitarist's Mito composed the new song, and prolific scriptwriter Mari Okada penned the lyrics, just as she did for songs in Aquarion Evol and CANAAN.
The CD will go on sale on February 8 in three versions: a limited first pressing edtion, a limited-time pressing edition, and a regular edition. The limited-time pressing edition will feature a jacket illustration by the anime's character designer Tetsuya Kawakami and a DVD with the anime's clean opening animation sequence.
Kodansha Comics is releasing the manga in English, and it describes the story:
Monsters of legend walk among us, going by the name “demi-humans.” Ever since he's discovered the “demis,” one young man has become obsessed with them. So when he gets a job as a teacher at a high school for demi-girls, it's a dream come true! But these demis, who include a rambunctious vampire, a bashful headless girl, and a succubus, have all the problems normal teenagers have, on top of their supernatural conditions. How to handle a classroom full of them?!
The characters include:
Voice actor Junichi Suwabe as the character Tetsuo Takahashi, a biology teacher
Hikari Takanashi the vampire
Kyōko Machi the dullahan
Yuki Kusakabe the snow woman
Sakie Satō the succubus
Himari Takanashi the human twin sister of Hikari
The anime will premiere in January and will air on Tokyo MX, MBS, and BS11.
Ryo Ando (chief episode director for both seasons of GATE) is making his directorial debut with the series at A-1 Pictures. Takao Yoshioka (Elfen Lied, Ikki Tousen, The Familiar of Zero) is both writing and overseeing the scripts. Tetsuya Kawakami (The Asterisk War: The Academy City on the Water) is designing the characters, and Masaru Yokoyama (Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Garakowa -Restore the World-, BBK/BRNK) is composing the music.
Kodansha published the manga's fourth volume in Japan on September 20. Kodansha Comics released the manga's first volume in English on November 1, and will release the second volume on January 17.
Source: Comic NatalieEd Miliband has released his annual Christmas message, recalling the 1914 Western front truce – calling for “the same sense of compassion in the face of the suffering and hatred that afflicts parts of our world”:
“One hundred years ago soldiers on the Western Front stopped their hostilities to cross no man’s land, to shake hands and – famously – to play football. In the midst of a tragic conflict the generosity, hope and sense of human solidarity that is characteristic of the Christian faith and culture came to the fore. What an extraordinary and unexpected event.
“We need the same sense of compassion in the face of the suffering and hatred that afflicts parts of our world. And especially in the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity. Let us remember those caught up in fighting and in fear of their lives.
“I am proud that the Labour movement has such deep roots in the Christian tradition of social activism and solidarity in the United Kingdom. This Christmas, I want to pay tribute to all who spend time, effort and skill in serving the needs of their fellow citizens in a voluntary and professional capacity.
“Our country faces a choice next year. Let’s choose generosity and inclusion. I hope you have a very merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year.”
Meanwhile, Scottish Labour’s new leader Jim Murphy urged Scots to put the referendum behind them to work together for the good of the nation:
“What has been an extraordinary year for Scotland is ending on a note of great sadness and pain.
“The tragic events in Glasgow on Monday mean that for those most closely affected, this time of year will be forever linked with loss and heart ache.
“It is a terrible ending to a remarkable year. 2014 saw the eyes of the world on our small country as we hosted the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles.
“We put on world class events that showcased Scotland to billions of people all across the world.
“And it has been a year like no other in politics. The referendum was passionate on both sides.
“It was exciting, a time when politics made a difference and people took part.
“And yes, of course, for one day in September we were divided by Yes and No.
“But as Scots we don’t look at what divides us but what brings us together.
“Whether we voted Yes or No in the referendum, we all want to build a fairer, better country.
“We are all proud of our nation’s history, because no country our size has ever shaped the world quite as much as Scotland.
“So let’s use that pride and passion to build the fairest nation on earth here in this land.
“Christmas is also a time to think of those less fortunate than ourselves.
“We think particularly of those families who are struggling to make ends meet and of those children for whom Santa will come via charity and the good will of their fellow Scots.
“I am sickened by the fact that our nation, as prosperous as it is, still relies on food banks but I am inspired by the fact there are so many good people who want to alleviate that hardship.
“Spare a thought, too, for the children of members of our Armed Forces who are stationed elsewhere and those children who are separated from a parent is in prison.
“This should be a period when together we think about how we can support children no matter the circumstance and regardless of family background.
“We also remember those who will be working over Christmas – our emergency services, those in the media and shop workers across Scotland.
“I want to wish everyone in Scotland the very best for Christmas.”Hello from the sewers... hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C., and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood that has settled into the cracks.
With that grotesque greeting, hand-printed in compulsively neat capital letters, a man who has killed five people in eleven months began a rambling and ghoulish letter to New York Daily News Columnist Jimmy Breslin. The writer, known by his mysterious signature Son of Sam, said he was "hungry" for more killings.
True to his word, the murderer struck again last week, creeping up behind a couple parked on a tree-shaded street near a disco-théque in the borough of Queens and firing four shots from his.44-caliber Charter Arms "Bulldog." Though Judy Placido, 17, and Salvatore Lupo, 20, his tenth and eleventh victims, were wounded, both miraculously survived. But the latest, and most publicized, attack tightened the grip of fear on neighborhoods in Queens and in The Bronx, where the bizarre, psychopathic killer has chosen his targets.
Despite an investigation that has grown to include more than 50 detectives, police at week's end had no solid clues to the identity of the so-called.44 Caliber Killer only reports from a few witnesses that he is a dark-haired white man in his late 20s or early 30s who fires his revolver while holding it in both hands, police style. Hunting for clues, experts have thoroughly analyzed his note to Breslin, plus another letter left at a murder scene filled with such violent and repulsive language that it has not been released to the public. Amid the vilifications contained in the second letter are hints that the writer is reasonably well educated and may have attended a Roman Catholic school.
Waiting for him to strike again, New Yorkers are grimly recalling the Boston Strangler and Jack the Ripper. Like those classic murderers, the Son of Sam seems intent on killing women. Most of his attacks have been on long haired brunettes, many of them sitting in parked cars at night with their boy friends. Two of the male victims were wearing shoulder-length brown hair, and police think that the killer may have mistaken them for females.
Terrified parents in the area are now insisting that their daughters wear their long hair up, bleach it, or have their dates at home. Some girls have decided not to date until the killer is caught, and others are adopting unusual evening wear: loose sweaters and large caps to disguise themselves as males. "I'm scared," said one Queens girl. "I used to kiss my boyfriend in front of the house, Now I run in."
Police have checked mental hospital records, tracked dozens of suspects for days, investigated many false confessions, and even talked to a few nervous wives who suspected they were married to the killer all to no avail. Law authorities have also had witnesses hypnotized to aid their recall of details, and have vainly asked astrologers to predict the next killing just on the chance that the murderer is himself a follower of astrology.TOKYO -- India is stymieing efforts to craft multilateral trade pacts, much to the dismay of international officials who had hoped Prime Minister Narendra Modi would opt for openness over protectionism.
"The nightmare continues," a Japanese trade negotiator said after a meeting of the World Trade Organization's General Council in Geneva on Oct. 21. The "nightmare" began at a council meeting at the end of July, when the Indian government abruptly withdrew its support for the organization's Trade Facilitation Agreement. Sources alleged that the Indian trade minister even ignored phone calls from WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo.
The agreement is designed to simplify customs clearance procedures and otherwise smooth trade pathways. Some estimate it would produce some $1 trillion worth of economic benefits. In a meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali late last year, 160 countries, including India, agreed to sign the deal. For the WTO, finalizing the pact would be a step toward reviving the stalled Doha Round talks on tariff cuts.
Modi, who took office in May, has cultivated a reputation as a reformer. But when it comes to trade, his Bharatiya Janata Party government is reluctant to let down its guard. The official word on why India pulled out of the Trade Facilitation Agreement was that the decision to sign was made by the previous Indian National Congress government, and that issues related to agricultural subsidies have not been resolved. Some other countries' representatives see it differently. They feel they already compromised by agreeing to a four-year moratorium on reviewing government subsidies on food reserves for the poor -- a window the Modi government could have used to soften domestic opposition to the deal.
The South Asian country also took the wind out of a meeting on the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in late August. At the last minute, India announced that it would not attend the conference in Naypyitaw, Myanmar's capital. The RCEP, as envisioned, would slash trade tariffs between India, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Some participants want to see the number of products subject to tariffs cut by 80% to 90%. India says it is unwilling to go beyond 40%, including items on which duties would only be lowered, not abolished.
The Naypyitaw meeting failed to produce a target for tariff removal. "We should not have included India in the RCEP negotiation framework in the first place," one Japanese official said. Some of the participants are talking about arranging a deal without India.
Political considerations
What explains the gap between Modi's reformist image and his reluctance to lower trade barriers?
In the general election in May, Modi's BJP secured a majority in the lower house of India's parliament. In the upper house, however, the party controls just a quarter of the seats. This means its political footing is not as solid as it might look.
Upper house members in India are selected by state assemblies, so the central government feels pressure to heed state governments' wishes. The BJP's poor showing in state assembly elections in August only increased the pressure to pander.
"The Indian government must solidify its power base at home before it can start acting flexibly in trade negotiations," said Shotaro Kumagai at the Japan Research Institute. This process "will take five to 10 years," the researcher added. Indian stock prices have risen 30% over the past year, with investors welcoming Modi and his initiatives to strengthen the country's economy. But anyone expecting immediate change in the country's trade policy is likely to be disappointed.
For now, India's stance could create some awkward diplomatic moments. One came during Modi's visit to Japan. "It is regrettable that the WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement was not signed," Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Modi during a reception in Tokyo on Sept. 1. Given the generally cooperative tone of the visit and the leaders' shared interests, such as checking China, the comment stood out all the more. According to sources who were there, Modi simply ignored Abe's remark and changed the subject.
But Modi is walking a fine line. To combat growing youth unemployment, he is promoting a "Make in India" campaign, encouraging global manufacturers to come and set up shop in his country. At the same time, he seems willing to risk international isolation by resisting trade liberalization.Event Report
Urbana Drive Electric Fair was a resounding success! Unfortunately, State Senator Scott Bennett could not attend, but Urbana Mayor Diane Marlin and Sustainability Director Scott Tess, as well as University of Illinois Professor Scott Willenbrock, gave remarks about the importance of EVs and renewable energy within the City's Climate Action Plan. We had over 20 EVs throughout the day, including some rare ones (in Central IL, at least) like the Chevy Bolt EV, Ford Focus Electric, Cadillac ELR, and even a homemade Volkswagen Golf conversion! Guests were full of questions for EV owners, and left with brand new insight into EVs. Two local news stations covered the Fair. All in all, a FANTASTIC first Drive Electric event here in Urbana, IL!
More photos from this event.
Event Description
National Drive Electric Week comes to Champaign-Urbana! The future of transportation is electric - the luxury of charging at home, skipping gas stations, and driving on clean energy are just some of the many reasons to switch to electric vehicles (EVs). With current all-electric models like the Nissan LEAF, Chevrolet Bolt, and Tesla's Model S, X, and upcoming Model 3, affordable and practical EVs are sweeping the nation. Join our event for a look at some of the newest EVs available from local dealerships, experience the joys of electric driving, and learn from local owners about the benefits of choosing an EV for your next car.
We will also be joined by Illini Solar Car, Illini Formula Electric, Illinois State Senator Scott Bennett, Urbana Mayor Diane Marlin, Professor Scott Willenbrock (University of Illinois), and many more!
Click the blue "register" button at the top of this page for a chance to win a $250 gift card.I first met Fran on Namaste Island, next to her daughter Barbie and some other friends in a cabin with wooden walls. It was a support group for people with Parkinson’s Disease; I do not have Parkinson’s myself, but was conducting research about illness and disability. That is why I found myself sitting in this circle with Fran as our leader, sharing troubles, joys, challenges. I will never forget when Fran said “I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease about six years ago. And when I got my diagnosis, it was like a punch in the gut.” Yet Fran not only supported others, but kept active on Namaste Island: “I’ll just walk around, go to the beach, even go horseback riding.”
Image by Anthea Beletsis
My first dance with Fran was on this island too. It was at the Phantom of the Opera Masquerade Ball, a benefit for Parkinson’s Disease charities held in a high-ceilinged ballroom that was all chandeliers and marble, with a tiled fountain in the center. I bought a new tuxedo for the event and my shopping excursion meant I arrived a little late. Right away I saw Fran in her luxurious red ball gown, complete with long red gloves, a necklace glittering with red and white stones, hair done up in blond curls, and an elegant white-feathered mask. Next to her was Barbie, whose gown shimmered blue and violet, every bit as breathtaking. Fran and I spun around the ballroom, song after song. At one point she looked at me and said “It thrills me to see me dancing. This is who I am.”
Did you already guess that Fran and I were dancing not in the physical world, but in Second Life, a virtual world (Figure 1)? What you might not have guessed is that Fran was 85 years old when we first danced (Figure 2):
Image by Tom Boellstorff
That is not the typical image of someone in a virtual world, and Fran was not the average Second Life resident, but anthropologists know that “outliers” can teach us a lot about the norm. Think with me like an anthropologist for a moment. When Fran said “this is who I am” while describing her avatar, she was not in denial about her physical body. She was saying that her virtual and physical bodies were both real, each in their own way. In this regard Fran was not an outlier at all. Her views captured beautifully a set of beliefs and experiences I commonly encountered in Second Life and other virtual worlds, and that other scholars have described as well. We should thus listen carefully when Fran said that being in Second Life was:
Greater than great, okay?…when I’m doing things like, I will dance… and I’ll watch my legs, and while I’m sitting here [in the physical world], my legs will be doing what I’m doing there that I cannot do here. I would fall on my face if I were to do something like that… I watch myself and I get thrilled that I am dancing! You see, I don’t think of me sitting in this chair: “me” is the person on the computer.
Her understanding of both virtual and physical bodies as real goes back to the first time she created her avatar with Barbie: "I said to Barbie'make me blonde' and I am grey, and'make me young' and I’m old, and so I do not look like my avatar at all. But if I look at her, I see Fran. I guess that’s who I am if I take a zipper and pull her out of me, that’s who I am."
The difference between Fran’s physical body and avatar body was not about hiding anything, and she often talked about her “fabulous” life in the physical world. She was not denying her physical body and was certainly aware of her Parkinson’s Disease every day. Instead, Fran was taking advantage of a virtual world to make a reality in which her physical body was not her only embodiment. Over and over, Fran insisted that Second Life was as real as the “real world.” As she once put it, “Actually I feel like this is more real-world to me than my real world.” Her experience of having an avatar body was real, the places in Second Life where she spent time were real, and her relationships and activities in Second Life were real. All these aspects of virtual world social interaction were distinct from the physical world, but there could be influence between them. Barbie, Fran’s daughter offline, could be Fran’s friend online and their shared experiences were real. In the other direction, people Fran met online could become real friends, whether they socialized only online (because the person might be thousands of miles from Fran’s home) or met in the physical world (as happened, for instance, with me).
What we learn is that as with other Second Life residents, Fran’s physical body and avatar body were both aspects of her reality. The avatar body made it possible to wear a ball gown and go to a virtual ball—on occasion, to be asked to dance by young men who might not have taken the time to get to know Fran had they met her only in the physical world. It allowed Fran to run a support group for people with Parkinson’s Disease who were scattered across the physical world. If we pay careful attention we learn something else as well. What is important is not just the avatar body, but the virtual world that avatar body inhabits (Boellstorff 2011). It is not just the avatar body dancing, but a ballroom to dance in; not just a support group, but a wooden cabin on Namaste Island where the group can meet. This aspect of virtual worlds—that they are places—is a topic discussed at length in Coming of Age in Second Life. It is a great example of how not all aspects of online technologies are the same. You do not have this shared experience of place when texting on a mobile phone or emailing from a laptop, though both of these forms of communication are real in their own way.
Note that I do not contrast Second Life (or other aspects of the internet) with the “real world.” Instead I talk about the “physical world” (or the “actual world”). Why? Because things online can be real or unreal, and the same goes for things in the physical world. You can learn a language online, or make a friend, or lose money playing poker: all real. On the other hand, you can put on a costume and engage in play or fantasy without ever using the internet! One topic I address in Coming of Age in Second Life is the reality of virtual world identities, relationships, and cultures—and what this tells us about the human journey in a digital age. Fran’s conclusion that what she was doing in Second Life was real was consistently shared by others I met during my research. You did not always do “real things” in Second Life (you could pretend to be a dragon, for instance), but even such roleplaying and fantasy was only possible because the broader virtual world was real.
Excerpted from Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human - reprinted with permission of the author.
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TweetBy Lloyd Webb
Jack Wilshere says “it’s the best feeling” to be back playing following his injury.
The midfielder made his first competitive appearance of the season during the 0-0 draw at Sunderland, after recovering from a long-standing leg injury.
Wilshere came on as a late substitute at Stadium of Light, and was delighted to be back on the pitch.
"I’m not saying that I’m there yet, this is just another step on my way to full recovery" Jack WIlshere
“It’s the best feeling,” he told Arsenal Player. “All those late nights and long days in the gym, this is when it really pays off.
“You can do all the training, you can play for the under-21s to build your fitness up, but what really matters is playing for the first team and getting back on the pitch, so I’m really happy.
“I felt good. In my first under-21s game, I didn’t really feel that great. In the second I felt better and in the third I felt as though I was able to get through 90 minutes and have an impact on the game.
“I spoke with the boss in the week, he felt the same and I travelled to Sunderland. It’s a big week for me in training, getting fitter and sharper. Hopefully next weekend I can get some more game time and go from there.
“I’m not saying that I’m there yet, this is just another step on my way to full recovery. There’s a few games left and after that, hopefully I’ll go away with England to the Euros. It’s an exciting time.”Today Tallinn is to launch a Linux pilot project at three schools and two preschools to examine whether all of the city's schools can eventually move to the free and open-source operating system and related office software.
The question the trial has to answer is whether all 6,000 computers in schools in the capital can make the changeover, Eesti Päevaleht writes.
It was reported in November that Estonia faced a sudden increase of prices for Microsoft licenses after years of special treatment. The city's education department did end up reaching one more extension of the favorable terms with the software giant in late December, but because Estonia is in a higher per capita income bracket now, it is only a matter of time before prices increase.
The schools trying out Linux are Mahtra Gymnasium, Mustamäe Gymnasium, Merivälja basic school, Mustamäe I preschool and elementary school, and Mesimummu preschool.Recipes & Cookbooks
Whether you’re a chef, cook, foodie or old-fashioned eater, if you’re reading this you know that every delectable dish begins with a recipe. Since its inception in 2007, www.kimberlybelle.com has been home to the FOOD Maven’s comfort-chic recipes, highlighting real foods and classic cocktails at their seasonal best. From gourmet to girl-next-door, these recipes are now available in downloadable, collectable, free eBooks!
In addition to Chef Belle’s four signature Season-a-Belle eBooks (Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn), you can add to your culinary collection (or begin a new one) by checking out Kimberly’s list of Can’t Live Without Cookbooks from her favorite author-chefs.
Recipes
Season-a-Belle
To download your copy of Season-a-Belle: Winter, Spring, Summer, or Autumn, right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the “Download” link next to your preferred size. Choose “Save Target As…” or “Download Linked File…” and the eBook should begin downloading in PDF format (check your browser’s Download window if applicable). If you need help or have any questions, write to belle@kimberlybelle.com with your inquiry/issue.
You have two download options for each eBook. “Prettier, with Patience” will give you a larger, higher-quality file in exchange for a longer download time. If you have a slower connection, choose “Faster, less Brilliant” for the smaller, lower-quality file and a quick transfer.
Winter Prettier, with PatienceDownloadFaster, less Brilliant Download Spring One Size Fits All Download Summer Prettier, with PatienceDownloadFaster, less Brilliant Download Autumn Prettier, with Patience DownloadFaster, less Brilliant Download
Can’t Live Without CookbooksWith the gut microbiome increasingly recognized as a major player in shaping human biology, probiotic treatments—introducing a few billion purportedly beneficial micro-organisms into human gut communities composed of trillions of microbes—are under intense investigation. Study designs and results have been a mixed bag, and the impact of probiotics remains unclear. Enter the probiotics’ conceptual cousin, prebiotics.
One’s gut bacteria composition could benefit from prebiotics, but the mechanisms—not to mention the very definition—of prebiotics remain in question. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Sebastian Kaulitzki.
Although probiotics consist of live microbes, prebiotics are microbe food: substances metabolized by microbes that are not digestible by the host. As researchers gain a more complete picture of the forces that shape microbial gut diversity, some think prebiotics could confer health benefits that probiotics have struggled to demonstrate, in part because prebiotics can nourish multiple microbial species already in place, triggering broader and potentially more robust changes in the host’s microbiome and health.
Prebiotics are generally nondigestible carbohydrates that get fermented by microbes in the gut; they are found in foods that are high in fiber, although not all fibers have prebiotic properties. Despite being a couple of decades behind probiotics in research, prebiotics are potentially key ingredients in the evolving stew of gut influencers.
The goal of manipulating whole microbial populations through selective feeding raises practical challenges; as health products, both probiotics and prebiotics exist somewhere in the poorly regulated space between food and drugs. Defining what is and is not a prebiotic will have commercial consequences. Scientifically, too, an ongoing debate over the meaning of the term “prebiotics” reflects diverging views of how they may actually confer benefits. Even the duo that coined the term 20 years ago may not see eye to eye.
Feeding the Beasts Interest in using food to modulate gut microbes to improve human health goes back more than a century. In a 1907 book called The Prolongation of Life, Russian zoologist Elie Metchnikoff, later a Nobel Prize recipient, noted that eating fermented dairy products loaded with lactic acid bacteria seemed to enhance the health of Bulgarian peasants (1). Metchnikoff and others, including those doing early work in Japan on yogurt (2), planted seeds for the field that would come to be called “functional foods.” Scientific interest in probiotics was one offshoot from this concept. The term “prebiotics” is newer, coined in a 1995 paper (3) where Glenn Gibson, now a professor of food microbiology at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and Marcel Roberfroid, emeritus professor of biochemistry and toxicology at the Université catholique de Louvain in Brussels, demonstrated that the fibrous oligosaccharide inulin reaches the colon intact and selectively stimulates the growth of bifidobacteria. The researchers defined prebiotics as “nondigestible food ingredients that beneficially affect the host by selectively stimulating the growth and/or activity of one or a limited number of bacterial species already resident in the colon, and thus attempt to improve host health” (3). At the time, the idea that a food product that wasn’t delivering a bolus of beneficial bacteria could nonetheless reliably change the composition of human gut microbiota was quite novel. During an early 1990s visit to the Cambridge, United Kingdom, laboratory of John Cummings, renowned for his work on dietary fiber, intestinal bacteria, and bowel function, Roberfroid announced that he had identified just such a compound: inulin. Cummings looked at him and said “Marcel, that’s not possible,” Roberfroid recalls. Since that 1995 publication (3), researchers have robustly demonstrated a “prebiotic effect” from consuming certain fiber-containing foods, and animal studies have suggested that prebiotics can positively influence factors such as gut function, immune function, glucose tolerance, and metabolic regulation, as well as reduce the incidence of colon cancer. Human studies are still in their infancy; one challenge is that the composition of gut microbes varies across individuals, so the effect of feeding them with prebiotics is highly variable too (4). Research on prebiotics’ effects on obesity and inflammation is especially active (5), and one recent meta-analysis suggests that inulin consumption may play a role in weight reduction (6). Studies also suggest that combining prebiotics with probiotics—an approach called synbiotics—may potentiate the effects. And researchers are trying to ascertain how generalizable and durable prebiotic effects are across human populations of different ages, physiological states, as well as culinary and cultural traditions. Even as these discoveries elucidate prebiotic inner workings, however, they also have led to calls for an expanded definition of what counts as a prebiotic. Gibson and Roberfroid’s paper (3) stipulated that nondigestible carbohydrates—that is, oligo- and polysaccharides—as well as some peptides and lipids, serve as metabolic substrates for colonic bacteria and can thus be termed “colonic foods.” Most such molecules stimulate microbial growth or metabolic activity broadly, and as such did not fit Gibson and Roberfroid’s concept of “metabolic selectivity for one or a number of beneficial bacteria” (3). However, for a variety of reasons, the requirement for a prebiotic to target specific species no longer holds, argues Laure Bindels, an assistant professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. In a review published in March 2015, Bindels et al. note that accumulating data in diverse areas, such as Crohn’s disease, Clostridium difficile infection, and obesity, suggest that overall biodiversity in the microbiota is what confers benefits, and not necessarily an increase or decrease of specific populations (7). Plus, the fermentation products of one microbial species’ supper can in turn feed other species. And short-chain fatty acids—widely considered the host-benefitting metabolic products of these microbes—are produced by many types of microbes, so targeting a single group, such as bifidobacteria, seems misguided. What’s more, “beneficial” is a murky and outdated descriptor for a gut microbe, Bindels says. Indeed, some microbial species may act beneficially in one context but detrimentally in others. “It’s not like a battle between good and evil anymore,” Bindels notes.
Guts In a Name Bindels and her colleagues propose shifting the focus from bug-counting to a functional approach. A compound is a prebiotic, she stipulates, if its metabolism by gut microbes modulates the overall composition or activity of the microbial community in ways that have beneficial effects on the host. “We think that you change the ecosystem and how it functions—the way the [microbe] interacts with the host—to get benefits,” she says. These differences may seem subtle, but they are important, says Robert Hutkins, a professor of food science at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. “It’s possible that a prebiotic might not even result in a significantly measurable change in the number of a particular taxon,” he says, but it certainly might change the functional properties of the community by changing the expression of various metabolic enzymes, for example. One vocal objector to Bindels’ suggested revision is Gibson. “If we deviate away from the original intentions as she seems to want, then it just opens the floodgates for lots of ‘wannabe’ materials to be classified as prebiotics—wrongly!” he says. “Bad for producers who have reliable products, bad for consumers who become more confused, but good for industries who have materials they want to class as prebiotics but cannot under the existing criteria.” On December 7 and 8, the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics debated the matter, with plans to produce a consensus paper for the field. Hutkins acknowledges that changing the definition might well mean researchers have to rethink what qualifies as a prebiotic. He points to a recent study suggesting that riboflavin, known as vitamin B2, has prebiotic properties because it contributes to the metabolism of a gut microbe, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii (8), although the vitamin isn’t itself metabolized by the bacteria. Removing the requirement for fermentation or metabolic transformation may take the concept too far from its original intent, he says. On the other hand, several carbohydrates that currently aren’t on the short list of well-established and accepted prebiotics perhaps should be, he adds. For his part, Roberfroid says the field must look beyond simply giving a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to specific compounds. “The approach we had in 1995 is only a very small part of the story,” he says. “We cannot reduce the prebiotic definition [based on] what we know about inulin.” Rather, he says, the focus should be on figuring out how to apply the concept of prebiosis most effectively to feed the microbes in our guts. “Extracting specific [prebiotic] products is not the major message for me. The major message is increasing the diversity of the food we eat in order to increase the diversity of and functional benefits conferred by our microbiota.”It's easy to assume that private schools deliver a better education because so many of their graduates go on to elite colleges and successful careers. But according to the CEP, this may be due more to demographics than academic quality. When students' family backgrounds and income levels are taken into account, there is no effective difference in the quality of a public or private education.
When the report's authors compared students of similar socioeconomic status at private, public and parochial high schools, they found that:
Achievement scores on reading, math, science and history were the same;
Students were equally likely to attend college whether they had graduated from a public or private school;
Young adults at age 26 were equally likely to report being satisfied with their jobs whether they had graduated from a public or private school;
Young adults at age 26 were equally likely to engage in civic activity whether they had graduated from a public or private school.
Exceptions
There was, however, one important area in which private school students did excel: SAT scores. Students in private schools performed consistently better on the test than public school students. The study's authors point out that this doesn't imply that private schools are any better at teaching subject matter. They offer two possible explanations for this finding:
Private schools are better at teaching test preparation.
The admissions process at private schools tends to select students with higher IQ scores, and aptitude tests like the SAT are a better measure of IQ than subject achievement tests.
Regardless of the reason for the difference, the result is that graduates from private schools are somewhat more likely to get accepted into very elite colleges.
The second exception that the study found was limited to a very specific type of private school. Catholic schools that are run by holy orders, such as the Jesuits, did show consistently positive academic effects. However, this is a relatively small percentage of parochial schools, since the majority of Catholic institutions are run by a local diocese rather than a holy order.
Read the full study, 'Are Private High Schools Better Academically Than Public High Schools?' on the CEP website at www.cep-dc.org. |
He’s blue, friendly, and his only purpose in life is to help with whatever task you need completed. When the task is done, poof! Mr. Meeseeks is gone. Of course you don’t want to wait too long before letting Mr. Meeseeks disappear. He doesn’t like that.
Fan of the 3D Print Guy page are already asking for more Rick and Morty characters to print, especially Mr. Poopy Butthole. Until then, you can follow 3D Print Guy’s channel and get the files for happy Mr. Meeseeks and angry Mr. Meeseeks right here.
Just—for the love of god—don’t ask him to teach you to golf.No one could have said it better than Giancarlo Stanton.
It was direct. It was clear. It was real.
“Alright, I’m pissed off!!! Plain & Simple.”
That was a tweet from the Miami Marlins’ best player at around 7 p.m. ET Tuesday, minutes after he realized his professional goals were in legitimate jeopardy. And it summed up just about everyone’s feelings perfectly, unless, of course, you collect a paycheck from or are a fan of the Toronto Blue Jays.
In one of the most incredible, shocking and epic salary dumps in the history of big-money professional sports, the Marlins’ wretched ownership and front office agreed to trade every impact player they still had, with the exception of Stanton, to the Blue Jays.
Worst sports owners: Loria makes the list
Two of last season’s blockbuster acquisitions, shortstop Jose Reyes and left-hander Mark Buehrle, along with front-line right-hander Josh Johnson and second baseman/outfielder Emilio Bonifacio, are leaving the Marlins, with John Buck a throw-in for salary purposes.
In return, the Marlins reportedly will get troubled shortstop Yunel Escobar, young shortstop Adeiny Hechavarria, starter Henderson Alvarez, minor league starters Justin Nicolino and Anthony DeSclafani, minor league outfielder Jake Marisnick and veteran catcher Jeff Mathis in a deal first reported by FoxSports.com.
The Marlins, after spending $191 million for Reyes, Buehrle and closer Heath Bell last winter, will shed roughly $160 million in guaranteed salary with this trade, pending league approval.
The Linemakers: Blue Jays' World Series odds improve
The salary purge began in July when Miami traded third baseman Hanley Ramirez, starter Anibal Sanchez, second baseman Omar Infante and reliever Edward Mujica, among others, and it continued last month when it parted with Bell. Manager Ozzie Guillen also was fired, but the Marlins presumably are on the hook for the three years and reported $7.5 million remaining on his deal.
Frankly, the Marlins should be absolutely ashamed. Then again, it’s not like their art-dealing owner Jeffrey Loria is unaccustomed to or affected by being painted with that brush.
Loria swindled the city of Miami into building him a publicly funded stadium. In return, he duped the team’s fans last winter by spending like the sky was the limit. He even made runs at first baseman Albert Pujols and left-hander C.J. Wilson in an attempt to convince the public the franchise suddenly was serious about spending for talent and, in turn, winning.
The non-publicized facts of those deals were that they were all back-loaded, meaning Loria, or someone else, wouldn’t pay the bulk of those agreements until late in the contracts. That gave Loria and Co.—president David Samson, president of baseball operations Larry Beinfest and general manager Michael Hill—time to move those players and unload the overwhelming majority of the salaries in the near future.
No one figured it would be this near in the future.
Miami got prospects in return in this blockbuster, but not Toronto’s top prospect. For now, it is a blockbuster for only the much-improved Blue Jays. It is a travesty for the Marlins, the kind of decision that should prompt commissioner Bud Selig to take a long look at Loria’s business practices.
If Selig fails to do so, Frank McCourt probably will wish he had held on to the Los Angeles Dodgers a little longer because what Loria has done is arguably worse than what McCourt did.
Responding to a text message asking for his reaction to the Marlins-Jays trade, an American League executive replied, “SMH”—as in shaking my head in disgust.
The Blue Jays are the beneficiaries of Loria’s deceit. They will take on plenty of money in this deal, but they have had it to spend for a while now. Their rotation gets a major upgrade, as does their defense and top-of-the-order offense. Toronto is now a contender in the AL East thanks to Miami.
The Marlins are now a complete embarrassment, and not just because they are strong candidates to lose 90-plus games again next season.
It isn’t as if Loria cares, though.
His priority, over everything else baseball-related, is to line his own pockets with other people’s money and protect his own wealth with the ferocity of a pit bull on a pork chop.
Loria was vilified when he gutted a World Series-winning Marlins team after the 2003 season. He was crushed for trading Ramirez less than a season after he paid to build the “new” Marlins. He was hit again for trading Bell and firing Guillen. This trade with the Blue Jays will take the hatred for him to a completely foreign level, one rarely—if ever—associated with any owner in any sport.
And through it all, Loria won’t blink while staring at his art collection that sits above the unrecognizable remains of the team he just blew to inexpensive and less-talented pieces.
It’s disgusting. It’s the kind of deal that makes you wonder how a man like this was ever allowed to buy a baseball franchise and keep it for as long as he has.
Whatever kind of art dealer Loria is doesn’t matter now. The only memorable “art” he should be known for dealing in is the art of the scam.
And to his credit, Jeffrey Loria has done it as well as anyone ever has.LONDON (Reuters) - Britain and the United States said on Sunday they were considering imposing additional sanctions on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his supporters for their actions in Syria’s war.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking after briefing allies in London on a new diplomatic initiative on Syria, also called on Russia and Iran to agree to a new ceasefire.
The threat of more sanctions on Syria came before a European Union summit on Thursday and Friday to discuss sanctions against Russia.
“There’s a lot of measures we’re proposing to do with extra sanctions on the Syrian regime and their supporters, measures to bring those responsible for war crimes to the International Criminal Court,” Johnson told reporters after talks he convened with his U.S counterpart and allies on Syria.
“These things will eventually come to bite the perpetrators of these crimes and they should think about it now,” said Johnson, adding there was no appetite in Europe for going to war in Syria.
He said it was “highly dubious” that Syrian government forces backed by Russia were capable of retaking the city of Aleppo or winning the war, and called on Russia and Iran to show leadership by agreeing to a ceasefire.
“It is up to them to show mercy, show mercy to those people in that city and get the ceasefire going,” he added.
He spoke alongside Kerry, who briefed European and other allies on a new diplomatic initiative involving Russia and a group of Middle Eastern nations aimed at ending the fighting in Syria. The first round of talks in the Swiss city of Lausanne failed to agree on a strategy for ending the violence soon.
Kerry confirmed the U.S. was considering additional sanctions over Syria, but did not name Russia as a target.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (L) and US Secretary of State John Kerry give a joint press conference after a meeting on the situation in Syria at Lancaster House in London October 16, 2016. REUTERS/JUSTIN TALLIS/Pool
Western powers have accused Russia and Syria of committing atrocities by bombing hospitals, killing civilians and preventing medical evacuations, as well as targeting an aid convoy with the loss of around 20 lives.
Syria and Russia say they are only targeting militants in Aleppo and accuse the United States of breaking the ceasefire by bombing scores of Syrian troops fighting Islamic State insurgents, over which the United States has expressed regret.
“We are considering additional sanctions and we are also making clear that President (Barack) Obama has not taken any options off the table at this point in time,” Kerry said.
Washington suspended bilateral discussions with Moscow over Syria following two attempts at implementing a ceasefire and growing tensions in their relationship.
With the U.S. presidential election less than a month away and Obama unwilling to assume a deeper role in the Syrian war, Kerry is trying to build a broader dialogue involving key regional players in the Syrian conflict.
The U.S. and its allies have urged Moscow to use its influence with the Syrian government to end the bombardment of Aleppo.
“There is some work to be done over the course of the next couple of days which might, or one might hope, open the door of possibility to an actual cessation,” Kerry said.
“It’s hard, and it’s hard because there are still deep beliefs in a lot of people that Russia is simply pursuing a Grozny solution in Aleppo and is not prepared to truly engage in any way.”
Moscow all but destroyed Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechnya region, during its 1999-2000 war against Islamist separatists there.
Slideshow (3 Images)
The United States first imposed sanctions against Syrian government officials in March 2011 shortly after the uprising that led to the civil war.
In 2013, Washington eased some of the restrictions to allow for reconstruction in opposition-held areas.
Both the EU and the United States have already imposed economic and other sanctions on Russia for its seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, and for its support for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.A farmer in south-western France has gone on trial on charges of helping illegal migrants "enter, move about and reside in" France. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and 30,000 euros in fines.
Read more
Cedric Herrou is alleged to have transported more than 200 migrants from the commune of Ventimiglia, located in Liguria, northern Italy, to France, according to French media. Most of the migrants reportedly came from Eritrea and Sudan.
He is one of three people to stand trial in southern France for assisting migrants, AFP reports.
The man welcomed migrants at his small garden where he let them live in tents or caravans, French news outlet 20minutes.fr reported.
Herrou has said he's doing his civic duty and has vowed to go on with his activities.
“If we have to break the law to help people, let's do it!” Herrou told supporters outside the Nice courthouse on Wednesday.
Herrou is expected to be sentenced on 10 February, according to Franceinfo journalist Simon Gourmellet.
#migrants Fin de la plaidoirie. Le délibéré sera rendu le 10 février à 8h30. — Simon Gourmellet (@SimonGourmellet) January 4, 2017
Initially the trial was expected to take place in November 2016; but it was postponed until January. Herrou was released in November but was placed under judicial control.
The case has triggered a response from local residents with activists planning protests near the courthouse. Some 300 people gathered outside the courthouse on Wednesday.
Rassemblement devant le palais de justice #Nice, pour le procès Cédric Herrou pic.twitter.com/d0uy0F0LGB — Stephane Burgatt (@S_Burgatt) January 4, 2017
In October, Herrou along with a group of supporters, opened an abandoned holiday village to migrants which belongs to the French state railway company SNCF. Police arrested him three days later.
In August, Herrou was arrested for smuggling eight Eritreans in his car into France. However, the case collapsed when prosecutors decided he acted on humanitarian grounds, AFP reports.
#migrants L'arrivée de Cedric Herrou sous les applaudissements de ses soutiens pic.twitter.com/NRqArPrGUz — Simon Gourmellet (@SimonGourmellet) January 4, 2017
It’s not the first time that Nice has brought criminal charges against its citizens for helping migrants. In November, Pierre-Alain Mannoni from the Nice Sophia-Antipolis University’s research laboratory stood trial for transporting illegal migrants in his car.
In his defense, Mannoni said that his act was merely a “gesture of humanity.” The verdict is expected to be pronounced on 6 January, according to 20minutes.fr. The Nice public attorney has asked for a six-month suspended sentence for Mannoni.
READ MORE: ‘Best offer’: France to give €2,500 to migrants who return home voluntarily
Almost 180,000 people crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa into Italy between 1 January and 19 December 2016, according to the UN International Organization for Migration.
Many European countries, including France, have tightened borders controls and have introduced more rigorous checks to stem the influx of migrants.Polish TV broadcasts Moreira’s “Masks of the Revolution” on Maidan shooting anniversary
Stories in the ‘Context” section are not fakes. We publish them in order to provide greater insight for our readers about the techniques, methods and practices used by the Russian government in its information war.
On 21 February Polish channel TVN24 broadcasted the scandalous film “Ukraine. Masks of the Revolution” by Paul Moreira.
The documentary has been widely criticized for the author’s ignorance of a Russian-backed conflict in Ukraine and distorted portrayal of the tragic fire in the Odesa Trade Union building on 2 May 2014.
“Ukraine. Masks of the Revolution” was broadcasted by the “Ewa Ewart recommends: Documentary on TVN24” show. Before the film Ewa Ewart reminded of the second anniversary of the tragic events on Maidan and noted, that the proposed documentary is “controversial,” the Polish Radio reports.
The broadcasting has sparked outrage among the Ukrainian community in Poland and Polish journalists. The Embassy of Ukraine in Poland commented on the broadcasting in an official statement.
“The Embassy of Ukraine in Poland is disappointed by the unfriendly gesture of the Polish TV channel “TVN24” which today has shown disrespect to millions of Ukrainians by broadcasting the lying and manipulative film by Paul Moreira “Ukraine. Masks of the Revolution,” the official statement says.
“What hurts the most, is that the Polish channel timed this film with the second anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity.”
The Embassy demanded the channel explain “why from variety of objective films about Maidan events this particular lying creature of the Russian propaganda was chosen, which insults the memory of Heroes of the Revolution of Dignity.”
“To me, broadcasting of the film “Ukraine. Masks of the Revolution without the appropriate explanation what kind of a film that was, is a scandal. This French film is lying, it is using classical manipulation techniques for depicting Ukrainian events that correspond to the Russian narrative,” Polish journalist Michał Kacewicz commented for the Polish Radio. Kacewicz has been reporting on Ukraine for years and is currently working for Newsweek Poland.
“The majority of Polish people don’t know those events in details. Considering our sensitivity to the topic of Ukrainian nationalism, this film can strengthen the feeling of fear and threat which are allegedly coming from the new Ukraine,” Kacewicz emphasized.
Ukrainian activists living in Poland also condemned the move of TVN24. In a statement on their Facebook page, members of Euromaidan-Warszawa reminded how much Poland supported Maidan, how many Polish journalists reported from the revolution and how many politicians were coming to Maidan to support the civil society of Ukraine despite their own political views.
“It turns out that, by broadcasting that film, the Polish television accuses its journalists, politicians, civic activists and ordinary people that were supporting Maidan in supporting the ‘neonazis’ and ‘banderowites.’ Bravo, Putin would be delighted!”
By Euromaidan PressAfter the embarrassment of Wednesday night's riot, in which thousands of Penn State students took to the streets to protest the firing of longtime football coach Joe Paterno for helping to cover up assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's alleged rape of several young boys, you'd think Penn State fans would have learned their lesson. As it turns out, not all of them have.
Penn State and Nebraska played a football game today, the first since Paterno was fired, and oddly, only one protester showed up—Penn State alum John Matko, who drove to State College from Pittsburgh carrying signs urging the university to follow Paterno's successor Tom Bradley and to cancel the rest of the football season. "The Kids Are What This Day Is About," read one of his signs. Apparently not everyone agreed:
A beer showered Matko. One man slapped his stomach. Another called him a "p–-." [...] A burly man wearing a "JoePa" T-shirt strode up, wrestled away the sign urging abused kids be put first from Matko's right hand and slammed it to the ground. [...] "Not now, man," one student said, shaking his head. "This is about the football players."
Now, in Penn State's defense, last night the university held a candlelight vigil attended by as many twice the number of students who rioted on Wednesday. And today was "Blue Out," a child abuse prevention-centered variation on the university's traditional "White Out" event that raised tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe Penn State can spend some of the money it raised on educating its fans?
[Washington Times, image via AP]Are We Entering a New Cold War?
Every year, the security glitterati of the world gather in Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference. The forum has been around for decades, but this year, over an unseasonably warm weekend, the most dramatic speech was about the cold: as in the Cold War, by Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev. Most remember former President Medvedev from a few years ago, when he led the Russian Federation with a more congenial face than that presented by current President Vladimir Putin.
He was clearly sent on a mission to provide the West (Europe, the United States, and NATO) with a view from Moscow. In a long and somewhat rambling speech, his key sound bite was actually quite jarring: We are in a new Cold War, and that this year, 2016, reminded him of 1962 (never mind that he was not born then). For those who need a quick refresher, 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Hardly a comforting memory to surface at a security conference.
In Munich this year, many of my Russian friends and colleagues were quick to say, “What he really means is that we need to be careful that we don’t end up in a Cold War.” In other words, it’s a friendly cautionary note as we continue to levy sanctions on Russia for their illegal invasion of Ukraine and blatant annexation of Crimea. With all due respect, most non-Russians here didn’t hear a conciliatory tone; instead, they heard a not-so-veiled threat. The comments came across to many as a cri de coeur on the part of the Russians that if things don’t start going their way (lift the sanctions, let Assad dominate Syria, show us the deep respect we crave) then this new Cold War will become a new normal.
Let’s begin with a reality check: we are not in a new Cold War. I am old enough to remember the Cold War — it featured millions of troops on the Fulda Gap in Europe, ready to attack each other; two huge battle fleets all around the world chasing each other in a massive Hunt for Red October world; and a couple of enormous nuclear arsenals on a hair-trigger alert poised to destroy the world. There was virtually no dialogue or cooperation between the Soviet Union and the NATO alliance. Proxy wars abounded. Fortunately, we are not back there.
But let us be realistic in the assessment of Moscow’s messaging in Munich: this is a regime under significant internal economic pressure, resulting from a combination of low oil prices and sanctions. Coupled with declining demographics, a significant alcohol and drug problem, falling life expectancy, an economy dependent on commodities, and a lack of transparent democracy, Russia has a handful of difficult challenges — although there has been some modest demographic improvement of late. We should not be afraid of Russian strength, but rather of Russian weakness — because they still possess a powerful military, the will to use it, and over 7,000 nuclear weapons (which they mention frequently, as if to remind us of their existence).
Frankly, we should not lay awake at night worried about Russia. Rather, we here in the United States ought to be worried about Europe and the centrifugal forces that seem to inexorably be pulling apart our closest pool of allies in the world. A weak or fractured European Union is a serious geopolitical setback for the United States. The question is, given Russian weakness and saber rattling about the Cold War, alongside European nervousness and disaggregation, what is the best course for the United States?
First, we should strengthen NATO. It is the foundation of security in the Europe, despite its trials and troubles. Strengthening NATO means admitting a 29th member, tiny but willing Montenegro in the southeast of the European continent at the Warsaw Summit this summer. It also means continuing to emphasize to our European partners that they need to spend the NATO-determined minimum of defense reflecting a full 2 percent of GDP — only five NATO nations meet that target today. (The United States exceeds it, spending nearly 3 percent of GDP on defense. NATO should bolster rotational forces in the east (not permanently base them); respond vigorously to Russian air and sea intrusions into NATO territories; conduct realistic defensive exercises, especially in the Baltics; and emplace pre-positioned forces for airborne forces to fall in upon in Poland.
Washington must also send its leaders to Europe often, to bolster a strong sense of alliance cohesion and reassure a very nervous continent as they look at Russian actions in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Top U.S. military professionals should be assigned to jobs in European military commands. And Washington should frequently comment on the hope that Britain stays in the European Union — we want a unified Europe to be able to stand alongside the United States in the international world. After all, Europe has 500 million citizens and a GDP that is larger than the United States: we need it as a coherent, unified partner. This has a reassuring effect, but more importantly a deterrent affect on any further Russian adventurism.
Third, we should be investing with our European colleagues in the cyber world. This means not only working on cyberdefense measures (via the NATO Center of Excellence for Cyber Security in Estonia), but also thinking through private-public cooperative measures to ensure that we can protect privacy appropriately while still allowing a global Internet. With the United States and Europe in alignment on these key issues, we have a vastly better chance of protecting ourselves and ensuring the Internet continues to be widely available with the right levels of privacy.
Finally, it is important that we keep open the channels of communication with the Kremlin. Plenty of dialogue, especially military-to-military, can help reduce the chances of an inadvertent collision or incident in the air. Leaders like Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov should continue their close, personal exchanges. There is no need to stumble backwards into a Cold War which benefits no one.
At the Munich Conference this past weekend, the Polish foreign minister was asked at one point by a frustrated Russian, “well, what is our part of Europe?” implying that so much of the former Russian zone of influence had become part of NATO and the European Union. Without a great deal of thought, the Polish leader said, simply, “your part of Europe … is Russia.” No one in NATO or the United States is seeking to intrude into Russia; our colleagues in Moscow should let the other nations of Europe make their own decisions about where they seek to set their course. That is the best way to avoid heading to a new Cold War.
Photo credit: Dmitry Astakhov/AFP/Getty ImagesHere are your Puck Headlines: a glorious collection of news and views collected from the greatest blogosphere in sports and the few, the proud, the mainstream hockey media.
• Guy Serota is part of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service mediation team that will hopefully facilitate an end to the NHL lockout. He also had one hell of a Twitter feed before he hastily deleted it when hockey fans found it. Anyhoo, this tweet and these tweets and also these tweets help maintain the legacy. The Sporting News has more.
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• David Backes, Kevin Westgarth and Mathieu Schneider held an NHLPA 'ask me anything' on Reddit today. Among the highlights was Westgarth on why there wasn't a new CBA this summer: "We were available throughout the summer, unfortunately it seems the NHL was hell bent on putting pressure on the players with the Lockout. I wish it was as simple as spending a certain amount of time together, negotiating, but its very frustrating to see how little progress can be made with a seemingly unwilling partner. [Reddit]
• A handy guide to decertification by the New York Times. [NYT]
• A handy guide to decertification from Eric Macramalla, for TSN. [TSN]
• The SB Nation blogs had an airing of grievances today about the NHL lockout. [SB Nation]
• Detroit Red Wings winger Todd Bertuzzi is not what you'd call optimistic about the fate of the 2012-13 season. As in he doesn't believe there's going to be one. [MLive]
• Did the NHL ask NBC to ignore the "Operation Hat Trick" charity game in Atlantic City? [NY Rangers Blog]
Story continues
• Ken Campbell on outspoken players: "Players might want to keep that in mind the next time they go to their computer or phone to vent their anger with the rest of the world. There's nothing to be gained by wishing Bettman dead or complaining about missing paychecks. Winston Churchill once said the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Sadly, he was right." [THN]
• Fair thee well, Mark Parrish. [PHT]
• Taylor Hall took the player of the week award from some poor under-appreciated AHL player. [NEWSOK]Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), who has proposed a budget that would remove key bargaining powers for public employee unions, now says that he and Republican legislators are considering some changes — but not so far as to change its principle.
“We’re willing to (make changes), but we’re just not going to fundamentally undermine the principle of the proposal which is to let not only the state but local governments balance their budgets,” Walker told reporters, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
Specifically, the proposed changes coming from state legislators — who have been deluged by protests over the past two days — would involve extending some civil service protections to local government workers, in exchange for the loss of most collective bargaining.From the Journal-Sentinel’s report this afternoon:
Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon) said he had asked Walker for those civil service changes at the request of GOP lawmakers in his house. He said the civil service protections being sought for the bill included protections for working conditions and employees who have a grievance with how a supervisor has treated them. Republican senators said Wednesday that further amendments were being considered to the bill – the major question remained how far if at all those changes would go. A GOP source familiar with the talks said Republican Sens. Dale Schultz of Richland Center and Van Wanggaard of Racine were backing a plan to put at least some union bargaining rights back into the bill.
Under Walker’s plan, as TPM has previously reported, most state workers would no longer be able to negotiate for better pensions or health benefits or anything other than higher salaries, which couldn’t rise at a quicker pace than the Consumer Price Index. Walker and state Republican leaders have said the plan is necessary to deal with the state’s budget shortfall.
According to the Associated Press: “The proposal would effectively remove unions’ right to negotiate in any meaningful way. Local law enforcement and fire employees, as well as state troopers and inspectors would be exempt.”
Protesters have converged on the State Capitol in Madison this week, and a legislative hearing at which members of the public could speak lasted for 17 hours before Republican leaders closed it at 3 a.m. (Democratic legislators then continued the listening session through to the morning.) In addition, Madison schools were closed on Wednesday after nearly half of the teachers union members called in sick.In the past few years we have had some truly amazing giveaways at eTeknix such as our £1000 PC Specialist Gaming System giveaway in March 2013 and our Big Get Active Xmas giveaway in December 2012. Today we are raising the bar once again as we unveil to you our latest giveaway. eTeknix, in association with DinoPC and XFX, are giving away a DinoPC T-Rex 7990 pre-built gaming PC worth an amazing £2000/$3000.
The mammoth DinoPC T-Rex 7990 gaming PC represents the best of the best in terms of gaming PCs. It boasts some of the highest quality and highest performance components on the market. As part of this amazing giveaway we have reviewed this epic system so you can take a much closer look at what’s on offer – be sure to check out that review right here. Of course, what you all probably want to know by now is – how can you enter this giveaway? Below we have explained all the steps for you:
Step 1 – Like eTeknix on Facebook
Step 2 – Like DinoPC on Facebook
Step 3 – Like XFX Europe on Facebook
Step 4 – Visit the forums and post a link to your Facebook profile to finalise your entry and tell us you’ve entered
Optional Step 5 – Post a screenshot of your system’s performance in 3DMark’s FireStrike test in a second post to gain an additional entry!
You can download 3DMark’s FireStrike test here.
If you do not wish your Facebook profile link to be displayed publicly on our Forum then please private message me (you must be logged in to the eTeknix forum for that link to work) your Facebook profile link with the following subject “DinoPC T-Rex 7990 Giveaway – Facebook Entry X” and replace X with the number of your first post on the forum thread (that is the number of your first post on that thread not the optional second post with the optional FireStrike screenshot). This way we can respect your privacy by keeping your Facebook profile hidden, but still allow you to enter. If you do not submit your Facebook profile link with that same format then your entry will not be counted.
Rules and regulations:
The competition is open worldwide
The competition ends at midnight GMT on the 9th of September 2013 and winners will be notified on Friday 13th of September 2013
In the event of a dispute, eTeknix staff hold the final say and no discussions will be entered into
Multiple entries that are invalid will result in disqualification ( more details on Forum post )
) Delivery is not in the hands of eTeknix and can take some time to arrive
In the event that the prize is unavailable, eTeknix reserve the right to offer an alternative of equal or greater value
Winner(s) will be announced on our competition winners page
By entering this competition, you adhere to the above rules and regulations
(Please do not post Facebook links and Screenshots in the comments below, these entries will not count, enter over on the Forum!)Edit: Our review of the SilverStone SX800-LTI here.
SilverStone’s hotly anticipated 800W SFX-L power supply is nearly here! Originally announced at Computex back in May, we have received word direct from SilverStone that the SX800-LTI should be available by the end of the year, with an MSRP of $179.99 (or 180€) excluding VAT.
You may find yourself wondering why anyone would need 800 watts of power in an SFX-L size, but there are actually a wide range of builds that stand to benefit from this PSU: from midrange rigs that can rely on the semi-passive functionality for almost continuous low-to-no fan operation, through to (naturally) dual-GPU builds and other high-performance configurations that simply need as much juice as possible. Indeed, for those builds, the release of this PSU makes perfect sense, and has been long awaited.
One may also hope that the introduction of PSU’s like the SX800-LTI will encourage case builders to consider designing towards SFX and SFX-L power supplies, over the antiquated and quite space-inefficient ATX specification, though the relative price premium and limited selection remains a strong headwind against such a transition. Only time will tell if the impact on the enclosure market on the part of this PSU will be manifest or not.
In any case, for more granular information on this unit, check out the SilverStone product page here, which SilverStone first published a few days ago.
Thoughts? Discuss them in the forum here.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
The drops of silicone oil bobbing in this mesmerizing video do more than create aesthetically satisfying ripples across a slick surface. They could be indirect evidence of an alternate solution to a nagging question in quantum mechanics — one that dates back almost a century.
The video is among the winners of this year’s Gallery of Fluid Motion, an annual competition of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics. It stems from a 2013 experiment performed by MIT physicists Daniel Harris and John Bush that provided a toy model for so-called “pilot waves”: hypothetical ripples in space-time that could carry subatomic particles along like so many buoys bobbing on a watery surface.
At the 1927 Solvay conference, French physicist Louis de Broglie first proposed the existence of pilot waves as an alternative to the troubling notion of a wave function. You know the drill; it’s the essence of Schroedinger’s famous cat paradox. All possible outcomes exist in a superposition of states, described by an equation called the wave function (aka the cat is alive and dead at the same time). When a measurement is made (we look in the box), it causes the wave function to collapse into a single state (the cat is either alive or dead).
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In his pilot wave theory, de Broglie suggested replacing the wave function with two equations: “one describing a real, physical wave, and another tying the trajectory of an actual, concrete particle to the variables in that wave equation, as if the particle interacts with and is propelled by the wave rather than being defined by it,” Natalie Wolchover wrote in Quanta last year.
Pilot waves have never been directly observed, but experiments over the last ten years involving bouncing oil droplets over vats of vibrating liquid have revived interest in de Broglie’s idea. Toss a pebble into a pond and it will produce rippling waves traveling outward.
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The same thing happens in the droplet experiments, with a twist: if the vibrations are tuned to just the right frequency — i.e., close to the droplet’s natural resonance frequency — there will be an intriguing interference effect. Not only does the droplet produce ripples as it bounces, but it can interact with those ripples, and this will affect its trajectory. That’s the pilot wave concept in a nutshell: just replace the droplet with a subatomic particle.
Apart from the implications for quantum mechanics, this is also a very cool fluid dynamics experiment. To create their video, Harris and Bush filled a shallow tray with a circular trough in the center with silicone oil and mounted it on a vibrating stand. Then they tuned the stand to various frequencies and watched to see how the droplets’ behavior changed around a specific threshold frequency. As I wrote last year:
Above that threshold, the roiling sea of waves will interfere with the droplet’s walk. Below it, the surface remains smooth except for the waves produced by the bouncing droplet. The closer one tunes the vibrations to that threshold, the more robust and long-lived the generated pilot waves will be. When the bouncing droplet produced waves, those waves bounced off the walls and interfered with each other, producing pretty interference patterns. They also affected the trajectory of the droplet. At first it looked like it was bouncing along randomly, but over time (around 20 minutes), the droplet was far more likely to drift towards the center of the circle, and increasingly less likely to be found in the rippling rings spreading out from that center.
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The basic experimental set-up involves a loudspeaker, a smart phone, and a screen with a striped pattern. Then the fun begins. We see first one, two, three, and four bouncing droplets, each creating ripples in the silicone oil, followed by a series of droplets arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice. The researchers next used a high-speed camera to create some nifty strobing effects: in one version, the droplet appears to glide across the surface of the oil; in another, the droplet appears to gain “hang time,” pausing just a little bit longer mid-air with every bounce.
You can check out the other winners featured in the 2015 Gallery of Fluid Motion here.July 3, 2011
2011-07-03T11:59:42-04:00
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Linda Hogan, an essayist, poet, playwright, novelist, and political activist, talked about her life, work, and career. She is the Chickasaw Nation Writer in Residence. Topics included the Native American experience, the history of her tribe’s displacement, and the responsibility that she believes people have to the environment and other species. She responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
Linda Hogan, a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, is the editor of several anthologies and the author of several novels and the non-fiction books The Woman Who Watches Over the World and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.
Linda Hogan, an essayist, poet, playwright, novelist, and political activist, talked about her life, work, and career. She is the Chickasaw… read moreClicking on the NYTimes’s daily confused article on the current #occupywallst, I’m moved by how corporate media’s utter bafflement on what is happening (and spreading) is almost entirely a result, not of bad answers, but of bad questions. And it’s not a stretch to suggest |
Australian Antarctic Territory.[4] An active complex volcano which erupted as recently as April 2013 and February 2016,[5] Mawson Peak is the summit of the Big Ben massif.
Discovery and naming [ edit ]
Mawson Peak was named by the 1948 ANARE Heard Island Expedition after the Australian geologist and explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, the leader of BANZARE 1929-31, who visited the island in November – December 1929.[6]
On the 20th February 1950, whilst aboard HMAS Lebuan, Thomas Gratton (Tim) Young OAM observed and recorded in the ship's log that Mawson Peak was an active volcano.
The 1964-65 expedition to Heard Island was led by Major Warwick Deacock, with the schooner Patanela skippered by Major Bill Tilman. They succeeded in climbing Mawson Peak for the first time, which is the highest point on this remote island.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Citations [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]The SYRIZA-ANEL government recently resigned, resulting in new early parliamentary elections (most likely on the 20/9).
As is well known, SYRIZA won the elections in January 2015, deceiving the workers, promising the abolition of the anti-people laws, which had been previously passed by the governments of PASOK and ND, after the agreements (memoranda) with the imperialist organizations (EU, IMF, ECB).
The KKE had warned in a timely fashion that SYRIZA, a “left”, an opportunist party which mutated into a social-democratic party, was chosen by the bourgeoisie to manage the crisis and can not implement a political line in favour of the people.
Our party had formulated its position that there can be no way out in favour of the working class and the other popular strata inside the capitalist development path, the EU and NATO.
As was demonstrated in a few months of managing capitalism, the “left” SYRIZA, which governed together with “right” nationalist party ANEL, not only did not abolish the 2 previous memoranda and most of the 400 anti-people application laws of the previous governments, but implemented them and passed through Parliament a third even more painful agreement (memorandum) with the imperialist powers. This agreement had the support of the other bourgeois parties and was voted for in Parliament by them: “rightwing” ND, “Social-democratic” PASOK, the “centre” party “POTAMI”. This new agreement massacres any rights that have remained, imposes new reductions in wages and pensions, abolishes social-security rights, imposes even more intense taxation of the popular strata, promotes the policy of privatizations etc.
In addition, the “Left-patriotic” government consistently operated during these months inside the framework of our country’s participation in the imperialist unions of NATO and the EU, of the “strategic alliance” with the USA. It participated in every NATO mission and exercise, it organized military exercises even with Israel, it promised a new base for the USA and NATO (on the island of Karpathos), it voted in the EU for the extension and reinforcement of the trade war against Russia etc.
So, in practice it has been demonstrated that the SYRIZA-ANEL government is another anti-people government, which with “”left” slogans served in an equally faithful way the bourgeoisie, the EU and NATO as the previous governments had done. Today, the governing SYRIZA-ANEL parties, using the same arguments that ND and PASOK had used in the past, defends the new anti-people agreement as the only way of keeping the country in the Eurozone and EU, something that it presents as the people’s salvation. SYRIZA, just as all the other bourgeois parties, sows the illusion amongst the working class and people that the EU and capitalism can be humanized, as long as the workers continue to endure the anti-people measures.
At the same time, the bourgeois political system in order to curb and control any radical changes in the people’s consciousness that could be brought about by the exposure of SYRIZA’s role continues to manufacture new parties. One such party, with the title “Laiki Enotita” (People’s Unity), was formed by MPs and former ministers from SYRIZA. These forces, which were active as a “left platform” inside SYRIZA, bear grave responsibilities as regards the deception of the people. They participated, even as ministers, in the implementation of the previous anti-people laws. They actively participated in the attempt during the previous period to trick the people that there is an alternative proposal for them inside the walls of the EU and agreed with the anti-people agreement that was signed by the SYRIZA-ANEL government with the Troika on the 20th of February, with the anti-people proposal of 47 pages submitted by SYRIZA to the EU etc. Now that the illusions fostered by SYRIZA have been dented, these forces promote the return to the national currency as a solution for the people, along with other measures for the management of the system. They act as a “barrier” to the radicalization of the people, seeking to trap the people inside the capitalist development path.
Over this entire period, the KKE consistently exposed the role of SYRIZA and the other bourgeois parties, struggled for the abolition of the memoranda and all the anti-people measures, to prevent new measures, to develop the workers’-people’s struggle for the recovery of their losses and the satisfaction of their needs in combination with the only alternative solution that is in the interests of the working class and other popular strata:
The regroupment of the labour movement and the construction social-people’s alliance between the working class, the poor farmers, the urban self-employed, the youth and women from the families of the popular strata in order to strengthen the antimonopoly-anticapitalist struggle for the real overthrow, the socialization of the monopolies, the disengagement from the EU and NATO and the unilateral cancellation of the debt, with workers’-people’s power.
We are waging the struggle with this line in order to strengthen the KKE in the labour-people’s movement and in Parliament, unwaveringly continuing the struggle for the interests of the working class and its liberation from the shackles of capitalist exploitation.
24/8/2015Life-saving anti-venom is in short supply for the treatment of bites from the world's deadliest spider.
A funnel-web spider bite can kill a human in just hours if the anti-venom is not injected into the victim but supplies in Australia are running at less than 50%.
Now experts who milk the poison from the spiders to create anti-venom are appealing to the Australian public to catch the deadly creatures so they can increase stocks.
Spider keeper Julie Mendezona, from the Australian Reptile Park, said: "Usually we are the ones saying to people if you see a dangerous animal leave it alone and it will leave you alone and you won't have any run-ins.
"But it is really important that we turn to the community to actually obtain our funnel-webs. It's the most productive way for us to get these animals."
The venom is taken from the spiders by delicately stroking their fangs and collecting the tiny droplets of deadly poison.
It is then sent away to a laboratory and turned into the anti-venom.
Just one dose of anti-venom takes around 70 milkings from a spider. The males are six times more deadly than the females and are therefore more sought after.
The funnel-webs live on the eastern seaboard of Australia and if disturbed in gardens or backyards will attack unsuspecting victims.
Pensioner John Gambrill, who lives near Newcastle in New South Wales (NSW), was bitten on the wrist while doing some gardening.
He told Sky News: "Everything sort of happened all at once and I thought, this is not good.
"I just didn't know how bad it was going to get. I had perspiration coming out of me everywhere, I had the shakes, I felt a bit faint.
"The ambulance got here in about five or 10 minutes and they wouldn't let me walk out of the house, putting me on a stretcher instead.
"The paramedics even brought the spider to hospital with me so the doctors could identify it and give me the right treatment."
He was treated and put under observation before being released some hours later.
Young children can suffer especially badly if bitten.
Dr Naren Gunja from the NSW Poisons Information Centre has treated a number of children and says the symptoms can be terrifying.
He said: "You have profuse sweating, frothing at the mouth, salivation. Then that can lead to having neurological and respiratory failure.
"Ultimately you can potentially die within hours of a bite."
Dozens of Australians are bitten by funnel-webs every year but thankfully since the anti-venom was introduced in the early 1980s there have been no deaths.
The spiders like moist, humid conditions and because recent weather has not been so suitable for their reproduction the zoo has fewer specimens than normal.
So now it is asking the Australian public to face its fear, and rather than killing any funnel-webs, catch them and take them to the zoo so they can be used to potentially save lives.So you’re stranded in the wilderness. You consumed the last nub of your Clif Bar two days ago, and now you’re feeling famished. Civilization is still several days away, and you need to keep up your strength. The greenery all around you is looking more and more appetizing. But what to nibble on? Some plants will keep you alive and are chock full of essential vitamins and minerals, while some could make you violently ill….or even kill you.
Which of course makes proper identification absolutely critical.
Below we’ve given a primer on 19 common edible wild plants. Look them over and commit the plants to memory. If you’d like to discover even more edible wild plants, we suggest checking out the SAS Survival Handbook and the U.S. Army Survival Manual.
In the coming months, we’ll be publishing articles on edible wild roots, berries, and fungi. So stay tuned.
Plants to Avoid
If you can’t clearly identify a plant and you don’t know if it’s poisonous, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Steer clear from a plant if it has:
Milky or discolored sap
Spines, fine hairs, or thorns
Beans, bulbs, or seeds inside pods
Bitter or soapy taste
Dill, carrot, parsnip, or parsley-like foliage
“Almond” scent in the woody parts and leaves
Grain heads with pink, purplish, or black spurs
Three-leaved growth pattern
Many toxic plants will exhibit one or more of the above characteristics. Bear in mind that some of the plants we suggest below have some of these attributes, yet they’re still edible. The characteristics listed are just guidelines for when you’re not confident about what you’re dealing with. If you want to be completely sure that an unknown plant is edible, and you have a day or two to spare, you can always perform the Universal Edibility Test.
Amaranth (Amaranthus retroflexus and other species)
Native to the Americas but found on most continents, amaranth is an edible weed. You can eat all parts of the plant, but be on the look out for spines that appear on some of the leaves. While not poisonous, amaranth leaves do contain oxalic acid and may contain large amounts of nitrates if grown in nitrate-rich soil. It’s recommended that you boil the leaves to remove the oxalic acid and nitrates. Don’t drink the water after you boil the plant. With that said, you can eat the plant raw if worse comes to worst.
Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis)
The vegetable that makes your pee smell funny grows in the wild in most of Europe and parts of North Africa, West Asia, and North America. Wild asparagus has a much thinner stalk than the grocery-store variety. It’s a great source of source of vitamin C, thiamine, potassium, and vitamin B6. Eat it raw or boil it like you would your asparagus at home.
Burdock (Arctium lappa)
Medium to large-sized plant with big leaves and purplish thistle-like flower heads. The plant is native to the temperate areas of the Eastern Hemisphere; however, it has been naturalized in parts of the Western Hemisphere as well. Burdock is actually a popular food in Japan. You can eat the leaves and the peeled stalks of the plant either raw or boiled. The leaves have a bitter taste, so boiling them twice before eating is recommended to remove the bitterness. The root of the plant can also be peeled, boiled, and eaten.
Cattail (Typha)
Known as cattails or punks in North America and bullrush and reedmace in England, the typha genus of plants is usually found near the edges of freshwater wetlands. Cattails were a staple in the diet of many Native American tribes. Most of a cattail is edible. You can boil or eat raw the rootstock, or rhizomes, of the plant. The rootstock is usually found underground. Make sure to wash off all the mud. The best part of the stem is near the bottom where the plant is mainly white. Either boil or eat the stem raw. Boil the leaves like you would spinach. The corn dog-looking female flower spike can be broken off and eaten like corn on the cob in the early summer when the plant is first developing. It actually has a corn-like taste to it.
Clovers (Trifolium)
Lucky you — clovers are actually edible. And they’re found just about everywhere there’s an open grassy area. You can spot them by their distinctive trefoil leaflets. You can eat clovers raw, but they taste better boiled.
Chicory (Cichorium intybus)
You’ll find chicory growing in Europe, North America, and Australia. It’s a bushy plant with small blue, lavender, and white flowers. You can eat the entire plant. Pluck off the young leaves and eat them raw or boil them. The chicory’s roots will become tasty after boiling. And you can pop the flowers in your mouth for a quick snack.
Chickweed (Stellaria media)
You’ll find this herb in temperate and arctic zones. The leaves are pretty hefty, and you’ll often find small white flowers on the plant. They usually appear between May and July. You can eat the leaves raw or boiled. They’re high in vitamins and minerals.
Curled Dock (Rumex crispus)
You can find curled dock in Europe, North America, South America, and Australia. It’s distinguished by a long, bright red stalk that can reach heights of three feet. You can eat the stalk raw or boiled. Just peel off the outer layers first. It’s recommend that you boil the leaves with several changes of water in order to remove its naturally bitter taste.
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)
Sure, it’s an obnoxious weed on your perfectly mowed lawn, but when you’re out in the wild this little plant can save your life. The entire plant is edible — roots, leaves, and flower. Eat the leaves while they’re still young; mature leaves taste bitter. If you do decide to eat the mature leaves, boil them first to remove their bitter taste. Boil the roots before eating as well. You can drink the water you boiled the roots in as a tea and use the flower as a garnish for your dandelion salad.
Field Pennycress (Thalspi vulgaris)
Field pennycress is a weed found in most parts of the world. Its growing season is early spring to late winter. You can eat the seeds and leaves of field pennycress raw or boiled. The only caveat with field pennycress is not to eat it if it’s growing in contaminated soil. Pennycress is a hyperaccumulator of minerals, meaning it sucks up any and all minerals around it. General rule is don’t eat pennycress if it’s growing by the side of the road or is near a Superfund site.
Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium)
This pretty little plant is found primarily in the Northern Hemisphere. You can identify fireweed by its purple flower and the unique structure of the leaves’ veins; the veins are circular rather than terminating on the edges of the leaves. Several Native American tribes included fireweed in their diet. It’s best eaten young when the leaves are tender. Mature fireweed plants have tough and bitter tasting leaves. You can eat the stalk of the plant as well. The flowers and seeds have a peppery taste. Fireweed is a great source of vitamins A and C.
Green Seaweed (Ulva lactuca)
If you’re ever shipwrecked on a deserted island, fish the waters near the beach for some green seaweed. This stuff is found in oceans all over the world. After you pull green seaweed from the water, rinse with fresh water if available and let it dry. You can eat it raw or include it in a soup. Or if you’re particularly enterprising, catch a fish with your homemade spear and use the seaweed to make sushi rolls, sans rice.
Kelp (Alaria esculenta)
Kelp is another form of seaweed. You can find it in most parts of the world. Eat it raw or include it in a soup. Kelp is a great source of folate, vitamin K, and lignans.
Plantain (Plantago)
Found in all parts of the world, the plantain plant (not to be confused with the banana-like plantain) has been used for millennia by humans as a food and herbal remedy for all sorts of maladies. You can usually find plantains in wet areas like marshes and bogs, but they’ll also sprout up in alpine areas. The oval, ribbed, short-stemmed leaves tend to hug the ground. The leaves may grow up to about 6″ long and 4″ wide. It’s best to eat the leaves when they’re young. Like most plants, the leaves tend to get bitter tasting as they mature. Plantain is very high in vitamin A and calcium. It also provides a bit of vitamin C.
Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia)
Found in the deserts of North America, the prickly pear cactus is a very tasty and nutritional plant that can help you survive the next time you’re stranded in the desert. The fruit of the prickly pear cactus looks like a red or purplish pear. Hence the name. Before eating the plant, carefully remove the small spines on the outer skin or else it will feel like you’re swallowing a porcupine. You can also eat the young stem of the prickly pear cactus. It’s best to boil the stems before eating.
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)
While considered an obnoxious weed in the United States, purslane can provide much needed vitamins and minerals in a wilderness survival situation. Ghandi actually numbered purslane among his favorite foods. It’s a small plant with smooth fat leaves that have a refreshingly sour taste. Purslane grows from the beginning of summer to the start of fall. You can eat purslane raw or boiled. If you’d like to remove the sour taste, boil the leaves before eating.
Sheep Sorrel (Rumex acetosella)
Sheep sorrel is native to Europe and Asia but has been naturalized in North America. It’s a common weed in fields, grasslands, and woodlands. It flourishes in highly acidic soil. Sheep sorrel has a tall, reddish stem and can reach heights of 18 inches. Sheep sorrel contains oxalates and shouldn’t be eaten in large quantities. You can eat the leaves raw. They have a nice tart, almost lemony flavor.
White Mustard (Synapsis alba)
White mustard is found in the wild in many parts of the world. It blooms between February and March. You can eat all parts of the plant — seeds, flowers, and leaves.
Wood Sorrel (Oxalis)
You’ll find wood sorrel in all parts of the world; species diversity is particularly rich in South America. Humans have used wood sorrel for food and medicine for millennia. The Kiowa Indians chewed on wood sorrel to alleviate thirst, and the Cherokee ate the plant to cure mouth sores. The leaves are a great source of vitamin C. The roots of the wood sorrel can be boiled. They’re starchy and taste a bit like a potato.For the third year in a row, Wyoming has fostered the nation’s best business climate, thanks to low rates on corporate and personal income taxes made possible by a booming oil industry, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation.
In fact, six of the top 10 states with the best business climate are western states, bolstered at least in part by new revenues from energy production that allows them to reduce other types of taxes. In many cases, the top-ranked states omit at least one major stream of revenue altogether, such as an income tax or a sales tax.
“If you can go without one of the major tax categories, not only do you have one less tool to distort the economy, but you’re also getting rid of a ton of overhead costs,” said Scott Drenkard, a Tax Foundation economist who co-authored the study. “You’re also able to get rid of the dead weight cost on the private side, where people are trying to comply with those taxes.”
Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming, all states in the Tax Foundation’s top 10, have no personal income tax. New Hampshire and Alaska have no sales tax.
Utah and Indiana, which place ninth and tenth in this year’s rankings, tax across all major revenue streams, but their rates are low across the board. Indiana, where the legislature cut taxes under former Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), displaced Texas in the top 10.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has cited the Tax Foundation rankings on trips to Democratic-run states like Illinois and Maryland, on which he tries to recruit businesses to move to the Lone Star State. Texas dropped a spot in the rankings, Drenkard said, because of the Texas margin tax, a tax on gross receipts. Michigan, Kentucky and New Jersey have eliminated gross receipts taxes in recent years, and some Texas legislators want to follow suit.
Northeastern states dominate the bottom 10, thanks to higher taxes on corporations and complicated tax codes. New York came in last place, while Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland all fell in the bottom 10. California, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Minnesota all have tax rates high enough to qualify for the bottom 10.
Expect the Republican Governors Association to celebrate the rankings: Seven of the top 10 states are run by Republican governors, while seven of the bottom 10 states are run by Democrats.
The rankings won’t stay static next year. Drenkard said a package of tax reforms signed by Gov. Pat McCrory (R) earlier this year will move North Carolina out of the bottom 10; had those tax rules been in effect by the July 1 beginning of the fiscal year, North Carolina would have qualified for 17th place on the list.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement Police have forced back hundreds of protesters who tried to break through a perimeter fence at the UN climate summit venue in Copenhagen. The Bella Centre, where the conference is taking place, has now been shut off, with no-one allowed to enter or leave. Activists have been angered by lack of progress on a new climate deal and also by restrictions on access to the talks. Meanwhile, African countries have softened their demands for climate finance from rich nations. RICHARD BLACK'S EARTHWATCH The African group reportedly gave the Ethiopian negotiator a real roasting about this at their routine morning meeting, because the proposal gives ground on some of the African bloc's fundamental points
Read more from Richard Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, speaking on behalf of all African nations, announced the move, which could remove a key obstacle in the talks. "I know my proposal today will disappoint some Africans," he said. "My proposal scales back our expectation with respect to the level of funding in return for more reliable funding." In another development, Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard has resigned as summit president. She will be replaced by Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen. Ms Hedegaard said the move was procedural, adding: "With so many heads of state and government having arrived, it's appropriate that the prime minister of Denmark presides." However, behind the scenes there are said to be deep tensions between the Danish PM's office and Ms Hedegaard's department. Stand-off Police detained at least 240 protesters as they marched to the summit across Copenhagen. AT THE SCENE Malcolm Senior, BBC News, Copenhagen From out of the gloom, a few hundred protesters headed towards the UN conference centre. They paused in front of the massed lines of police, blocks of concrete and metal fencing. Then a female voice urged them to push past the police lines and on to the summit. There was a surge and young people pushed hard against the lines. The crush was obvious. Some protesters squeezed through and climbed onto the roofs of parked vans. The first one was urged to come down - he refused. His riot policeman nemesis joined him on the roof, and threatened him with his police baton. The protester ignored him, and a brief game of cat and mouse ensued. Then the policeman hit him hard across the legs, and the protester slid down the windscreen onto the ground. A couple of others followed suit, but no-one made it past the police ring. The helicopter buzzed overhead. The surge stopped. The stand-off began. The has been a tense stand-off between protesters and police following earlier clashes. TV footage showed police using their batons on the crowd and some protesters wiping their eyes after being hit by pepper spray or tear gas. Protesters and police officers were injured in the clashes. As government ministers from around the world join the talks, Danish officials have cut the number of campaigners allowed in. Thousands of would-be delegates have queued for hours to gain access to the conference venue - many unsuccessfully. Those unable to take part on Wednesday included campaign group Friends of the Earth. It said its delegates had arrived at the centre to find their badges were no longer valid. Some campaigners said that after marching to the summit they would try to break in. And sources told the BBC that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown had been told that he could not leave the Conference Centre in Copenhagen for security reasons. Mr Brown was due to hold a series of bilateral meetings at his hotel close to the conference centre. Inside the conference, Wednesday's "high-level" session, due to be addressed by prime ministers and other dignitaries, was delayed when several developing countries protested about procedural issues. China said the process chosen by the Danish hosts "lacked transparency". Others complained that rewritten texts were being pushed through without proper consultation. US-LED COPENHAGEN DEAL No reference to legally binding agreement
Recognises the need to limit global temperatures rising no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels
Developed countries to "set a goal of mobilising jointly $100bn a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries"
On transparency: Emerging nations monitor own efforts and report to UN every two years. Some international checks
No detailed framework on carbon markets - "various approaches" will be pursued The BBC's environment correspondent Richard Black says the summit has been plagued by claims from poorer countries that the Danes have tailored the shape of negotiations to suit the EU's desired outcomes. Delegates still have a huge number of fundamental issues to address before the summit finishes at the end of the week, our correspondent says. These include the size of emissions cuts by developed nations, how finance should be raised and disbursed, and most fundamentally, whether a deal here should aim to keep the global temperature rise to 2C or 1.5C. Draft text released to delegates and obtained by the BBC makes clear that the most important parts of any eventual deal have still to be decided. Temperature targets are still in the text as alternatives, our correspondent says. Proposed figures for emission cuts by developed nations - apart from the US - range from 15% by the period 2013-2017 to 49% by 2013-2020. The section on finance consists entirely of paragraphs in square brackets, meaning that none of it has been agreed, our correspondent adds. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has suggested that poor countries may have to give up their hope of getting immediate long-term financial commitments from richer countries. The amount of aid rich nations will pay poorer ones to combat global warming has been one of the main stumbling blocks at the summit. In an interview with the UK's Financial Times, Mr Ban said he did not think the exact amount was vital to the current deal. "If they are not able to agree this time at Copenhagen, then there needs to be some initial arrangement. This is a time when common sense, compromise and partnership should prevail," he said. US hopes Despite the difficulties, the White House says US President Barack Obama, who will join world leaders in Copenhagen later in the week, is confident of reaching a deal. "The president believes that we can get... an operational agreement that makes sense in Copenhagen, over the next few days," spokesman Robert Gibbs told a briefing. CLIMATE CHANGE GLOSSARY Glossary in full UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is already in Copenhagen, told reporters on Tuesday that it was a critical moment. "This is a very important moment for the world," Mr Brown said. "It is possible that we will not get an agreement and it is also true that there are many issues to be sorted out. But I am determined... to do everything I can to bring the world together." More than 120 leaders will formally join the talks on Thursday, aiming to seal an accord by Friday.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionBoston is the most unequal big city in America, a new report finds.
In 2014, households earning near the top of Boston’s income distribution made nearly 18 times the earnings of households closer to the bottom.
Specifically, Boston households earning more than 95 percent of other households made $266,224 in income in 2014, while households earning more than only 20 percent of other households earned just $14,942.
The ratio between those two figures is what the Brookings Institution calls the “95/20 ratio.” In 2014, Boston’s ratio was 17.8 — tops among big U.S. cities, and ahead of New Orleans, Atlanta, Cincinnati and Providence.
(Courtesy of the Brookings Institution)
The report out Thursday updated data Brookings puts out annually. When I reported on this last year -- regarding 2013 income -- Boston’s 95/20 ratio was 15.0, and it was then the third most unequal big U.S. city.
From 2013 to 2014, Boston’s poor got poorer, and its rich got richer.
Boston households at the 20 percent threshold saw their incomes dip 8 percent from one year to the next, according to Brookings, which uses American Community Survey census data, while households at the 95 percent threshold saw their incomes increase 9 percent over the year.
Now, a few caveats.
In its report published Thursday, Brookings said Boston’s “large student population partly explains its relatively low 20th percentile incomes.”
In an interview, Alan Berube, co-author of the report and a Brookings senior fellow, said that about 4 percent of Boston's adult population is in graduate school, compared with a national average of about 1 percent.
"So certainly a little bit of what you're seeing — not all, but a little bit of what you're seeing in terms of lower earners in the city — reflects the fact that you have a lot of people who are temporarily poor," Berube said. "Their earnings potential is pretty great and within a few years they'll probably be earning a very decent income, but right now you're seeing some of your lower-income households are in this temporary position."
Another caveat: Generally, metro areas and cities are more unequal than other areas. As Brookings has written before: “Large populations, diverse housing types, and generally progressive politics mean that most cities will always have higher shares of the rich and poor than smaller places.”
Berube added that inequality is not necessarily a bad thing.
"Inequality in and of itself may or may not be a problem per se," he said in the interview. "What you want to make sure you do is help those families up the ladder over time, and hopefully Boston is applying its resources and investments in such a way that it's making that possible."
Berube cited housing policy as one area in which local officials could ameliorate any negative effects of inequality. In more unequal cities, like Boston, Brookings found, housing is less affordable for the low income.
(Courtesy of the Brookings Institution)
Thursday's report came after Boston said it permitted more affordable housing units in 2015 than any other year, and after Mayor Marty Walsh outlined an increased affordability requirement for new developments.
Also in the report:
The Boston metro area -- a wide swath extending into southern New Hampshire and down Massachusetts’ South Shore -- is the sixth-most unequal metro area, according to Brookings, which analyzed the 100 largest U.S. metro areas and the largest city in each of those metro areas.
And Brookings compared cities’ inequality now to before the recession.
In short, inequality worsened in Boston, as the city's poorest 20 percent saw its household income decrease 9 percent from 2007 to 2014, while households at the 95 percentile saw their incomes rise 8 percent.This is a topic that I don’t see a lot of people talk about and honestly, this technique doesn’t come to my mind when I’m mixing a song and it’s been a while since I used it. Don’t get me wrong though, I do use parallel processing all the time for effects not for dynamic processors.
Parallel compression does sound great when applied correctly. For instance, multi Grammy Award winner, recording engineer Michael Brauer uses parallel compression on vocals. He sends vocal parts to different compressors using send channels and blends them together.
In a Q&A session in 2013 Michael Brauer said he’s not sure if this technique will sound as good when doing it in-the-box (using a DAW), it works fine in the hybrid. I see a lot of people asking about Michael Brauer parallel compression trick so I thought I should add that so you don’t waste your time trying to do it on a software such as FL Studio lol just kidding 😀
OK enough with the jokes and boring intro let’s get straight to it.
What is New York Compression
To put it in the most simplest form, this is mixing a dry signal with a processed signal. Sometimes the original signal is not 100% dry, it might have some subtle compression applied to it. But the processed signal needs to be heavily processed.
This will bring up the softest parts of the sound that is getting compressed adding audible detail while leaving the loud transients intact. hmmmm that’s rocket science.
Put it this way, a normal compressor does what is called downward compression which is bringing down the loud peaks, parallel compression is the opposite. The quieter parts are brought up in level while keeping the other parts the same, so this processing technique is upward compression and does the opposite of a normal compressor. And this technique is also known as New York Compression.
You can do parallel compression by using send or Fx channels. The way I do it is to duplicate the sound to a new channel that way I have full control of both dry and compressed signals. Some compressors come with a dry/wet parameter so you can use that as well.
Most people don’t know this but Logic stock compressor does have a dry/wet parameter hidden. You can find it by by clicking on the triangle at the bottom left of the plugin as shown below.
Parallel Compression Settings
Remember that this is a concise guide so the compression settings can be applied to any reputable DAW, Cubase, Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, Reaper etc.
When it comes to the envelope you want to use a fast attack but don’t kill the transients and a medium release will work. The ratio settings needs to be high that is why other people choose to use a limiter instead, because it has unlimited ratio. Be careful though sometimes a high ratio can cause the signal to distort or create a pumping effect. While in some cases a small ratio of 2:1 will work.
You’ll also need to use a high gain reduction, but this will depend on the material so play around with a gain reduction of around -10dB to -20dB and let your ears be the judge.
I choose to use very high settings because I know I have full control of the 2 signals. But just make sure the 2 signals blend well when mixed together and don’t make it sound obvious. Keep everything as organic as possible.
Applying The Technique
Parallel compression can be applied on anything that you think needs upward compression, it could be vocals, drums or even an entire mix during mastering.
As mentioned above, people like Michael Brauer use parallel compression on vocals. If you want to learn more about this technique then head over to Sound on Sound and check out a great post written by Mike Senior.
He shows a step by step process on how to do the Michael Brauer parallel compression technique using Cubase. You can use the same process on any DAW. Here’s the direct link to the blog post.
>> http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr09/articles/cubasetech_0409.htm
If you’re using this technique on drums then duplicate the original signal to a new channel. If the drums are on separate channels then export all the drums and import the drum track to the project.
Then add an eq to the duplicate channel. The eq settings will be a smile curve like the one shown below:
After adding that eq then I’ll add the compressor and use the settings I mentioned above. Once I’m happy with that then I’ll drag the volume of the processed channel back down and bring it up slowly to blend it with the original signal.
You can use this production technique on anything, just make sure that you switch on the delay compensation on your DAW to avoid phase. I use the FabFilter Pro Q for these kinds of situations because it has both zero-latency and different phase processing modes.
You can add whatever you want on the processed signal chain, it doesn’t need to be the eq and compressor only. Feel free to add your own creativity.
You can also make your mix punch using this technique, which is not the main purpose of parallel compression though. The question I see popping |
Today's reporting on local currencies gives the impression that this is a NEW phenomenon born from the recession. Rather, many of these programs have existed for some time.
The organization that runs BerkShares, told Huffington Post that it has been producing currency since 2006, well before the financial crisis dominated headlines. Ithaca Hours have been in production since 1991. Despite the fact that these currencies have existed - a point USA Today should update - there is a growing interest in currency production for communities hit by the recession. New currencies, like the Detroit Cheers are coming into play.
Read the article from USA Today on local currencies.
A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money. Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.
Do you know of other local currencies that have been circulated in response to the recession? Are you part of a community that has been using local currencies? Is there more of an interest in your local currency now more than ever? If so, send photos of your local money to submissions+localcurrency@huffingtonpost.com--include an explanation of who started the currency and how successful it has been. If you regularly spend your local currency, tell us how it has affected your purchasing habits and your local businesses.
Keep reading for more info on local currencies:
The Detroit News expands on the movement, with an article on its local currency, "Detroit Cheers," which was re-born from the Depression era push to create currencies.
A Detroit trio of small-business owners are reviving the idea, following an emerging national trend. The businesses are creating a currency called Detroit Cheers, and more than a dozen city merchants have already agreed to accept it as real money. "The world is just now reeling from economic chaos; in Detroit, that's how we always roll," said Jerry Belanger, 49, a backer of the currency, as he watched the initial run of Cheers bills roll off the presses last week.... Detroit Cheers joins an estimated 75 local currency systems that have sprung up recently in the U.S., said Michael Shuman, author of "The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition."
Below is a slideshow of some of the local currencies out there:
PHOTO GALLERY Local Currencies
If you want to know more about how a local currency works, check out the fact sheet on BerkShares, a currency that is now being used in Massachusetts. Below is an excerpt on how the money helps the economy there:At the last lottery on Dec. 8, held in front of a small but spirited audience at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and streamed on the Internet (1,100 people watched), five winners were selected: a woman who said she wanted to use the income to "spend more time with her children and do volunteer work"; another woman who said she wanted "to be able to live my dreams and give something back"; a third woman who said she wanted "to develop a theater production"; a man who said he would use the money "to hire a new employee to help my ecological vegetable garden business grow"; and a fourth woman who wrote she "wants to wake up happy every day, to travel more and support other artists."Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.
“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?
“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”
Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”
After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.
Photo
Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban.
“They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.”
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That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland.
I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were.
The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly.
Photo
With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away.
St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate.
While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.
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One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message.
Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet.
“I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.”
Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka’s new government on Wednesday asked the police to investigate what it called a “diabolical conspiracy” by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa to hold on to power even after he was defeated in an election last week.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa listens to a speech during his final rally ahead of presidential election in Piliyandala January 5, 2015. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte
New President Maithripala Sirisena is trying to shore up his government and prevent a comeback by the former rulers in parliamentary elections that may have to be held this year.
Rajapaksa has denied the allegations against him. His allies say they have been subjected to threats since the election and they have asked for government protection.
The former president and those around him are coming under a level of scrutiny unthinkable until he was voted out of office last Thursday, ending a decade in power notable for its concentration of control among a coterie of relatives and allies.
On Tuesday, opposition politicians filed a series of detailed corruption complaints against Rajapaksa and his brothers and son, who also held government posts. Another filing asks for Rajapaksa to appear in court on Jan. 26.
Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera, who filed the latest police complaint, said the government had reliable information that Rajapaksa along with his brother and former defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the incumbent chief justice and two other politicians discussed declaring a state of emergency while the counting was going on.
Chief Justice Mohan Peiris was appointed by Rajapaksa after the contested impeachment of his predecessor. The new government believes Peiris has weakened the independence of the judiciary and during the election campaign vowed to have him removed. On Monday, lawyers protested against him in the street.
“They also discussed the possibility of the army taking over the election commission, arresting the election commissioner and even obstructing the counting in the different part of the country by using the armed forces.”
Samaraweera said the police chief, army commander, and attorney general had prevented a “diabolical conspiracy” by refusing to take such action.
Rajapaksa, who congratulated the president and stepped down even before official results were announced last Friday, rejected the allegations.
“I deny in all possible terms reports of attempts to use the military to influence election results,” Rajapaksa said on his Twitter feed.
“During decades in politics, I have always bowed down to the people’s verdict. Wins & losses are a natural part of political life.”
Alan Keenan, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, which documents abuses in Sri Lanka, said he welcomed signs the Rajapaksas will be investigated.
“The fact it is politically helpful to the new government - in that it weakens the chances of the Rajapaksas coming back - is also fortuitous but it shouldn’t be the primary motivation,” he said.
The government does not have a parliamentary majority and unless it can win over defectors it may have to call an election later this year, experts say.Politician Facing Investigation Tries To Destroy His Emails; Assistant 'Helps Out' By Emailing Order To Other Staffers
from the HOW-TO-FUCK-UP-101 dept
There are multiple ways to handle a super-sensitive situation like this one. The following is none of them. [via CJ Ciaramella]
Far too many politicians and legislators aren't happy with the fact that their emails are subject to public records requests. Some attempt to dodge this layer of accountability by using personal email accounts to handle official business. Oregon governor John Kitzhaber is one such politician.
Unfortunately for Kitzhaber and many others just like him, public records laws anticipate this endaround. In many states, personal email accounts are also FOIA-able if the emails discuss official (read: public) business. Kitzhaber, however, believed he could outsmart outbludgeon the system.
Gov. John Kitzhaber’s office last week requested state officials destroy thousands of records in the governor’s personal email accounts, according to records obtained by WWand 101.9 KINK/FM News 101 KXL.
Records show the request to destroy Kitzhaber’s emails came from Jan Murdock, Kitzhaber’s executive assistant. She wanted all emails from Kitzhaber’s personal email accounts removed from state servers.
The prospect of deleting thousands of emails clearly made Osburn’s supervisor, Arian Turpin, uncomfortable.
“Guys, hold on processing this request until we receive approval from a higher authority,” Turpin wrote in a Feb. 5, 2015 email at 6:52 pm. “Given the unusual nature of the request, I’m reluctant to have my team move forward without the active awareness and consideration of the possibilities and a direct approval from higher levels of the action.”
Krieger told his supervisor, Michael Rogers, that he would not destroy the emails.
“I am not willing to make the call to delete information out of the email archive,” Krieger wrote on Feb. 5 at 7:24 pm. “As I stated we will need to discuss.”
Rumors of possible influence peddling led to this public records request. Kitzhaber's last-minute attempt to set fire to his email legacy doesn't exactly plant a halo over his head, seeing as it camebefore the Oregon DOJ opened up an investigation into these allegations. But he might have gotten away with it if only his own executive assistant hadn't completely sabotaged the coverup.Let that sink in for a moment.There has been no word as to whether Kitzhaber required emergency surgery to remove his face from his palm after his assistant informed him that she had EMAILED orders to delete his EMAILS to EMAIL accounts that were subject to open records requests.But then again, maybe Kitzhaber would have been out of luck anyway. Restoring a bit of faith in the system were the responses from staffers to this unusual request.Turpin kicked this up to the next level, and the next level (Turpin's supervisor, Shawn Wagoner) was similarly hesitant to be Kitzhaber's accomplice. He ordered those involved to "take no action at this time" while he kicked it uplevel to his boss (Gary Krieger) -- whofelt there was something inherently wrong with vanishing the Governor's emails.The lesson here is: if you want to run a successful coverup, you need to make sure you've got more thanon board with your plan. And you need to make sure thatwon't cheerfully pitch in with "help" that only hurts.
Filed Under: email, foia, john kitzhaber, oregon, public recordsIn November 2010, Donovan McNabb signed a blockbuster contract extension. A six-time Pro Bowler with the Eagles, McNabb had been traded to Washington that spring. His new deal was completed just days before his 34th birthday, and the widely reported terms—five years, $78 million, with incentives that could push that compensation as high as $88 million—were at the time among the most lucrative for quarterbacks, the NFL’s most expensive position. Fletcher Smith, McNabb’s agent, seemed delighted by the prospects of the new deal. “Now,” Smith said, “he doesn’t have to focus or concentrate on what next year will bring.” But there would be no next year. After the 2010 season ended, McNabb never collected another cent from that contract.
The true details tucked inside McNabb’s deal would be revealed days later. It turned out that nothing beyond the current season was guaranteed, and Washington had a team option on the five remaining years of the pact. That never came into play; McNabb was traded to the Vikings on the eve of training camp the following summer, and was out of the league for good once Minnesota waived him that December. What was left of his Washington megadeal simply voided, as if it had never existed.
The particulars of McNabb’s contract might have been unique, but the broader narrative—the gaudy, headline-grabbing numbers that turn out to be completely ephemeral—remains a common phenomenon in the modern NFL, where contracts are not fully guaranteed.
How can this be? MLB guarantees salaries completely. So does the NHL, minus the rare buyout. The overwhelming majority of NBA contracts are guaranteed. Of the four major U.S. sports, the NFL is an outlier. This is the case even though the NFL is expected to rake in an estimated $14 billion in revenue this year, a 75-percent increase just since 2010, and $4 billion more than any other U.S.-based sports league. Yet only in the NFL are contracts not contractual, and even many of the so-called guarantees not guaranteed.
NFL players are far more likely to sustain injuries than those in MLB, the NBA, and the NHL. A recent paper from the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University, which is part of a long-term project funded by the NFLPA through money set aside in the current CBA, estimated that (emphasis mine) “the mean number of injuries suffered per game in the NFL is approximately 4.9 times higher than the sum of those other leagues.” That same study, which its authors stress was done without any influence from the NFLPA, also found that an NFL player is 3.8 times more likely than an NHL player to sustain a concussion in a regular-season game—a figure that doesn’t include data from practices, training camps, or the preseason and postseason. And the average length of an NFL career, according to the Wall Street Journal, is now less than three years. Given football’s inherent violence, the immense physical toll it inflicts, and the ever-shrinking career spans of its participants, NFLers would seem to be the pro athletes most in need of guaranteed contracts.
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The explanation is a complicated one. There are two major rules that work against players getting more guaranteed money, though they are slowly getting more guarantees these days in the forms of both bonuses and salary. But the one thing many fans and even some players may not realize: There’s also absolutely nothing to prevent an agent from negotiating a fully guaranteed salary for an NFL player. It just never happens.
The NFL doesn’t have guaranteed contracts for the simple reason that this is the way things have always been done.
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“Back in the old days, owners could give guarantees; it’s just that they never did,” Gary R. Roberts, the author of a 1992 Marquette Law Review article titled “Interpreting the NFL Player Contract” and the current president of Bradley University, told me. “They didn’t have to. Nobody else was doing it, so there was no leverage the players had to insist on guarantees.”
The NFL’s labor disputes have landed in the courts more frequently than any of the other big four sports’. And while guaranteed money has been on the NFLPA’s radar since at least the 1970s, the players have long used their bargaining powers on issues they’ve considered to be more pressing: salaries, benefits, pensions, free agency, health and safety, workplace rules.
While players in MLB, the NBA, and the NHL all achieved some form of free agency in the mid-1970s, that right wasn’t granted to NFL players until much later, in 1993. (And even then the players only achieved free agency by decertifying the union and taking their fight to court.) The trade-off was accepting a salary cap, a construct that functions to keep wages down rather than to preserve parity, as it’s so often sold.
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There’s absolutely nothing to prevent an agent from negotiating a fully guaranteed salary for an NFL player. It just never happens.
No rule drives ownership’s reluctance to give players more guaranteed money than the cap, which is governed by a complex series of accounting rules that don’t always reflect actual payments to players. Portions of a team’s cap, for example, can be consumed by what’s known as dead money—cash previously paid to a player in the form of a guarantee (usually a signing bonus), but prorated to stay on the books for the life of the contract (up to five years), even after that player has been cut or traded.
How does this all work? Chris Deubert, one of the Harvard study’s authors, told me that “the contract on its face is guaranteed.” But what the CBA has long done is articulate rationales for why that contract can be terminated.
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“And then it’s up to the player and his agent to strike out those enumerated reasons why a player can be cut,” Deubert said.
As Deubert and Glenn M. Wong wrote in their excellent 2009 history of the evolution of bonuses and guaranteed money in the NFL for the UCLA Entertainment Law Review:
Signing bonuses, paid within a certain date of signing, represent the most traditional form of guaranteed money as the player receives the money relatively quickly. However, [basic] salaries, option bonuses and roster bonuses to be paid in future seasons might also be guaranteed. Typically, these categories of compensation can be guaranteed against “skill,” “injury” and/or “cap.” When a club terminates a player’s contract it must indicate what its reason are for doing so. The acceptable reasons can be nullified by these guarantees: a “skill” guarantee provides that a player’s contract cannot be terminated if in the club’s opinion he does not have the requisite skill; an “injury” guarantee protects a player’s contract from being terminated if he is injured; and a “cap” guarantee prohibits a club from terminating a player’s contract when his salary cap charge may have become too large. So while reports may often cite the “guaranteed” money of a newly signed player, the particular guarantees are much more involved.
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One other factor that keeps owners from doling out guarantees is an arcane CBA rule mandating that any fully guaranteed money be placed into escrow at the time of signing. This means that even if the guarantees are paid to the player over the course of one, two, or even three years, ownership still must place all of that guaranteed money into a separate bank account. Owners don’t like to do this because they’d rather not part with money until they absolutely have to. Meanwhile, agents hate the escrow stipulation, colloquially known as “the fully funded rule,” because owners reference it whenever they turn their pockets inside out and shrug. The rule once served a purpose, back before the league’s revenues skyrocketed and some owners genuinely had serious enough cash-flow problems to threaten their ability to make payroll. But not now.
“It is a rule that really has no place in today’s NFL and should be removed,” said Jason Fitzgerald, the founder of overthecap.com.
I’ve banged this drum in recent months, but teams now use the CBA as a cudgel to limit players’ earning power through a variety mechanisms like injury splits, per-game roster bonuses in lieu of salary, one-year deals, and contract years that automatically void. But the root of all this remains the salary cap, a fact that gets taken for granted whenever guaranteed money is discussed.
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“I think it’s not as conscious a decision as you might be thinking; it’s much more a matter of inertia,” Deubert told me. “Ever since 1993, that salary cap structure has become just more and more complicated and ingrained. I think the idea of doing guaranteed compensation, or even figuring out guaranteed compensation within that structure, is very complicated and challenging.”
If the players’ union were to successfully bargain for guaranteed compensation, Deubert added, “You’d have to rewrite about half of the CBA.”
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The NFLPA says 62 percent of what was paid to players in 2016 was guaranteed—a figure that includes signing bonuses. But that figure doesn’t reflect the fact that owners generally don’t pay out salaries they’re not contractually obligated to pay. The Harvard study’s own more recent findings revealed that just 44 percent of what was actually contracted was in the form of a guarantee. This still represents a substantial improvement from the start of free agency in 1993 until the dawn of the previous CBA in 2006, during which time Deubert estimates that less than 25 percent of all contracted NFL compensation was guaranteed. A handful of factors in the current CBA account for this.
For the first time, the owners have a cash-spending floor that requires them to spend a minimum of 89 percent of the cap, which prevents them from just hoarding any unused cap space for all eternity. (The previous CBA, by contrast, had a cap-spending floor, a rule some owners used to game the system by cramming all sorts of not-likely-to-be-achieved bonuses into deals, since even those phony bonuses had to count against the cap.) DeMaurice Smith, the NFLPA’s executive director, recently told ESPN’s Outside the Lines that the cash-spending rule “has pushed us to a world where larger and larger amounts of the salary are guaranteed, and I think that’s a good thing.” But the spending floor is actually required in aggregate across four-year intervals (2013 through 2016 and 2017 through 2020), with an allowance to roll over any unused cap space from one year to the next. Andrew Brandt, who’s worked in the past on both sides of the bargaining table as a former agent and as an executive responsible for contracts with the Packers, told me this rollover allowance has given teams the green light to manipulate what they’re actually spending on players. “This is a loophole that is allowing teams to collectively leave $200-300 million of cap room on the table every year,” Brandt said.
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“Back in the old days, owners could give guarantees; it’s just that they never did. They didn’t have to. Nobody else was doing it, so there was no leverage the players had to insist on guarantees.”
There have been noticeable improvements to the sort of guarantees players are getting. While the current CBA mandates a wage scale that includes four-year contracts for all drafted rookies, most first-round picks—this year this was true for the first 21 selections—get all four years fully guaranteed. And for second-round picks, it’s pretty standard for the first year or two of their salaries to be fully guaranteed.
“That represents a dramatic change from the past,” longtime agent Leigh Steinberg told me.
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Steinberg represents quarterback Paxton Lynch, taken No. 26 overall last year by the Broncos. He successfully bargained to get $600,000 of Lynch’s $1.74 million fourth-year salary guaranteed.
First-round picks also are required to carry a team option for a fifth year. That option must be exercised no later than May 2 heading into the player’s fourth season, at which point the fifth-year compensation is guaranteed for injury. It then becomes fully guaranteed by the start of the following league year in March. And even though the option is an additional restriction on players’ ability to bargain for what they’re worth, the option-year salary is a substantial improvement above what players had earned under the rookie-wage scale.
Then there’s the franchise tag and the lesser-used transition tag, which also tie players to their current teams—thus eliminating their bargaining position—after their contracts have expired. The advantage for the player is that the tags pay an average of the top-tier salaries at that player’s position, and they are fully guaranteed.
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But it’s telling that for many of the NFL’s best young players, actual salary security often takes the the form of rules that give their teams greater control over them.
Of all the rationales used to justify why NFL teams refuse to fork over fully guaranteed contracts, none comes up as often as football’s injury risk. If players are so prone to injury, so the thinking goes, teams don’t want to be saddled with paying out a big contract to someone who is at-risk of being unable to play—a burden exacerbated by the salary cap.
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The late Gene Upshaw, the former executive director of the NFLPA, made this point in a 2002 op-ed published in the Washington Post. Upshaw’s tenure was widely regarded for being too chummy with management, and his words here don’t exactly refute that:
“[G]uaranteed contracts are not negotiated by the unions into their collective agreements, but rather by players and agents into their individual agreements. Unfortunately for the NFL player, his ability to negotiate a guaranteed contract is severely undermined by the risk of a career-ending injury. He could be the greatest player who ever played, but he is still potentially one play away from the end of his career each time the ball is snapped. And even if an injury is not career-ending, it can diminish his skills. This fact obviously makes the clubs very reluctant to guarantee salaries in future seasons.”
More and more excuses for not guaranteeing contracts have cropped up:
Players with declining skill consuming roster spots that could go to others.
Players might put in less effort if they know they’re getting paid no matter what.
Players might be less likely to play through pain if they’re not constantly playing for their next contract.
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All of these reasons manage to ignore the reality that a system of guaranteed compensation hasn’t hindered the growth and popularity of other sports.
But the players’ union is forced to prioritize. Under the current CBA, players are entitled to a minimum of 47.5 percent of the NFL’s revenue. But part of what they receive (roughly $40 million per team) goes toward their benefits package, which doesn’t count against the cap, and which the NFLPA likes to claim is “the very best in professional sports.” The Harvard study, which compared that benefits package to the other leagues, concluded that this is “substantially true,” even as reports suggest the outreach for former players—especially older ones—has been less than ideal. Here’s the Harvard group’s explanation, which includes a caveat that these packages do not present an apples-to-apples comparison because of the NFL’s high injury rates:
First, the NFL offers every benefit that is provided by any of the other leagues. Second, the NFL offers several benefits that are not provided by any of the other leagues, including severance pay, long term care insurance, the Former Player Life Improvement Plan, and neurocognitive disability benefits for former players. Third, there are several benefits that only the NFL and a limited number of the other leagues provide: (a) only the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL provide health insurance (beyond COBRA) for former players; (b) only the NFL, MLB, and NBA provide players with mental health and substance abuse treatment; (c) only the NFL and NBA offer a health reimbursement account; (d) only the NFL and MLB offer disability benefits to former players; (e) only the NFL and NBA offer education-related benefits for all players; and, (f) only the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLS guarantee workers’ compensation benefits to all of their players.
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“The union ideally is making an informed decision of how they want to spread their [share] of the revenue,” Deubert told me. “More guaranteed money would mean less in benefits.”
Fitzgerald, the founder of overthecap.com, estimates that just 15 to 20 percent of all multi-year NFL contracts make it through to conclusion. If agents can bargain for more guaranteed money, why don’t they?
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To secure more guaranteed money—or at least as a higher percentage of the total contract—would in most cases result in shorter and cheaper deals. With the cap continuing to rise—it has increased 36 percent since 2013, thanks to a massive spike in national broadcast revenues—shorter deals would also give players more opportunities to test the market as a greater pool of money becomes available. Teams keep players during non-guaranteed seasons all the time, which is why a lot of agents would prefer to take a chance on the four-year, $30 million deal with $12 million guaranteed versus a two-year, $15 million deal with $12 million guaranteed.
“They’re betting on their player,” longtime agent Tony Agnone told me.
As far back as the 1980s, Agnone secured contracts with significant guarantees for players like Karl Mecklenburg and Steve Watson. But that avenue was only available to players with star power, a small cross-section of the league. That remains true today. Another longtime agent, Brian Mackler, said he often seeks to get 60 to 75 percent of a contract’s max value in guarantees. He successfully did this on two occasions for Patriots linebacker David Harris. In 2011, Mackler got Harris a four-year deal with the Jets for $36 million, with $29.5 million guaranteed. Harris played through that contract, and in 2015 he signed a three-year, $21.5 million deal that included $15 million guaranteed. The 33-year-old Harris was cut by the Jets in June, and none of the $6.5 million he was due in 2017 was guaranteed.
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“A lot of agents are more concerned about the total value so they can run to the newspapers and say ‘Look what I got this guy,’” Mackler said. “I think a lot of agents are more concerned about how they’re perceived in the newspapers.” This is true. There’s a whole ecosystem built around initially announcing the max details of contracts only, without the guarantees. Scoop reporters do it as favors to the agents who feed them the scoops, and owners like it because it makes them appear to be spending a lot more money than they actually are.
Interestingly, this year’s free-agent crop did produce one notable short deal that was almost fully guaranteed: Linebacker Lawrence Timmons left the Steelers for the Dolphins for two years, $12 million total, with $11 million guaranteed. It’s rare to see a long-term deal that includes full guarantees into Year 3. Timmons’s deal just cuts through the bullshit by identifying itself as what most deals actually are. Will that become the norm in the future?
The sheer size of NFL rosters also works in favor of the owners. During the offseason, teams can have up to 90 players, though only the top 51 salaries count against the salary cap. In-season, there are 53 players on a roster, plus 10 practice-squad players, who are paid a minimum of $7,200 per week (all of which counts against the cap). Compare that to rosters of 25 in MLB, 23 in the NHL, and just 15 in the NBA, which recently concluded another round of eye-popping megadeals. As NFLPA spokesman George Atallah told Pro Football Talk last summer, during the annual spasm in which the NFL’s relatively smaller contracts were tsked-tsked compared to the NBA’s massive spending spree:
“One business has fifty-three employees; it’s the NFL. One business has fifteen employees per team, and that’s the NBA. So by definition the smaller business is going to be able to pay their employees more money per employee than the bigger business is... I wish more of the certain members of the sports media would just do some basic math before they popped off.”
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This offseason has brought attention to the NFL’s shrinking middle class, and to the growing divide between veterans and younger players, which is creating “a have and have-not league,” as former Buccaneers GM and current ESPN analyst Mark Dominik described it to The Ringer’s Kevin Clark. Overthecap.com’s Fitzgerald recently wrote that 17 percent of the estimated $5 billion the league is expected to spend this year on salaries will go to just 50 players (out of roughly 2,000), with half of all salaries going to 250 players. The growth of the salary cap has worked in concert with arbitrary restraints like the rookie wage scale to create this disparity. For fringe players—i.e., most of the league—a work stoppage would interrupt their prime earning years, which are already limited. Combine these factors—a league filled with a handful of well-compensated players along with a sizable majority making far less, with little-to-nothing guaranteed—and it becomes easy to see why it’s so difficult to organize NFL players to take collective action. And then there is the nature of NFL players themselves, given the sport they play. As Agnone put it, they’ve spent their lives being obedient and having their heads filled with military-style talk of unit cohesion by coaches who constantly shout at them like drill instructors.
“You’ll never confuse football players with the Bolshevik revolutionaries who stormed the Winter Palace,” Agnone said.
Let’s go back to McNabb’s Washington contract. Those initial reports suggested it carried “$40 million in guarantees.” That was misleading to the point of a lie. As Adam Schefter later discovered, it included a $25 million guarantee that paid out only if McNabb were to suffer a career-ending injury. An additional $12.5 million was a vested guarantee in the form of an option bonus that was never exercised. The deal was essentially a mirage. McNabb and his agent agreed to the extension because its lone actual guarantee—$3.75 million, which the Skins happily spent in order to control his rights that offseason—allowed him to collect a total of $17.5 million in 2010, making him the highest-paid QB in the league just as his career was winding down. In a league without guarantees, this is the kind of shell game agents and players are often forced into playing to secure as much money as possible for as long as they can, while they can.Rupert Murdoch’s long-held plan to hand over his media empire to his sons is now being realized.
Mr. Murdoch is expected to name his son James to succeed him as chief executive of 21st Century Fox, the sprawling entertainment company that includes cable and broadcast television networks, film studios and satellite companies, multiple people briefed on the plans said on Thursday.
He also is expected to elevate his son |
combined with maternity or maternity without virginity are so sublime and are so beautiful that these two charisms are incompatible with the priesthood. They just don’t go together. The moment that you realise you have a maternal vocation, the moment that you realise you are called to virginity, it excludes the priesthood. They don’t go together. You cannot have all the charisms and what a blessing that men have the priesthood, because otherwise they could develop complexes of inferiority which would be a catastrophe because they don’t like it. As a matter of fact I think they would be very disturbed suddenly to realise the greatness of femininity.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta said “A woman cannot become a priest. There was only one creature on earth who could say with truth ‘This is My Body, This is My Blood’, the Holy Virgin and she was not chosen to be a priest.” Therefore let us accept and realise to be a priest as St. Paul says quite explicitly, God chooses who is going to be a priest and he happens to have chosen the male sex. However, some stupid women would like to sell the privilege of their femininity, the mystery of their femininity, the sacredness of their femininity, their maternal vocation, to become priests and to steal it from men who have received it from God Himself. The Church has always honoured women in an extraordinary way.
Overcoming the evil of feminism
If you study pagan art, you will see that the pagans glorified the male genitals. The male organ was considered to be the symbol of strength and power. If you go to Pompeii or to Athens, to pagan countries, the male organ was always the one that was honoured.
When the Church took over, she waged war on this pagan cult. She eliminated it, she fought against it. Sometimes you find remnants in pagan cultures, but the very moment the Church came it was officially eliminated and what did she do? She replaced it by a prayer, prayed by millions of people, day after day, century after century, which makes an explicit reference to the female organ par excellence, the womb: “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”. That is the place that the Church gives to women in the Church.
Therefore let us realise the tremendous greatness of the mission women have received and make them realise that they have to wake up to the greatness of this mission, to fight for it and to overcome the catastrophe and evil of feminism.
I have not chosen to be a woman, but the more I meditate on the Christian message, I am grateful I am one.World-renowned, award-winning bars have been known to take on ambitious menus with serious production quality. And, when a bar is working with a presumably substantial budget, in-house creative resources, and sometimes an agency, that makes sense. But one cocktail bar is showing us that a clever, memorable, one-of-a-kind menu design doesn’t always have to require staggeringly huge budgets, brands or big-city clientele — just a little imagination and a lot of dedication.
The Rogue Gentlemen in Richmond, Virginia is known locally for farm-to-table food and a strong, beloved cocktail program. They’re also known for their exceptionally thoughtful, creative, occasionally absurd and often riotously funny menus, which undergo a complete overhaul four times a year. Over the years, the menus have taken the form of a cheeky Richard Gere centerfold, an issue of National Geographic, a game of Mad Libs, a book of baseball cards, even a nostalgic diner menu that instantly recalls a certain fast-casual breakfast chain, iconic bright-yellow logo and all. Rogue’s most current iteration for fall? A wine-stained field guide and camping journal, complete with sixteen drinks — and sixteen hilariously cynical journal entries from Rogue’s owner himself, John Maher, who admittedly hates camping (but arms himself appropriately with provisions like daiquiri supplies, a travel-sized 375-mL bottle of J. Mourat rose and a koozie).
The menus themselves are masterfully done with an incredible amount of attention paid to each and every facet, from concept to execution. But perhaps the most impressive aspect of Rogue’s menu design? The fact that they’re constantly producing these on a budget of approximately $500 per season. (Admittedly, it helps that a loyal regular at Rogue also happens to be a designer, but still — that’s wildly impressive considering the quality of each production, and the investment of time each menu requires from start to finish.)
We caught up with Maher to ask him why the bar started pursuing these time-intensive projects, what it takes to dream up a menu and see it to completion, and how they manage to up the ante each time:
How long has The Rogue Gentlemen been doing these major menu switch-ups?
We started doing these menus after about 3 months after we opened. I've always wanted to do it, but took some time to find the right person to help us implement it in a design capacity.
How does it work from a budget/resource perspective? Do you use an agency, or have an in-house designer?
We are extremely fortunate to have an in-house designer. His name is Chad Cariano and he was a regular guest since we opened. Chad was part of a small group here in Richmond, called Cabin, that produced several of our early menus. Last spring, that team split up and went separate ways. And Chad is the one that stuck around and still oversees our menu design.
We try to keep the menus under $500 per season, with the exception of our first one which was a hard cover, bound cocktail book. It was our most labor-intensive menu ever and most expensive, but it set the tone for us.
The nostalgic diner-style menu bears a striking resemblance to that of a certain American breakfast chain.
How long does it usually take to come up with a new menu, from brainstorming to final execution?
We have several menu meetings during each season to discuss the next menu. We start to really work on the next menu about a month in to our current menu. We brainstorm, drink a lot of bourbon, and find a concept. Chad will put together a rough preview and we make changes and tweaks over the next month. All in, I'd say it takes about 2 months from initial idea to receiving the final menus.
How many people are involved? Is it pretty collaborative?
Our entire team is part of the process. A fully collaborative restaurant is something I'm very proud of, as an owner. We're a small, tight knit family of very creative people. I like to say that we're a room full of bartenders. When we have questions about using more savory ingredients, we turn to Chef to point us in the right direction. Total, 7 people have creative input into our menus.
The Richard Gere centerfold menu, with a drink corresponding to each of his physical features.
What is the customer feedback like? Any menus that have been standout crowd favorites?
Our guests love our menus, some more than others. Our most "polarizing" was also our most photographed and talked about, the Gere menu. We had some guys slam the menu closed and throw it down in a huff. Fragile egos, and all. But people look forward to our menus every season. Launch day is always crazy. We have a very dry, odd sense of humor that we put into our menus. Some people get it and love it. Others are like "huh? I don't understand." Our current menu is definitely a crowd pleaser. So much so that we had to reorder more menus after 3 1/2 weeks because people were taking them. That was a first for us. I'm also extremely proud of this one because I wrote 99% of the copy for it. Everyone loves my crazy story. The baseball cards were a big hit as well.
Each drink on the Field Journal menu corresponds with a diary entry from Maher's ill-fated camping adventures.
Finally... why do you make these? Obviously it's fun and memorable but I imagine it also requires a huge investment of both time and cash. I'd love to hear your philosophy on what makes it worthwhile.
When we opened Rogue, I knew I wanted to have really special cocktail menus. Anyone can print off a piece of paper with a bunch of cocktails on it. I've been to some incredible cocktail bars all over the country. Some of the best in the world. And these places give the guest something special and creative. Be it a big leather bound tome like Williams & Graham, or a San Francisco tourist map at Trick Dog, or a dossier at Wilson & Wilson. I wanted to give our guests something special and memorable.
We also use our menus to put our guests at ease when they come in. A lot of times they may be a little nervous their first time. A wall full of esoteric spirits on the wall and cocktails with words they may not know. But when we hand them baseball cards, or a Denny's menu, or a story about me trying to go camping, it makes them laugh and puts them in a fun and inviting mood. We're all very creative people and we like to push the envelope when it comes to what a cocktail bar is in Richmond. We spend so much time and effort on our drinks that they deserve to be featured on something more than just a piece of paper.
We are so lucky to have, I think, the most talented graphic designer in the entire city on our team. Chad takes our crazy ideas and turns them into works of art. Without him, I'm not sure we could do what we do. These menus have become part of our identity. We stand out in a crowd of bars because of them. And we'll continue to make our crazy menus four times a year and one day we'll win the Spirited Award for Best Cocktail Menu. That plate belongs behind our bar.Ty Cobb (not that Ty Cobb). Jerry Cleveland/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Ty Cobb is a White House attorney. He was hired in July and has been of interest to the public thus far mostly because he has a distinctive mustache and is named Ty Cobb, like the baseball player, to whom he is apparently distantly related. Now, however, he’s also notable for writing a comically disjointed but heartfelt late-night email about Russia to the owner of a noodle restaurant who had been harassing him via unsolicited messages about fellatio.
Business Insider broke this classic story of unlikely friendship between mustache lawyer and noodle fellatio man*:
The exchange on Tuesday night was with Jeff Jetton, the owner of a popular ramen restaurant in Washington, DC, who has made himself known to reporters by digging into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia … Cobb, a partner at Hogan Lovells, responded to Jetton’s obscenity-laden emails using his official White House email account.
Jetton sent Slate his email exchange with Cobb (really). Here’s the kind of thing Jetton was writing to the attorney before their conversation turned serious:
At what point will you stop fondling the Don’s balls and say no, out of curiosity?
Also:
Have fun choking Trump’s nutsack. Douche.
And:
I wish you nothing but joy when his hairy testicles get caught up in your throat.
For some reason—boredom, perhaps—Cobb responded to one of the non-obscene sections of the emails, in which Jetton asked him how he personally justified working for a figure like Trump. They went back and forth a while; here’s one of Cobb’s responses:
Can say assertively the more adults in the room will be better. Me and Kelly among others. Over and out
Another:
All deserve a defense. Particularly with phony allegations and fake news. I am on’t be here for long but will be I my piece against bullshit Russian bullshit that hurts us now and is totally political limiting Russian cooperation against NK. This shit is real and real time. Got to go: Best, Ty
Typos aside, the gist here is comprehensible: Every American deserves a defense, including Donald Trump, and Cobb believes that he’s helping the country by providing a stable presence in the White House and dealing with what he believes to be an overblown scandal that’s harming American interests. Also, “bullshit Russian bullshit” is a great phrase. Ty Cobb for president?
*Correction, Sept. 6, 2017, at 4:20 p.m.: This post originally stated that Mother Jones broke the Cobb-Jetton story; in fact, Business Insider was the first site to publish a piece about their exchange.
Cobb’s interlocutor was, improbably, the owner of a Washington noodle shop called Toki. This restauranteur, Jeff Jetton, has been something of a mixer or an amateur investigator in the Russia scandal. On his own initiative, he has reached out to players in the controversy—including Carter Page and Sergei Millian —and published interviews with them on a pop-culture blog called Brightest Young Things. Brightest Young Things.The Dallas Cowboys announced on Wednesday that they signed a 22-year-old defensive end named Efe Obada from the London Warriors, an amateur football team in England.
Obada was scouted by Warriors' defensive coordinator, Aden Durde, who was an intern coach with the Cowboys last season, according to Neil Reynolds of NFL UK.
Obada's journey to the NFL is incredible.
According to Reynolds, Obada and his sister were trafficked from the Netherlands to the UK when Obada was 10. Upon arriving in London, they were left alone and homeless. Obada says:
"This lady just left us out on the streets. It was scary and we were lonely. We went to a tower block building and there was a security guard there. We explained our situation and he let us sleep in the foyer of the flats. We spent two or three nights sleeping in the foyer of that building and we only had our jackets to keep us warm. It was freezing."
Obada says he joined gangs as he got older but eventually steered away from that life when he saw three of his friends get killed.
While studying business at Lamberth College, a friend introduced Obada to the Warriors, which was his introduction to American football.
Obada told Reynolds:
"I didn’t really know anything about American football but I was told I had the physique and that I should try it. I fell in love with the sport. When I went to the first practice, I was just trying to get my frustration out and release some energy. I was congratulated for hitting somebody and I liked it."
While playing for the Warriors, Obada worked as a warehouse storeman at Grace Foods, working 40 hours a week with shifts starting at 6 a.m. He played five games for the team before getting signed by the Cowboys.
Obada has the raw athleticism to make it in the NFL, according to Reynolds. He ran a 4.67 40-yard dash —which would be second among tight ends in the recent NFL Combine — and a 120-inch broad jump, which would be the highest among tight ends.
Obada lifting a big tire:
Played 5 football games his entire life.Currently works in a warehouse.Now.. he's a Cowboy: http://t.co/DDZqb8033j pic.twitter.com/2OSqhLWkCU — NFL (@nfl) April 1, 2015
Although video of Obada playing is hard to come by, here he is tipping a pass, as spotted by Nick C, a Cowboys writer for Real Sports Entertainment Network:
Efe Obada blows by the OT showing decent technique for a guy in his 4th game ever. Tips the screen pass pic.twitter.com/ueJIqwILdp — Nick C (@NickCRSEN) April 1, 2015
The Cowboys' website called him a "long shot" to make the team. NFL teams are allowed to have 90 players on the roster right now, but must cut that to 53 by the start of the regular season.
Still, Obada has a shot.
"This is a dream," Obada told Reynolds. "It’s amazing and life-changing. It’s a major turning point in my life and feels like a movie. This could be it – I can change my life. This is unreal – this doesn’t happen to people like me. I’ve never even been outside of London since I arrived in the UK."
NOW WATCH: 8th-grade basketball team loses after game-winning shot gets stuck on rim in freakish fashion
More From Business InsiderAmerican Airlines is taking heat for requiring a teen who is nonverbal to stow the iPad she relies on to communicate during a recent flight.
Carly Fleischmann, a 17-year-old with autism from Toronto, lambasted American Airlines on her Facebook page earlier this week for limiting access to the iPad she uses to speak.
On her way home from Los Angeles last Friday, Fleischmann said that a flight attendant told her to put away the tablet for takeoff and landing and was unwilling to bend even after Fleischmann’s aide explained that it was a communication device.
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“She stated to me that it was the policy of the airlines that I couldn’t have my iPad and that with all her years of flying that she’s never seen or heard anybody using an iPad to communicate before,” wrote Fleischmann, who said that her communication needs have always been accommodated by the crew on previous flights.
“My iPad to me is like a voice. Can you imagine being on the airplane and (being) asked not to talk for over 25 minutes,” she wrote, adding that she was ultimately allowed to keep her iPad out after the captain of the plane intervened but the device had to be placed “in front of my seat out of my reach.”
Fleischmann, whose intellectual capabilities went unknown until age 11 when she began to type, is well-known with her story having been featured on ABC News, CNN and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” among others. She has a strong social media presence with over 42,000 fans on Facebook and some 26,000 Twitter followers and they were quick to respond, flooding American Airlines’ Facebook page to demand answers.
Airline officials responded directly to many of the postings indicating that they have reached out to Fleischmann privately, but that the flight attendant acted in compliance with the airline’s policy and federal rules.
“Our flight attendants are responsible for following U.S. Department of Transportation regulations on the accommodation of customers with disabilities,” airline spokesman Ed Martelle said in a statement to Disability Scoop. “American’s electronic device policy is designed to be in full compliance with the DOT. Likewise, federal safety rules require the stowage of personal items during takeoff and landing and prohibit the use of electronic devices at the same periods. We regret any discomfort Carly felt or difficulty this may cause customers.”
Federal rules and American Airlines’ policy on the use of electronics make exceptions for certain medical devices including hearing aids and pacemakers but do not specifically mention assistive and augmentative communication devices.
Late Wednesday, Fleischmann said she was working to get a meeting with representatives of American Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration to discuss the matter.After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, scores of victims’ family members decided to pursue lawsuits in federal court, bypassing a dedicated compensation fund in order to seek not only millions of dollars in damages, but also answers and accountability.
Many had wanted to compel a public soul-searching, and to have the airlines and others reveal in court how their policies and actions might have allowed 19 armed hijackers to pass through airport security, board planes and carry out the attacks.
The families had amassed a trove of internal documents and depositions. But none of the material was ever aired before a jury: Each of the 96 victims’ cases filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan was settled confidentially under the direction of Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who oversaw all the cases.
Although that meant there would be no Sept. 11 civil trial, Judge Hellerstein, in his first public interviews about the wrongful death cases and settlements, said that he had no regrets over the outcome.Netflix Japan has greenlighted a new drama series produced by veteran TV comedian and host Sanma Akashiya.
The currently untitled series has backing from talent agency Yoshimoto Kogyo and Dentsu Digital Holdings, a fund management company that is part of the Dentsu ad agency. Shooting will begin this summer and streaming is scheduled to start next spring.
Based on the life of Jimmy Onishi, a comedian and painter who was once Sanma’s apprentice, the eight-episode drama will be shot on 4K video and a subtitled version will be distributed in 200 countries and territories worldwide. Each episode will run about 40-50 minutes.
This is the second Japanese-made drama commissioned by Netflix. The first, “Hibana: Spark,” a series about a struggling comic duo, based on an award-winning novella by Yoshimoto comic Naoki Matayoshi, will start streaming on June 3.Andre Ward Fights On For Unreachable Admiration
Despite a period of uncertainty, taunts, and fan frustration, Andre Ward steps up once again in a rematch versus Sergey Kovalev in another attempt to affirm himself as the best fighter in the world
Babajide Sotande-Peters Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 15, 2017
When Andre Ward tasted canvas in the 2nd round of his first encounter with unified light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev last November, the preconceived story he wanted to write for himself came crashing down and another one began to take form.
Ward wanted to emulate the greats of the past as he rose from the deck and clawed his way to victory when everything seemed against him. And when he rallied valiantly to see the final bell and have his hand raised in victory, you would have assumed that Ward’s vision had been revealed out in the open for everyone to admire. On paper it was a brilliant display deserving of admiration and respect that might have been plucked from some Hollywood film.
But it is seldom that simple when it comes to Andre Ward.
The unanimous verdict in his favor was met with a mixture of disagreement, derision, and resentment from a vocal conglomerate of fighters, experts, and fans alike. The general consensus was that despite an admirable comeback where Ward showed visible adjustments to frustrate and nullify the offensive arsenal of his formidable adversary, he still fell short of being dominant enough to erase the early lead that Kovalev built up. All meaning that he should consider himself fortunate to escape Las Vegas with the light heavyweight belts.
Now, to both his closest supporters (and especially himself), the instant reaction to Ward’s latest triumph seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. The 33-year-old has been more than vocal about a constant lack of credit for all that he has achieved in the sport. He feels submerged in a pre-existing climate of “having to do more” to receive his due owing to an effective but aesthetically unpleasant fighting style, coupled with who he is and where he is from. And if you consider his point-of-view, then one may be able to acknowledge and appreciate his grievances.
After all, to add to his dominance of the super-middleweight division, he has moved up to a new weight class, sought out the biggest available challenge in that category by taking on Kovalev (a man considered by many to be the baddest man in the sport) and withstood adversity to best him — albeit in highly controversial fashion. This all being in a climate where Ward (and Kovalev) seemingly stood out as a repudiation of the modern day prizefighter – someone willing to take risks in order to affirm their greatness. So what is the issue here?
Again, with Andre Ward it is seldom that simple.
The appreciation that should have greeted the initial fight was shrouded with a satirical sense of “relief” in general boxing circles that Ward was finally taking on his first legitimate challenge in years. He had already been recognized as a top tier technician, a dying breed of sorts, with his dominance matched by very few. And conventional wisdom dictated that this fresh test would be yet another definitive stamp on his greatness (at least that is what the betting odds suggested) But even in victory, Ward didn’t live up to that dominant standard, which goes a small way to explaining the reservations pound for pound fanatics have in placing him on the top of their list.
However above all it is the man in the mirror who serves as Ward’s biggest obstacle toward validation.
This sentiment is typified by the immediate aftermath of last November’s contest. Kovalev had an immediate rematch clause, but Ward bode his time on the negotiating table, flirting with retirement and stirring mind games with a frustrated and angry Kovalev. In Andre Ward’s world, Kovalev was built to be an unstoppable monster who ultimately wasn’t as formidable or strong a puncher as marketed. Again, not like Ward was the favorite or anything…
So by the time the new champion pressed play on the inevitable rematch, instead of praising both for delving straight back into the firing line, fans and media members alike were too busy compressing their contempt for “S.O.G.” And during the interim, the significance that a return should carry in the minds of fight fans has been lost amidst the shuffle of a non existent pre-fight promotion and a positive resurgence of elite level fights in 2017 as a whole.
Nonetheless, this rematch is a rare case of a clash carrying more intrigue and question marks than its preceding episode did. Controversy and apathy can now well and truly subside for anticipation. Kovalev showed he could operate at the highest possible level of the sport with the success he did show vs Ward, but will he be able to replicate the success he showed early in the first fight for 12 full rounds on this outing? How much credence does his claims that he over trained for the first fight really hold?
And as it relates to Andre Ward, are the in fight adjustments he made in the first fight reflective of a man who has simply figured out his opponent? Or will he be pushed both physically and mentally to a non-penetrable level in this return?
But most importantly, should he overcome Kovalev for a second time, what will we be talking about instead of praising a champion who has affirmed himself as the sport’s best?Paramount Pictures/CBS Studios
Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios filed an amazing amended complaint Monday in their lawsuit over the fan-made Axanar films. A little background: Paramount has allowed Star Trek fan films in the past, as long as they didn’t make a profit, but crowdfunding has changed the landscape. Producer Alec Peters was able to raise more than $100,000 for his first short film, Prelude to Axanar. The resulting 21-minute mockumentary, with slick production values and recognizable actors, premiered at San Diego’s Comic-Con in 2014:
Peters and his company Axanar Productions used the film as a proof-of-concept for a feature-length fan film, for which they raised $650,000. At that budget, it turned out Paramount and CBS were a little less tolerant of the use of Star Trek properties, and filed a lawsuit against Peters and his collaborators in December. Peters requested a dismissal in February on the grounds that, among other things, Paramount and CBS hadn’t been specific enough about exactly how he was infringing their Star Trek copyrights. On Friday, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Paramount and CBS cleared up any doubts. The Hollywood Reporter has posted the full amended complaint, and it’s a doozy.
The heart of the filing is an endless table of every infringement: characters, races and species, mood and theme, plot point similarities, costumes, settings, and even logos. The dialogue section includes the entire Klingon language. And each infringement has a detailed explanation, filled with Star Trek universe trivia. Did you know that triangular medals for dress uniforms on the left breast first appeared in the Star Trek episode “The Menagerie Part I,” from 1966? The United States District Court for the Central District of California does! The filing even includes framegrabs:
Paramount/CBS
It goes on like that for pages. Regardless of whether it’s determined the Axanar producers violated copyright or not, the amended complaint makes clear that Alec Peters and his lawyers broke a much more fundamental rule: Never ask a Star Trek fan for more detail.Stephen Frears has crafted a moving and thought-provoking drama, one which treats its audience like adults, all while sprinkling in bits of humor amidst the fantastic performances.
In Stephen Frears’s Philomena, he manages an astounding feat. He effectively balances sappy drama with effective storytelling. With a great script and great performances from Dench and Coogan, Philomena is just as thought-provoking as it is hilarious.
Philomena is based on the work of Martin Sixsmith, who is played in the film by Steve Coogan. Sixsmith, a British journalist, picks up the story of Philomena Lee, whose child was taken from her many years ago. The two strike up a friendship, as friends rather than clients, as their journey to find Philomena’s child takes them to Washington D.C.
Judi Dench shines as the titular character in Philomena. I have not seen much of her work outside of the James Bond films, but she is terrific as the distraught mother. Her Oscar nomination is well-deserved here. She delivers a moving performance in the scenes where she learns of her son’s life. She also gives the film the majority of its well-intentioned humor amidst the dark content. Steve Coogan’s character Martin Sixsmith is also wonderfully complex. Philomena throws some heavy material at you, with talks of religion and other values scattered throughout.
It manages to remain its complexity given the content, with some interspersed humor here and there. Some of these jokes land quite well, but the majority are simple jabs at American lifestyle, with a mix of airplane and hotel humor. If that’s the best Philomena can manage, then it’s a wonder that it wasn’t labeled a comedy at the Golden Globes. But this humor is very welcomed, as it allows you to take a break from the film and appreciate the well-crafted characters. The screenplay also delivers thanks to work from both Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope.
Philomena is a great drama. One that manages to tell a complex tale with heavy themes, all while keeping a light tone throughout thanks to some great characters. I haven’t even mentioned the brilliant score from Alexandre Desplat, whose work fits the film excellently. Philomena might not score come awards time, but you owe it to yourself to check out this great movie.
Buy Philomena Today on Amazon!
AdvertisementsThe police in Uttar Pradesh have arrested a senior Congress leader for allegedly circulating a fake photo of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker disrupting flood relief work in Chennai, reports said.
UP Congress Committee (UPCC) chief Nirmal Khatri was arrested on Friday for circulating a morphed photo on WhatsApp that claims to show an RSS worker fighting with the police and disrupting the flood relief in Chennai.
The image was widely shared on WhatsApp and several other social media networks. RSS workers brought the matter to the attention of the police and told them the picture was taken in 2012.
The RSS then filed a complaint against Khatri, who had shared the image on WhatsApp. Based on the complaint, the Agra police registered case under Section 469 of the IPC (forgery for purpose of harming reputation) and Section 66D of the Information Technology Act (cheating using computer resource) against him, according to PTI.
The RSS has said the person seen clashing with the police in the fake photo is Ajit Kumar from Agra, who is a farmer by profession and an RSS worker.
"He is currently working for the RSS in Mathura and has never been to Chennai," RSS leader from Braj, Pradeep Kumar, told Times of India.
Khatri told TOI he did not know the picture was fake and had deleted it after he came to know that it was morphed.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
The invention of the world's first electric battery, the voltaic pile, in 1800 was a monumentally historic event. For the first time, people had captured electricity and were free to study its effects and potential. One of those people was Johann Wilhelm Ritter. However, rather than using it to invent something awesome, such as the light bulb, Ritter used the voltaic pile to apply current to sensitive areas of his body, including his nasal cavity, tongue and eyes, because that was evidently the absolute best idea he could come up with. Clearly, programming Karnov 187 years early would have been the superior idea.
kobayashisdomain.blogspot.com
And probably more sexually satisfying.
The Perverted Bit:
Determined to follow this line of thought until the bitter end, Ritter decided to electro-blast his yogurt cannon, possibly because he was known to be an eccentric who tap-danced on the borderline of crazy.
He wrapped his dong up in "a cloth moistened with lukewarm milk" (you know, because), then touched a charged wire from the battery onto the cloth. After a bit of a jolt, his penis started to swell. Rather than hurling the cloth out of the window for fear of penile explosion, he kept it firmly applied until he experienced the most terrifying orgasm of all time (we're calling shotgun on that premise so we can pitch it to Stephen King).
We'd call it a page-turner, but honestly, most of them are stuck together.
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Showing all the measured reserve of a 10-year-old boy discovering nudity, Ritter began frequently zapping himself, going so far as to jokingly write to his publisher that he intended to marry the voltaic pile (given what we've just learned, we are in no way surprised that actual women were less than excited to have sex with him).
After a while, Ritter began experiencing some nasty side effects, including muscle spasms and paralysis, all over his body (his boner, while arguably his favorite place to electrocute, was by no means the only area of his anatomy that he attached to the battery). Rather than discontinue his "experiments," which by this point seemed to have no higher academic pursuit beyond trying to turn himself into a Spider-Man villain, Ritter would self-medicate with opium to keep the discomfort at bay, leaving him free to play with his masturbattery until the end of time. Or at least until he died at 33 from tuberculosis augmented by a deteriorating physical frailty, which a regime of drug use and constant electric shocks certainly did nothing to help.Back in May of last year, Google announced that Chromebooks would start supporting Android apps. Now, every single Chromebook going forward will have access to the Google Play Store.
The news comes from a single line of text in Google's list of Chromebooks that can support the programs: "All Chromebooks launching in 2017 and after as well as the Chromebooks listed below will work with Android apps in the coming future." Below that is a list of older Chromebooks that will also run Android apps.
We knew this would eventually come, and now isn't terribly surprising timing. There are more Chromebooks with touch screens than ever, including the Asus Chromebook Flip C302CA and Samsung's upcoming Chromebook Plus and Pro, all of which were announced at CES in Las Vegas.
MORE: Best Chromebooks Available Now
Many non-touch Chromebooks can also support Android apps, but the experience probably won't be as good. See the full list here.
Adding Android apps makes the Chrome ecosystem significantly larger. Chrome OS' bare app selection has been mostly limited to web-based programs, but now Chromebooks will run the most popular mobile apps you can find.
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An umbrella group involving loyalist paramilitaries is warning “all unionists and loyalists against voting for Alliance Party candidates”.
In a statement issued on its website, the Loyalist Communities Council also said that unionists can win back South Belfast on Thursday if there is a “maximum turnout of the unionist electorate”.
The LCC was set up, with the backing of former Tony Blair aide Jonathan Powell, in 2015 to tackle criminality, educational under-achievement and “loyalist disenfranchisement” in politics.
The body and its goals were signed up to by representatives from the three main loyalist paramilitary groups - the UVF, the UDA and the Red Hand Commando.
Today’s statement, which was later dismissed by Alliance as "absurd", comes in the wake of a row between Sinn Fein and the DUP over the DUP’s relationship with the UDA.
Last week, Arlene Foster was criticised by Sinn Fein MLA John O’Dowd for meeting with UDA chief Jackie McDonald in South Belfast just days after the murder in Bangor of Colin Horner.
The Ulster Political Research Group, which provides political advice to the UDA, has endorsed the DUP’s Emma Little Pengelly for the South Belfast constituency.
In its statement, the Loyalist Communities Council “urges every unionist and loyalist voter to ensure they turn out and vote for unionist candidates in the forthcoming general election”.
They add: “Sinn Fein, and the other anti-unionist parties are seeking to capitalise on the uncertainty created by the collapse of the Stormont Executive, and the impending Brexit negotiations to move Northern Ireland away from the United Kingdom. This will only succeed if unionists fail to register their votes for unionist candidates.
“The LCC deplores the unwillingness of the main unionist parties to co-operate to maximise unionist representation at Westminster. In constituencies where there is a risk of losing a seat to republicans, we ask that unionists vote for the unionist candidate most likely to win that seat.”
The LCC then offers “the following guidance” - that in Fermanagh South Tyrone “we ask that every unionist votes for Tom Elliott”; in North Belfast, Nigel Dodds; in East Belfast, Gavin Robinson and in South Belfast “we ask that every unionist votes for Emma Pengelly”.
They add: “If there is a maximum turnout of the unionist electorate not only will three unionist seats be protected but a fourth (South Belfast) will be won back for Unionism.”
And in a no-holds-barred attack on the Alliance party, they add: “The LCC particularly warns all unionists and loyalists against voting for Alliance Party candidates.
“Many unionists think they can retain their unionism yet vote for Alliance candidates. They are sorely mistaken in that belief. No party does more to undermine the Britishness of Northern Ireland, and foment community mistrust and division than the Alliance Party.
“Any unionist who votes for the Alliance Party is driving a nail into the coffin of the Union. This Party must be rejected at the polls by all unionists and loyalists.”
Responding to the statement, the Alliance Party said that “in sharp contrast to the DUP, who appear content to accept the endorsement of paramilitaries, Alliance is satisfied to accept their rejection of our principled and consistent stand for the rule of law and against all terrorism”.
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A 36-year-old Nassau County man shot and killed his aunt during an argument over a parking space Thursday night and then killed himself, deputies said Friday.
According to the Nassau County Sheriff's Office, the murder-suicide was reported about 7 p.m. at a home on Swallowfork Avenue in Callahan.
Deputies said James Aaron Proffitt got involved in an argument between his mother and his aunt, 55-year-old Melinda Sue Lein, got a handgun from his room, shot Lein and then shot himself.
Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said Proffitt had been living with his mother, his aunt and his siblings in his mother's Callahan home.
"They are shocked that something like this would happen. (They) never thought it would. Certainly, they are upset," Leeper said. "They are all being cooperative. We don't know what made him snap to do that, but it's something that, unfortunately, occurred."
A neighbor who did not wish to be identified told News4Jax Friday that she's known the family for more than a decade and can't believe what happened.
"It doesn't make sense when things like this happen. But you never know what's going through someone's mind when they decide to do something like this," she said.
Proffitt has no criminal history and authorities have never been called to the home before, according to the Sheriff's Office.
Copyright 2017 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved.So, there's this extremely minor Google Music update floating around in the "rollout" ether that will take you from 5.1.1107K to 5.1.1109K. I poked around in it and found a few boring changes related to Chromecasting, but the "new feature" that some people will really notice is the removal of the SD card hack we told you about last month.
That's right, update to 1109; lose a feature. They basically killed the little activities shortcut that allowed you to set the option, and removed the SD card preference from the settings storage. The core of the SD code hasn't been ripped out; they just did the bare minimum to disable it.
So, do you have an SD card? Have you been enjoying your extra song storage this past month? If so, then version 5.1.1109 is the devil - stay away. Hopefully this is just a temporary thing until they work out all the bugs (have there been any bugs?) with SD storage.
If you've been surprised by this, and want a version with SD support, you can still download 5.1.1107 5.1.1106 (and view the hack instructions) in our old article.
Thanks to Douglas Vantran for sending in the APKWith rehab — or worse — looming, Lindsay Lohan is determined to squeeze in as much fun as she can. And because this is LiLo, one must assume that fun involves drinking to the point of intoxication and causing a scene in front of paparazzi.
Less than a week after her sentencing, Lohan was seen hitting clubs in Southern California this weekend. According to Us Weekly, she was "drinking Ketel One vodka on the rocks and smoking Parliaments" with a pal in San Diego while wearing a Yankees cap and hoodie before chatting up singer Sean Kingston, who partied at a nearby table. The next night she tried to shield herself from media while leaving a private club in Santa Monica.
Despite the weekend boozing, TMZ issued a news alert that Lohan was NOT late to work on Monday morning. In fact, she was 45 minutes early for her 10 a.m. start. This shocking development might have been prompted by her debt to tax-relief benefactor Charlie Sheen. She's shooting a guest appearance on his FX sitcom "Anger Management" — as his therapy patient!
Lohan must face her own real-life treatment, but RadarOnline.com reports that she insisted it had to wait for Coachella. LiLo has attended the Palm Springs-area music and arts festival for the past three years and she wasn't ready to let any sentence get in the way — in fact, as attorney Mark Heller haggled with prosecutors, she made her deal contingent on the rehab stint coming after the April event.
"Lindsay loves going to the musical festival, and she’s determined to go this year," a snitch told Radar. "She didn’t want a little thing like rehab to get in her way of attending. Linds refused to sign off on any deal that would have prevented her from going to Coachella, period. Yes, it’s that important to her, for some strange reason."
Some speculate her obsession with Coachella this year might involve her budding romance with musician-club promoter Avi Snow, rumored to be aboard the private Mr. Pink jet that shuttled Lohan from New York to L.A. to make her last-minute plea deal. As part of that bargain, the actress was ordered to enroll in treatment by no later than mid-May. When her legal team makes its next appears in court May 2, it must provide a progress report on Lohan's counseling and proof of enrollment in a locked rehab facility.
But here's the twist: TMZ is reporting that the locked rehab facilities stipulated under the deal simply don't exist, thereby nullifying the agreement. The website says the type of treatment center Heller promised prosecutors he could enroll his client in is fictional. The centers won't stop patients if they want to leave — and because Lohan has been caught sneaking out of rehab before that could be a problem.
"There is no rehab that will hold you against your will, unless they feel the person is a suicide risk, and in that case they can hold the individual for 72 hours," rehab guru Dr. Drew told TMZ.
The only site that could keep Lohan locked up in New York is connected to the prison system and one requires a felony for enrollment. Lohan doesn't have one. (There's a bright side, huh?) Because of this development, prosecutors are re-evaluating the deal, TMZ reports. And jail time is back on the table.
Lindsay, you might want to hit a few more clubs while you can!
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Bynes isn't content to lie low in LiLo's shadow
With tabloid rival Lindsay Lohan making headlines for her partying and rehab sentence, it's only natural Amanda Bynes would seek to put a little of the spotlight back on herself.
Her answer? A makeover (which includes wigs, cheek piercings and heavy makeup), strange behavior while clubbing solo in the early-morning hours around Manhattan and some lascivious tweets, including one inviting rapper Drake to "murder" an unmentionable part of her anatomy.
Seems her family has been reading those tweets, too. According to E! News, the self-proclaimed retired actress's recent antics coupled with her history of vehicular mishaps has family on the West Cost worried about her well-being. Sources tell E! her family wants Bynes to return to Los Angeles to keep a closer eye on her, but she refuses.
In the meantime, sources say her family is hoping for the best but is ready to step in "if needed." Many might suggest such intervention was needed some time ago.
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Angelina Jolie meets with women and girls in Congo
Angelina Jolie is meeting with women and girls in eastern Congo, where sexual violence is rampant.
Jolie, a special envoy for the U.N. refugee agency, traveled to the Nzulo camp near Goma on Monday along with British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
The International Rescue Committee says it's provided care to more than 2,500 women and girls who have been raped or abused over the last year alone. The IRC is handing out kits with flashlights and whistles, as well as cleaning products so that women can avoid bathing at creeks where the risk of assault is higher.
Sexual violence is frequently used as a weapon of war by rebel groups that operate in eastern Congo, as well as by Congolese soldiers.
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Robin Roberts, model Vodianova getting DVF Awards
Diane von Furstenberg, herself an inspiration to some, is honoring the women she looks up to, including newscaster Robin Roberts.
Recipients of this year's DVF Awards were announced Monday. They include Roberts, who gets the lifetime leadership award for the "extraordinary grace and courage" she has shown in her fight against breast cancer and a blood disorder, according to a statement from von Furstenberg's Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation.
Model Natalia Vodianova is being recognized for her charity work to help children in her native Russia.
The public participated in online voting for the People's Voice Award nominees, celebrating women who use "vision, resources and commitment" to further positive change. Each DVF award winner receives $50,000 for her cause.
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James Cromwell pleads no contest in Wisconsin
Actor James Cromwell has pleaded no contest to disrupting a University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents meeting last month while protesting cat experiments at the school.
The 73-year-old Cromwell and another activist, 27-year-old Jeremy Beckham, were charged with disorderly conduct following the meeting on the UW-Madison campus Feb. 7. Both men held large signs showing a cat with metal implanted in its head at a campus lab while shouting about the treatment of cats.
Cromwell's attorney, Marcus Jens Berghahn, entered no contest pleas on both men's behalf Monday. A court commissioner ordered each to pay $263 in forfeitures and costs.
Cromwell was nominated for an Academy Award for the 1995 film "Babe." His film credits also include "L.A. Confidential" and "The Green Mile."
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Tuesday's birthdays: Actor Leonard Nimoy is 82. Actor Alan Arkin is 79. Actor James Caan is 73. Singer Diana Ross is 69. Actor Johnny Crawford ("The Rifleman") is 67. Singer Steven Tyler of Aerosmith is 65. Singer-actress Vicki Lawrence is 64. Actor Ernest Thomas ("Everybody Hates Chris," "What's Happening") is 64. Actor Martin Short is 63. Country singer Ronnie McDowell is 63. Drummer Monte Yoho of The Outlaws is 61. Country singer Dean Dillon is 58. Country singer Charly McClain is 57. Talk-show host Leeza Gibbons is 56. Actress Jennifer Grey is 53. Actor Michael Imperioli is 47. Guitarist James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins) is 45. Country singer Kenny Chesney is 45. Actor T.R. Knight ("Grey's Anatomy") is 40. Rapper Juvenile is 38. Actress Amy Smart is 37. Actress Keira Knightley is 28. Rapper J-Kwon is 27.
— The Oregonian and The Associated PressAmong social scientists interested in the development of children’s ability to infer mental states, an enduring controversy concerns false-belief understanding. When tested with traditional tasks, which require answering questions about the likely actions of agents with false beliefs, children do not succeed until age 4 y or later. When given nontraditional tasks without such questions, however, children succeed much earlier. Are traditional tasks more difficult because they tap an advanced form of false-belief understanding or because they impose greater processing demands? Our experiments support the latter possibility: 2.5-y-old toddlers succeeded at a traditional task when response-generation and inhibitory-control demands were both reduced. Traditional tasks thus assess the same form of false-belief understanding as nontraditional tasks but impose additional processing demands.
Abstract
When tested with traditional false-belief tasks, which require answering a standard question about the likely behavior of an agent with a false belief, children perform below chance until age 4 y or later. When tested without such questions, however, children give evidence of false-belief understanding much earlier. Are traditional tasks difficult because they tap a more advanced form of false-belief understanding (fundamental-change view) or because they impose greater processing demands (processing-demands view)? Evidence that young children succeed at traditional false-belief tasks when processing demands are reduced would support the latter view. In prior research, reductions in inhibitory-control demands led to improvements in young children’s performance, but often only to chance (instead of below-chance) levels. Here we examined whether further reductions in processing demands might lead to success. We speculated that: (i) young children could respond randomly in a traditional low-inhibition task because their limited information-processing resources are overwhelmed by the total concurrent processing demands in the task; and (ii) these demands include those from the response-generation process activated by the standard question. This analysis suggested that 2.5-y-old toddlers might succeed at a traditional low-inhibition task if response-generation demands were also reduced via practice trials. As predicted, toddlers performed above chance following two response-generation practice trials; toddlers failed when these trials either were rendered less effective or were used in a high-inhibition task. These results support the processing-demands view: Even toddlers succeed at a traditional false-belief task when overall processing demands are reduced.Mike Johnson was in junior high when his teacher, Mrs. Elliot, asked him to meet her by the flagpole. It was there that Johnson -- now a freshman Louisiana state representative pushing controversial religious freedom legislation -- had his seventh-grade epiphany.
Johnson's father was in the hospital, and doctors told the family he wasn't supposed to make it. Patrick Johnson was a Shreveport firefighter. He and his co-worker had been called a few months earlier, on Sept. 17, 1984, to cap a leak at a cold storage facility.
Patrick Johnson had not known that for more than a week, the leak had been slowly releasing flammable anhydrous ammonia. When the forklift Patrick Johnson's co-worker used to lift him toward the leaky pipe brushed a wall, causing a spark, there was an explosion.
His co-worker, Percy Johnson, (no relation), was killed in the fire. "He had three young sons," said Mike Johnson, 43, during a recent interview from a sidewall of the Louisiana House floor.
It was a big story in Shreveport. Eighty percent of Patrick Johnson's body was covered with third-degree burns. Doctors gave him a 10 percent chance to live.
"It burned everything but his face," Johnson said. But his father recovered.
"I saw an actual miracle of my father surviving when they said that he shouldn't," Johnson said. "It made me a person of very deep faith."
That faith, grounded by what he considered an early miracle, has since guided his work in law and politics, Johnson said. "It's my true north."
But back then, the family was uncertain if Johnson's father would survive. His mother, Jeanne, stayed by her husband's bedside. Their rural property on the outskirts of Shreveport, in Greenwood, needed to be maintained. At age 12, Mike was the oldest of four children. He knew his burden had suddenly grown heavier.
"It altered the course of our lives pretty dramatically," Johnson said.
At the flagpole, Mrs. Elliot told Mike Johnson she was appointed by the rest of the faculty to talk to him. They were concerned how he was handling the possibly that his father would either die or be maimed for life. Her message left him standing there, in a cutoff jean jacket, stunned.
"Can I speak to you frankly?" Johnson remembered her saying. "I believe that God -- we believe that God -- has greatly gifted you with a lot of leadership ability. We're afraid you are squandering those gifts that God has given you."
Since the fire, Mike had been acting out at school, he said. He got himself elected as parliamentarian on the student council, but had lately been disrespectful to teachers and disruptive in class. Other kids followed his example.
"She said, 'You're a leader, and you need to act like a leader,'" Johnson recalled.
After Mrs. Elliot left him standing on the concrete pedestal beneath the American flag, closing with "Have a nice lunch," Johnson said he walked back through the doors of his school a different kid.
"I was shaken out of malaise," he said. "It changed my perspective about responsibility and leadership."
It is Johnson's sense of duty and faith-driven conviction -- combined with an affable personality and sharp legal mind -- that scare some of his opponents the most.
His allies on the religious right have described him in superhero terms. But to those who believe they stand to be hurt by his policies, he's a formidable threat.
It comes at a cost
At some point between his father's fire and college at LSU, Johnson's aspiration to be a firefighter faded in favor of constitutional law and conservative politics.
A Republican from Bossier City, Johnson claims his religious freedom proposal (HB 707) -- officially titled the Marriage and Conscience Act -- carves out protection against state action for people who are religiously opposed to same-sex marriage. "It's merely about trying to... ensure that as our cultural norms change and ideas about marriage change, that we don't make religious liberty a casualty of those changes," Johnson said.
But LGBT advocates and some other elected officials insist the proposed law sanctions -- and even promotes -- discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. "Discrimination in the name of religion is bad," Tucker Barry, the managing director for Equality Louisiana, has said.
Johnson quoted founding fathers from the House floor hallway, explaining why he's seeking legislation to protect what he believes to be the country's primary foundational principle.
The "wall of separation between church and state" which Thomas Jefferson wrote about in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, has been misinterpreted in modern times, Johnson said, to suggest religion has no place in public life. Jefferson and the other founders did not want to establish a national Church. But, quoting John Adams, Johnson clarified: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Both small businesses and large companies in Louisiana have said it portrays the state as unwelcoming and goes against their values. House Speaker Pro Tem Walt Leger, D-New Orleans, said the legislation lacks substance and distracts from the Legislature's task of solving a massive budget crisis. "We have real challenges like funding higher education and health care... I see the bill as purely political," he said last month, outside the chamber.
In an April 13 op-ed in NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, Leger compared the proposal to Jim Crow laws: "Would we have stores place 'Heterosexuals Only' signs in their windows where 'Whites Only' signs once hung?"
Baton Rouge councilman John Delgado, who is often a vocal supporter of LGBT rights, unloaded on Johnson in a news article lastmonth. Johnson shook his head dismissively and smiled when discussing what the councilman called him, but he also repeated from memory the weeks-old quote.
"I'm not a 'despicable bigot of the highest order,'" Johnson said, bobbing his head side-to-side with each word. "I know that I brought this bill for the right reason."
But the councilman, who is considering a run for Baton Rouge mayor, doubled down this week on his criticism, calling Johnson a "bully." Delgado said he doesn't know Johnson personally but is familiar with him since they attended undergrad at LSU around the same time.
"It bothers me fundamentally whenever I see someone being discriminated against or treated differently based on the way that they were born -- that attacks me, that attacks my humanity," he said. "Yeah, I'll react and say things that are maybe a little controversial when I see these type of actions, but I became a lawyer to defend people from actions like that."
The father of four children, Johnson said it's "never fun" when people say things about him that "are not fair and are not charitable." His wife, Kelly, he said, feels equally called to support his work, and they understand criticism is part of the job.
"Defense of liberty is never easy," Johnson said. "It always comes at a cost."
The country, aided by a series of bad court rulings, Johnson said, is headed in the wrong direction. One of the reasons he works to defend conservative religious policies in court and at the Louisiana State Capitol is for the future of his children. He wants his two daughters and two sons, ages 4 to 13, to have the same freedom to live a faith-driven life that he has enjoyed. "I believe it is legitimately in jeopardy," he said.
Delgado, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and others, however, have argued that the First Amendment and the state's Preservation of Religious Freedom Act, passed in 2010, already protects religious freedom.
"Somehow Mike Johnson thinks he's smarter than the founding fathers and he's able to come up with this law that will guarantee (religious freedom) better than the First Amendment," Delgado said.
Johnson noted, though, that he hasn't shied from his critics.
He recently popped into an organized press event in Shreveport, where religious leaders gathered to voice opposition to the bill. They were surprised to see him, Johnson laughed. But he found the debate enlightening.
He asked them if a gay T-shirt shop owner should be compelled by the government to print and sell shirts to funeral-protesting Westboro Baptist Church members that read, "God detests gays."
"Well ye-ah, you should," Johnson said they answered, imitating a tone of uncertainty. "They realize to be intellectually consistent, they have to answer that way."
His posture grew rigid. "To me, that's a shocking admission." The founding fathers believed you should "bring your virtue and religious ideas to the public sphere, they just didn't want an established religion."
He said he was surprised by all the attention his bill has received. "To me the legislation was and is a very simple bill... It makes good common sense."
The bill has been informally termed the "religious freedom" bill because it was designed to mirror a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Word of the legislation, however, piggybacked on a national news cycle focusing on controversial proposals in Indiana and Arkansas that were also referred to as "religious freedom" measures. Moreover, Jindal's public backing of the bill further stirred controversy, grabbing it headlines.
Johnson looked amused when talking about how "religious freedom" became a lighting rod issue just as he joined the Legislature. His legal background is in constitutional law and religious liberty, so he thinks about those issues "all the time."
"The phrase is on everybody's lips right now," he said. "But I've been doing that work for almost two decades."
Superhero status
For newcomer to the Legislature, the Johnson is better aquatinted with politics than most rookie lawmakers. He's been behind the curtain, either helping to craft or defend legislation backed by the religious right, for years in Louisiana and other states.
"This man is a nationally recognized figure in anti-LGBT politics," Bruce Parker, coalition manager of an LGBT advocacy group, Equality Louisiana, has said.
Johnson has appeared on FOX News and other cable TV programs defending abortion restrictions, public prayer and same-sex marriage bans. Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" even poked fun at a Fox News segment on which Johnson appeared with Sean Hannity -- a sure sign of national right-wing notoriety.
He automatically won his seat in January when no one qualified to oppose him in a special election to replace former state Rep. Jeff Thompson, who vacated the spot to run for district judge.
But Johnson's rise as the darling of Louisiana social conservative power circle isn't a recent development. It started about 15 years ago.
Johnson married Kelly, a schoolteacher also from the Shreveport area, on May 1, 1999. They wed almost exactly a year after he met her at a high school friend's wedding and two weeks before he graduated from law school at LSU.
Before that, he began volunteering with the Louisiana Family Forum while still in law school. But he claims other than that, he was "the least connected person coming out of law school." His father was a fireman in Shreveport, and his mother was a homemaker. Kelly's father sold tractor supply parts in Minden, and her mother coached physical education at the high school.
Shortly after they wed, however, Mike and Kelly soon found themselves sitting in a TV studio, opposite Diane Sawyer, talking about religion, marriage and politics. They became the poster couple for a buzzword at the time: covenant marriage.
Covenant marriage sprung from a conservative "marriage movement" that started in Louisiana and spread to just a few states but was debated in state legislatures across the country.
"We jokingly called them the covenant couple," said Louisiana Family Forum Executive Director Gene Mills, of the Johnsons.
A Christian conservative policy group, the family forum, helps guide Gov. Bobby Jindal's social policies. The group has acted as a sort of liaison between the Louisiana Governor's Mansion, the House and Senate chambers and state and federal courthouses regarding socially conservative legislation the organization promotes and helps get passed. And over the years, Johnson has been the one Mills has called on to draft and defend those laws.
Covenant marriage was first introduced into the political arena by then state representative Tony Perkins, who is now president of the Washington. D.C.-based Family Research Council. Perkins sponsored legislation making divorces more difficult to obtain for couples that voluntarily agree to a contract, or covenant. Jindal -- then a health administrator -- and his wife, Supriya, also participated in a covenant marriage ceremony with the Johnsons.
Johnson said he met Perkins through former state representative Woody Jenkins, who now leads the conservative Chamber of Commerce of East Baton Rouge Parish and edits the right-leaning Central City News. Through his volunteer work with the family forum while still in law school, Johnson helped Perkins craft the covenant marriage legislation.
Mills laughed when he recalled how the Johnson's photo was used on all the literature and material for the movement. In addition to the Diane Sawyer interview, "Good Morning America" flew the couple to New York. "CBS This Morning" had them on. Time Magazine published an article. They were carted around big cities in limousines.
"It was a fun time for us," Johnson said. "We were young."
Neither Mills nor Johnson could remember at first exactly why the Johnsons were handpicked to give interviews to promote covenant marriage. Johnson then either remembered correctly, or realized it for the first time: "It's 'cause my wife's pretty -- that's why they chose us."
But Mills said there's something about Mike, too, that stands out.
"I think he's believable. I think he's likable."
It's impressive watching Johnson work a courtroom, Mills said. He exudes the air of a "powerful attorney" combined with an earnest mediator who has "always got time for somebody."
A decade ago, around the time Jindal was running the Department of Health and Hospitals, Johnson, who is the same age at the governor, became the first in his law school class to argue a case in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court. The state attorney general, Richard Ieyoub at the time, hired him to defend the same-sex marriage ban after it passed in 2004.
Johnson was back in the courtroom last year to defend the same marriage law. His successful defense resulted in Judge Martin Feldman's delivery of the "first win for traditional marriage," Mills beamed. A series of court judgments across the country had struck down similar bans. "That stopped that trend."
Attorney General Buddy Caldwell's office hired Johnson last year to defend a controversial abortion law out of the 2014 session that affectively limits access to abortion by enacting requirements that make it difficult for clinics and doctors to comply.
Johnson practices privately with Kitchens Law Firm but in recent years did work for the Alliance Defending Freedom -- previously called the Alliance Defense Fund -- which represented a photographer in New Mexico court after she declined to work for a same-sex couple two years ago.
More recently, he's helping represent a group trying to build a Noah's Ark theme park in Kentucky in a federal discrimination lawsuit against the state for rejecting its application for tax incentives. The suit is possibly related to legislation (HB 771) he's pitched in the Louisiana Legislation this year.
Johnson has been courted by national agencies who wanted him to move to Washington, D.C., and other big cities, Mills said. But Johnson proclaims his and Kelly's ties to Louisiana have kept them here. "This is home," he said.
Jindal, in a statement to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, called Johnson a leader and a scholar.
"Rep. Mike Johnson has a bright future ahead of him in the Louisiana Legislature, and his thoughtfulness and kind demeanor will help him succeed and drive big changes," the governor said. "Indeed, Louisiana will be better off because of his efforts."
Parker is a political adversary of Johnson's who is working with Equality Louisiana and other LGBT supporters to kill Johnson's legislation.
He had this to say of Johnson: "I think he's going to be a mover and a shaker."
Parker said he talks with Johnson regularly and described him as "polite,""very nice," and "brilliant." His conversations with Johnson "have been the most collegial and friendly interactions I've ever had with a legislator that I disagree with," said Parker, while speaking from the steps of the State Capitol after attending a Planned Parenthood rally there. Parker has been lobbying legislators on LGBT and other progressive issues for a half decade, and he counts Johnson among three to whom he is closest.
John Bel Edwards, D-Amite, described Johnson as "very nice, very smart" and personable. Edwards, who Louisiana Democrats have endorsed as its gubernatorial candidate, was also at law school around the same time as Johnson.
"Mike is a good person. I think (he's) conscientious about doing what he believes is best for the state," Edwards said. "I just don't believe he's got the wording on this bill right. It doesn't conform to his stated intent."
Delgado called the measure "transparent." With religious freedoms protected by existing laws, he feels certain the wording of the bill aims to block gay couples from being treated equally in advance of a Supreme Court ruling that could legalize same-sex marriage.
Parker, while opposing the bill, said Johnson is sincere.
"I think he's coming from a genuine place and not sort of a political place," he said. "I'm also a Christian -- where we diverge is, I think that he's addressing a problem that doesn't exist. I think it's an overreach."
Piling on top of his previous praise, Mills compared Johnson to Clark Kent. As Johnson talks from the House floor, he lifts a knuckle over his eyeglasses toward his well-kept straight, brown hair, to push up a cowlick that falls over his forehead.
"Some swear he has an "S" on his chest," Mills said, laughing.
Cunning or kindness?
Confronted with praise of his legal brain and his status among religious conservatives, Johnson grows dismissive and humble, then provides a reminder of that trope about a super hero's tragic past.
"I'm a fireman's kid. I don't have an academic pedigree," he said.
But while trying to explain his passion and work ethic, he jumps quickly back to that sense of duty and responsibility he encountered at the flagpole.
"A lot of people in my generation just didn't seem to care," he said. "It concerns me -- it still does -- that so few people seem to have a real awareness of important matters of public policy."
"A informed electorate," he quoted Jefferson, again, "is a prerequisite to democracy."
It's Johnson's mastery of his subject that Parker said keeps him up nights.
"The thing that I always worry about is, (Johnson) knows what he's doing. He can move around language and he can change concepts and still accomplish the goal he was working toward, and maybe in ways that the rest of us wouldn't catch," he said.
After leading a LGBT community meeting in April about the bill, Barry noted Johnson's rhetoric had shifted since he first introduced the bill. Johnson originally said the legislation would also protect religious freedoms of people whose conscience led them to believe in same-sex marriage. Gay people should like it, he told them.
But after changes to the bill -- prompted by House leadership -- were made, the legislation clarified that it applied explicitly to those who oppose same-sex marriage.
The changes proved his earlier comments to be disingenuous, Barry said. "(Johnson) has changed his story so many times." The language is smarter, "but the intent is still there."
Supporters will say it's written narrowly, Barry said, but "unfortunately, we won't know how broad it is until people start using it as a defense (to discriminate)."
For example, Parker said the original bill lacked the descriptor "sincerely held" when referring to religious beliefs that merit legal protection. "It's a subtle difference," he said. "But it's a substantive one." Legal scholars explained that without the descriptor, it opened the law up to be applied to a much wider swathe of scenarios.
"I'm not saying I think he's trying to trick people. But I am saying that he's good at what he does."
Johnson continues to insist he does not want to authorize discrimination or hurt people -- and that his bill won't do that. "I love them," he said of LGBT people and his other critics, adding, "even the councilman." He heeds the biblical view that same-sex marriage is wrong. But said he clings most of all to the New Testament's instruction to "love your neighbor as yourself."
"I say read the bill," Johnson said. "There's nothing in this bill that has any animosity (or) condones discrimination."
Parker shrugged his shoulders when he said he "finds it odd" that he and some other opponents to the bill like Johnson.
"I think he's very bright -- very intelligent," Parker said, rising from his seat on the shallow white stairs. "It's terrifying."In September 2015, then-Staff Sgt. Brian Claughsey was deployed with the 21st Special Tactics Squadron in Afghanistan when his team got a call: The city of Kunduz was under attack by the Taliban.
Claughsey, a combat controller, linked up with Army Special Forces soldiers with the goal of liberating the city and recapturing its airfield.
In an ongoing firefight over the next four days, he and the other members of the team fought their way through back-to-back ambushes. Claughsey engaged the enemy while calling in close-air support and helped keep more than 100 people safe.
For his actions, Claughsey, now a technical sergeant, received the Silver Star during a ceremony at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Friday.
Liberating Kunduz
As Claughsey and his team were driving to the Kunduz airfield Sept. 29, 2015, they saw civilians fleeing the city.
"[That] is usually a pretty telltale sign that the Taliban has taken over," Claughsey told reporters during a phone interview Friday before the ceremony.
After a night of fighting, the U.S. service members re-secured the airfield, but when they returned to the forward operating base, they were told the entire city had fallen to the Taliban.
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"We were going to go back in that night and go all the way into the city and liberate Kunduz so we could give [the residents] their city back," he said.
Claughsey rode in the fourth truck of a 50-vehicle convoy, consisting of pickup trucks from the Afghan National Army and vehicles from the Special Forces team.
"As we started going into the city, we got past the airfield and as soon as we [did], we started taking fire from a building," he said.
Claughsey called in the AC-130U flying overhead and directed fire toward the Taliban position, according to his Silver Star narrative.
"We got back into the convoy, and from there on out, [we took fire] about every 100 to 200 meters," he said. "The C-130 did a phenomenal job of putting rounds down and keeping us safe and allowing us to continue on."
After a third ambush from a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device that was detonated, the convoy had to stop at a four-way intersection where six insurgents opened fire with machine guns.
As Claughsey's truck attempted to suppress the enemy, two Special Forces soldiers drove an all-terrain vehicle between the truck and the enemy, engaging them with a machine gun.
"Those two guys were really the reason my vehicle survived any of that ambush," he said, adding that he also directed C-130 fire on the insurgents.
With them out of the way, the team cleared one of the buildings off the road — from which they operated for the next four days.
"Once we got into that compound, it was fairly sustained fighting for four days," he said. "There was no downtime … you typically see lulls in the fight, like at night. That certainly didn't happen."
An Afghan National Army helicopter flies near an Afghan military base during fighting between Taliban militants and Afghan security forces in Kunduz on October 1, 2015. Afghan forces pushed into the centre of Kunduz on October 1, triggering pitched gunfights as they sought to flush out Taliban insurgents who held the northern city for three days in a stinging blow to the country's NATO-trained military The stunning fall of the provincial capital, even temporarily, highlighted the stubborn insurgency's potential to expand beyond its rural strongholds in the south of the country Afghan forces, hindered by the slow arrival of reinforcements but backed by NATO special forces and US air support, struggled to regain control of the city after three days of heavy fighting. AFP PHOTO / Wakil Kohsar (Photo credit should read WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images)
An Afghan national army helicopter flies near a military base during fighting between Taliban militants and Afghan security forces in Kunduz on Oct. 1, 2015. Around this time, a team of Air Force combat controllers, Special Forces operators and Afghan forces fought insurgents during a four-day battle to push the Taliban out of Kunduz.
Photo Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images
At one point, one of the special operators called Claughsey on the radio to ask for support at their position.
"They were taking very effective fire from mortars and small arms," he said. "I coordinated with the [overhead] F-16 and did some strafing."
The repeated attack from the low-flying F-16 was effective, but a few hours later, the Taliban made a final push to try to take over the compound.
The troops were attacked from three sides, which pinned Claughsey down on a rooftop while another combat controller called in air support on another side of the compound.
While stuck on the roof, Claughsey |
Ford Museum, the 1984 Jeep Cherokee (XJ) was the first true sport utility vehicle in the modern understanding of the term,[44] although Jeep already used the term literally in their 1974 brochures, for the original SJ Cherokee.[30][31] Developed under the leadership of AMC's François Castaing and marketed to urban families as a substitute for a traditional car (and especially station wagons, which were still fairly popular at the time), the Cherokee had four-wheel drive in a more manageable size (compared to the full-size Wagoneer) as well as a plush interior resembling a station wagon.[44] With the introduction of more luxurious models and a much more powerful 4-liter engine, sales of the Cherokee increased even higher as the price of gasoline fell, and the term "sport utility vehicle" began to be used in the national press for the first time.[44] "The advent and immediate success of AMC/Jeep's compact four-door Cherokee turned the truck industry upside down."[45]
The corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard was ratified in the 1970s to regulate the fuel economy of passenger vehicles. Car manufacturers evaded the regulation by selling SUVs as work vehicles.[46] The popularity of SUV increased among urban drivers in the last 25 years and particularly in the last decade. Consequently, modern SUVs are available with luxury vehicle features, and some crossover models adopt lower ride heights to accommodate on-road driving.
Keith Bradsher explained the rise of the SUV with American Motors' (AMC) lobbying the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a waiver of the United States Clean Air Act. The EPA subsequently designated AMC's compact Cherokee as a "light truck", and the company marketed the vehicle to everyday drivers.[37] AMC's effort to affect rulemaking changing the official definition of their new model then led to the SUV boom when other auto makers marketed their own models in response to the Cherokee taking sales from their regular cars.[47]
Rise to popularity [ edit ]
SUVs became popular in the United States, Canada, India, and Australia in the 1990s and early-2000s. U.S. automakers could enjoy profit margins of $10,000 per SUV, while losing a few hundred dollars on a compact car.[48] For example, the Ford Excursion could net the company $18,000, while they could not break even with the Ford Focus unless the buyer chose options,[49][50] leading Detroit's big three automakers to focus on SUVs over small cars.
The higher cost of labor in the U.S. and Canada compared to the lower wages of workers at non-U.S. companies like Toyota made it unprofitable for American auto makers to build small cars in the U.S.[51] For example, the General Motors factory in Arlington, Texas, where rear-wheel-drive cars were built, such as the Chevrolet Caprice, Buick Roadmaster, and Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, was converted to truck and SUV production, putting an end to full-size family station wagon and overall terminating production of rear-wheel drive full-size cars. Due to the shift in the Big Three's strategy, many long-running cars like the Ford Taurus, Buick Century and Pontiac Grand Prix fell behind their Japanese competitors in features and image (relying more on fleet sales instead of retail and/or heavy incentive discounts); some were discontinued.[52][53][54]
Buyers were drawn to SUVs' large cabins, higher ride height, and perceived safety. Full-size SUVs often offered features such as three-row seating to effectively replace full-size station wagons and minivans. Wagons were seen as old-fashioned. Additionally, full-size SUVs have greater towing capabilities than conventional cars, and can haul trailers, travel trailers (caravans) and boats. Increased ground clearance is useful in climates with heavy snowfall. The very low oil prices of the 1990s helped keep down running costs. The SUV was one of the most popular choices of vehicle for female drivers in the U.S.[55][56]
Social scientists have drawn on popular folklore such as urban legends to illustrate how marketers have been able to capitalize on the feelings of strength and security offered by SUVs.[57] Popular tales include narratives where mothers save the family from armed robbery and other incidents by taking the automobile off-road, for example.
In Australia, SUV sales were helped by the fact that SUVs had much lower import duty than passenger cars did, so that they cost less than similarly equipped imported sedans. However, this gap was gradually narrowed, and in January 2010 the import duty on cars was lowered to match the 5 percent duty on SUVs.[58][59]
Sales of SUVs and other light trucks fell in the mid-2000s because of high oil prices and declining economy. In 2008, General Motors announced plans to close four truck and SUV plants, including the Oshawa Truck Assembly.[51] The company cited decreased sales of large vehicles in the wake of rising fuel prices.[60] The business model of focusing on SUVs and light trucks, at the expense of more fuel-efficient compact and midsized cars, is blamed for declining sales and profits among Detroit's Big Three automakers since the mid–late-2000s. The Big Three were slower to adapt than their Japanese rivals in producing small cars to meet growing demand due to inflexible manufacturing facilities, which made it unprofitable to build small cars.[61] However, starting in 2010, SUV and light truck sales have started an upward trend due to lower gasoline prices and a revival of the North American economy.[62] In 2013, General Motors saw its sales for its large SUVs increased by 74%, making them the largest producer of SUVs in the United States.[63] However, the "small and compact SUVs, when compared with other vehicles in the light truck segment, has made this vehicle segment the third highest selling vehicle segment in the automotive market in 2013."[23] With the redesigned GM and Ford large SUV's being introduced in 2014 (for the 2015 model year), it has seen a slight resurgence among consumers due to better fuel economy and new engines, along with updated and newer features.[64] This resurgence in the popularity of this variation on SUV's is also seen with brands such as Audi, Jeep and Ford creating the compact SUVs in 2018.[65] Positive reception for compact SUV's are further confirmed when noting that the Volvo XC40, another luxury compact SUV, won European Car of the Year 2018.[66]
Market dominance [ edit ]
Starting in 2015, sales of SUVs started dominating the industry. In 2016 global market researcher Euromonitor International released news that worldwide SUV sales surged 22 percent since 2015. "SUVs overtook lower medium cars to become the largest automotive segment in 2015, accounting for 22.9 percent of light vehicle sales globally." The world's fastest growing SUV markets in 2014-2015 were: China: + 47.9 percent; Italy (+ 48.6%), Spain (+ 42%), Portugal (+ 54.8 %) and Thailand (+ 56.4%).[8] According to automotive market researcher Focus2Move, the SUV segment grew to 27 million units in 2016, or 26% of global passenger car sales, updated to 21.6 million sales for Q1–Q3 of 2017, taking 36.8% of total market. Moreover: the 12% growth of the SUV sector was the only growing segment at global level, and thus solely responsible for overall 2.4% growth of the world's passenger car market.[67][1]
In the US, at the end of 2016, sales of SUVs and light duty trucks had surpassed traditional car sales for the year by over 3 million units.[68] Manufacturers like Hyundai have started reducing their production of traditional cars in favor of SUVs citing reduction in sales and difficulty competing with other manufacturers.[69]
Euromonitor International in 2016 further concluded:[8]
"The popularity of SUVs in the early 2000s has precipitated a rush of companies trying to capitalise, with a growing number of brands and new concept offerings like crossovers to appeal to a wider audience." "However, a combination of key social changes such as urbanisation, smaller households and an ageing population, in conjunction with increasing emissions regulations, have also boosted the fortunes of the small car segment."
"Euromonitor predicts that small cars will see a Global Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 2.9 percent between 2015 and 2031 but this is firmly secondary to the projected CAGR of 4.8 percent for SUVs." "[Global] sales of SUVs grew from 5 million units in 2000 to 20 million in 2015 and are forecast to hit 42 million units by 2031."
"(...) replacement demand [for cars] in developed markets will start to slow and global growth will be increasingly reliant on SUVs and emerging markets.
Designs [ edit ]
Although designs vary, SUVs have historically been passenger vehicles with a separate body on a chassis taken from some kind of light truck, commercial vehicle, pick-up or off-road vehicle. SUVs are typically of a two-box design, with the engine compartment in front, and a combined reconfigurable passenger and cargo compartment behind it, instead of having a separate trunk.[nb 7] Early SUVs were frequently two-door open-body models with removable tops, like classic Jeeps, or large station wagon-like vehicles, like carryalls / suburbans or travelalls.
SUVs typically have high ground clearance, big wheels, a tall (and historically boxy) body, and upright (high H-point) seating. This can make them more likely to roll over due to their high center of gravity. Bodies of SUVs have recently become more aerodynamic, but the sheer size and weight keeps their fuel economy poor. Most mid-size and full-size SUVs have three rows of seats with a cargo area directly behind the last row of seats. Cargo barriers are often fitted to the cargo area to protect the vehicles occupants from injury from unsecured cargo in the event of sudden deceleration or collision.
Over time, consumer demand pushed the SUV market mostly towards family-friendly four/five-door models.[9][10] For example, even the only 159 in (4.0 m) long 1991 Chevrolet Tracker mini SUV was a four-door model. 1999 saw the final production of the two-door full-size truck-based Chevrolet Tahoe SUV; and in late 2013, Toyota dropped its badly selling 2-door Land-Cruiser variants.[72] Some of the last old-school two-door SUVs soldiered on for some time as carry-over models, but their sales were not viable enough to warrant a redesign at the end of their life cycle. The SWB 2-door Mercedes-Benz G-Class was ended after 2011, and the Land Rover Defender was altogether axed in 2016.
Only a few short-bodied 2-door SUVs remain today, such as the diminutive but capable Suzuki Jimny. The body-on-frame Jeep Wrangler has continued as a compact two-door body style, but from 2007 it was complemented with a 20-inch longer four-door variant: the Wrangler Unlimited.[nb 8][73] A few relatively recent attempts for new two-door SUV models, the 1997-2001 Isuzu VehiCROSS and the 2011-2014 Nissan Murano convertible, were both short-lived and enjoyed only low production numbers.[74][75] A rare exception to the trend is the relatively successful compact to mid-size Range Rover Evoque introduced in 2011. The latter two models are examples of another trend — they are of unitary body construction.
Unitary body structures and crossovers [ edit ]
Although originally, SUVs were of separate body and chassis construction, virtually without exception, whether they evolved from short, highly off-road focused designs such as original Jeeps / Land Rovers and the like, or from larger heavy-duty people haulers (carryalls, suburbans, travelalls etc.), gradually more and more automakers introduced off-road vehicles and SUVs with an integrated, unitary body or monocoque vehicle frame design.
The 1977 Russian Lada Niva was the world's first purpose-designed unibody 4WD off-road car
Since so much of the SUV's history can be tied to the original US jeep, it is relevant to begin with mentioning the US military's replacement of the Willys Jeeps by the Ford M151 ¼-ton 4×4 trucks starting in 1959. The Ford M151 jeep had an integrated body and frame construction, was produced from 1959, and remained in use through the 1990s.
In 1977, production of the Russian Lada Niva began — the world's first mass-produced civilian off-road vehicle with a unibody architecture. The Niva combines a closed, boxy, hatchback-like body with full off-road capability, not only featuring high ground-clearance, but full-time four-wheel drive, a transfer case with high and low gearing, and lockable center differential. A longer wheelbase five-door model was added in the early 1990s and the car remains in production for four decades now.
The compact 1983 Cherokee was Jeep's first unibody SUV. Nevertheless, it was a seriously off-road capable design, using front and rear solid axles, transfer-cases with high and low range, and either part-time or full-time 4-wheel drive. Following this, Jeep replaced the venerable SJ Wagoneer with its Grand Cherokee line in 1992, featuring a unibody structure from the start.[77] Derived from the XJ Cherokee, it too came with front and rear live axles, high and low range, and either part-time or full-time 4-wheel drive systems.
Land Rover have fully switched to unibody architecture SUVs, starting with their newer, more compact models — the 1997 Freelander, its 2014 successor Discovery Sport, and the 2011 Range Rover Evoque, which were all unibodies from the start — but also on the large models, starting with the 3rd generation Range Rover in 2002, as well as the 2013 Range Rover Sport and the 2017 Discovery.[nb 9] The last body-on-frame hold-out, the archetypal Land Rover Defender, was retired after 2016.
Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi redesigned its 2000 Montero/Shogun/Pajero with a unibody, discarding the previous box-ladder frames, achieving a lower center of gravity, 300% more torsional rigidity, and longer suspension stroke. Suzuki's 3rd gen Vitara equally switched to a unibody in 2005, while still offering off-road capable selectable four-wheel drive with a lockable central differential along with low ratio gears.[78]
SUV market segment classifications [ edit ]
Mini SUV [ edit ]
A mini SUV (also called subcompact SUV or subcompact crossover) is a class of small sport utility vehicles. The term usually applies to crossovers based on a supermini (B-segment cars in Europe) platform.
Compact SUV [ edit ]
A compact SUV is a class of smaller SUVs that are commonly built with less cargo and passenger space, and often with smaller engines resulting in better fuel economy, the term is often interchangeable with crossover SUV.
Mid-size SUV [ edit ]
A mid-size SUV is a class of medium-size SUVs whose size typically falls between that of a full-size and a compact SUV. This term is not commonly used outside North America, where fullsize and midsize SUVs are considered similar.
Full-size SUV [ edit ]
Full-size SUVs have greater cargo and passenger space than midsize SUVs. They are usually given higher safety ratings than their smaller counterparts.
Extended-length SUV [ edit ]
An extended length SUV, also sometimes called a long-wheel based SUV, are vehicles that are similar to a full-size SUV, except that these vehicles have a larger cargo area of around 130 in (3.30 m) and passenger space that can seat up to 8 or 9 people (with the available third row seating that when folded or removed adds more cargo space). Although these extended length SUVs are mostly sold in North America because of their size and the roads are made and designed differently, they can also be found in other countries, exported to such places like the Philippines and the Middle East. The vehicles are 221 in (5.61 m) to 223 in (5.66 m) in length and can be distinguished by the rear wheel area not touching the rear doors. At the present time, the only automakers that are actively building these extended length SUVs are General Motors and Ford, both from their assembly plants in the United States (GM in Texas, Ford in Kentucky).
Use in remote areas [ edit ]
SUVs are sometimes driven off-road on farms and in remote areas of such places as the Australian Outback, Africa, the Middle East, Alaska, Canada, Iceland, South America, Russia and parts of Asia which have limited paved roads and require a vehicle to have all-terrain handling, increased range, and storage capacity. The scarcity of spare parts and the need to carry out repairs quickly resulted in the popularity of vehicles with the bare minimum of electric and hydraulic systems, such as the basic versions of the Land Rover, Jeep Wrangler, Nissan Patrol and Toyota Land Cruiser. SUVs for urban driving have traditionally been developed from their more rugged all-terrain counterparts. For example, the Hummer H1 was developed from the HMMWV, originally developed for the military of the United States.[79]
As many SUV owners never used the off-road capabilities of their vehicle, newer SUVs (including crossovers) now have lower ground clearance and suspension designed primarily for paved roads.[80]
Some buyers choose SUVs because they have more interior space than sedans of similar sizes. In areas with gravel roads in summer and snow and ice in winter, four-wheel drives offer a safety advantage due to their traction advantages under these conditions.[citation needed]
The sport utility vehicles have also gained popularity in some areas of Mexico, especially in desert areas or in cities where drivers frequently encounter potholes, detours, high water and rough roads. Increasing use is also attributed to the high number of dirt roads outside major population centers, resulting in washboard and mud in the rainy seasons.[81]
Use in recreation and motorsport [ edit ]
Bowler Wildcat is a high performance offroad race SUV
Some highly modified SUVs, together with their more rugged off-road counterparts, are also used to explore places otherwise unreachable by other vehicles. In Australia, China, Europe, South Africa, South America and the United States at least, 4WD clubs have been formed for this purpose. Many 4×4 mud racing events and other activities take place throughout the US organized by clubs and associations.
Modified SUVs also take part in off-road racing competitions, including the Dakar Rally, Baja 1000, FIA Cross-Country Rally World Cup, King of the Hammers and Australasian Safari.
The Trophee Andros ice-racing series is another competition where SUVs participate as well.
Luxury SUV [ edit ]
Numerous luxury vehicles in the form of SUVs and pickup trucks are being produced. Luxury SUV is principally a marketing term to sell fancier vehicles that may have higher performance, comfort, technology, or brand image. The term lacks both measurability and verifiability, and it is applied to a broad range of SUV sizes and types.[citation needed]
The Maserati Levante is an example of Luxury SUV
Nevertheless, the marketing category was created in 1966 with Kaiser Jeep's luxurious Super Wagoneer.[82][43] It was the first SUV to offer a V8 engine, automatic transmission, and luxury car trim and equipment in a serious off-road model. It came with bucket seating, air conditioning, sun roof, and even a vinyl roof. Land Rover followed suit in 1970 by introducing the Range Rover. The trend continued with other competitors adding comfort features to their rudimentary and truck-based models.
The production of luxury models increased in the late-1990s with vehicles such as the Lincoln Navigator and Cadillac Escalade. These luxury SUVs generated higher profit margins than non-luxury SUVs did.[83][84] For some auto makers, luxury SUVs were the first SUV models they produced. Some of these models are not traditional SUVs based on light truck as they are classified as crossovers.
The luxury SUV class encompasses both smaller 5-passenger SUVs and larger 7-passenger SUVs, with luxury features both inside of the cabin but also in the outside. Buyers looking for a luxury vehicle that offers more cargo capacity than a sedan may prefer a luxury SUV. This is also a vehicle aimed for those who prefer an SUV with a little more style.[85]
Luxury SUVs typically offer the most expected safety features including side airbags, ABS and traction control, and many of them also come with electronic stability control, crash resistant door pillars, dynamic head restraints and back-up sensing systems.[85]
Other names [ edit ]
GMC Envoy XUV
In Australia and New Zealand, the term SUV is not widely used, except by motoring organizations,[86] the press,[87] and industry bodies.[88] Passenger class vehicles designed for off-road use are known as "four-wheel drives", "4WDs", or "4×4s". Some manufacturers do refer to their products as SUVs, but others invented names such as XUV,[89] (HSV Avalanche XUV or GMC Envoy XUV) or action utility vehicles (AUVs).[90] The term "AWD", or all-wheel drive, is used for any vehicle which drives on all four wheels, but may not be designed for off-road use. "Crossover" is a marketing term for a vehicle that is both four-wheel-drive and primarily a road car.
In the United Kingdom the term "4×4" (four-by-four) is also common, even for vehicles not used in urban areas. "AWD" is not commonly used there. The less capable SUVs also pick up the name "soft-roader" because while they appear designed to go off-road, in many cases they're not actually capable of it.
In Finland the term "katumaasturi" is commonly used to designate SUVs.[91] It roughly translates to street-off-roader, or street-4×4. This marks the difference with what is called "maasturi" which is a vehicle with off-road capability.
In Sweden the most mainstream term for SUV is Stadsjeep (Sw) (city jeep) — it is literally the title of the Swedish article on this topic.
Slang and pejoratives [ edit ]
SUVs such as the Range Rover are sometimes referred to as "Toorak tractors" in Australia, referencing the affluent Melbourne suburb of Toorak
In Australia, a variety of pejorative terms, including "Toorak Tractor" and "Mosman taxi" are used to describe vehicles like Range Rovers used in wealthy urban areas with fine roads, fine dining, and exclusive designer shopping precincts, where off-road ability is not required. The terms allude to affluent suburbs of Toorak, Melbourne, and Mosman, Sydney to name a few.[92][93] These terms were in use at least as early as the late 1980s.[citation needed]
The equivalent term "Chelsea Tractor" became prominent in the United Kingdom around 2004 to describe vehicles such luxury SUVs used in urban areas such as Chelsea, London, where their four-wheel-drive capabilities are not required and the car is believed to be a status symbol rather than a necessity.[94]
In New Zealand, the term used is "Remuera Tractor", after the affluent Auckland suburb. In Christchurch, the term "Merivale Tractor" is used.
In the United States, "mall-rated" is an equivalent.[citation needed]
In Norway the term "Børstraktor" (Stock Exchange Tractor) serves a similar purpose.[95]
In the Netherlands they are sometimes called "P.C. Hooft-tractors" after the exclusive P.C. Hooftstraat Amsterdam shopping street.[96]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ (...) — called also sport-utility vehicle ^ fully spelled out; and defined for students — is almost identical: "an automobile similar to a station wagon but built on a light truck frame", only omitting the "rugged" qualification.[12] Merriam-Webster's definition under "sport-utility vehicle" —— is almost identical: "an automobile similar to a station wagon but built on a light truck frame", only omitting the "rugged" qualification. ^ Collins Cobuild Advanced English Dictionary ^ Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Edition (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) ^ Collins English Dictionary (HarperCollins Publishers) ^ Among genericized brand-names, "Jeep" stands out because it started out as generic nickname before World War II, which was then trademarked as a brand name by Willys-Overland in 1950, only to be genericized back again by the general public, to mean similar vehicles, including those by competing manufacturers. ^ [70][71] A rare exception was the 1995–1998 body-on-frame Suzuki X-90 T-top two-seater. ^ [10] And in mid 2017 three quarters of all new Wranglers listed for sale were four-door models. ^ The 2004 Discovery and Range Rover Sport models still used an integrated bodyframe, semi-monocoque.
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Pickford’s exceptional early season form following his summer move from Sunderland won him a Three Lions call up for forthcoming World Cup qualifying games against Malta and Slovakia.
It was the first time the Wearsider had been named in a full England squad, albeit he was summoned as a replacement for Southampton number one Fraser Forster for clashes with Scotland and Spain last November.
Pickford is yet to be capped by his country’s senior team but would have expected to vie for a starting place this week with regular keeper Joe Hart, Stoke’s Jack Butland and Tom Heaton of Burnley.
His international ambitions are now on hold, however, with the FA confirming Pickford has returned to his Club for treatment.
An FA statement said: “Goalkeeper Jordan Pickford has left the England camp and returned to Everton.
“Having reported to St. George’s Park on Sunday evening, the 23-year-old underwent an assessment on a muscle injury sustained playing for his club.
“After discussions between England and Everton medics, it was decided it was in the player’s best interests to return to Finch Farm for further treatment.
“Gareth Southgate will now prepare for the forthcoming World Cup qualifiers against Malta and Slovakia with the remaining three goalkeepers in his 27-man squad.”
Pickford has represented England at every age group from Under-15 through to Under-21.
He completed his move to Everton in June while at the European Under-21 Championship in Poland, where England reached the semi-final before suffering a penalty shootout defeat by Germany.
Pickford went a Club-record 352 minutes without conceding a goal after making his competitive Toffees debut in last month’s Europa League third qualifying round home victory over MFK Ružomberok.
He has kept four clean sheets in seven games and last week crucially saved a penalty from striker Ahmed Said as Everton sealed progress into the Europa League group stage with a draw at Hajduk Split.
Mason Holgate, meanwhile, has withdrawn from the England Under-21s squad due to a minor ankle problem.
The young Lions launch their European Championship qualifying campaign in Holland on Friday, before taking on Latvia at Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium next Tuesday.
Midfielder James McCarthy is also set to miss Republic of Ireland's World Cup qualifying matches against Georgia and Serbia.
The 26-year-old was picked in manager Martin O'Neill's 39-man squad for the meeting with the Georgians in Tbilisi on Saturday and next Tuesday's Dublin clash with fellow Group D leaders Serbia.
But the knee injury which has prevented McCarthy from featuring for Everton this season has cost the former Wigan man the opportunity to be included in O'Neill's trimmed 25-man party.TIGARD, Ore. Police say a Tigard business owner plowed his truck through an outdoor cornhole tournament at JB O'Brien's Pub on Southwest Durham Road Saturday morning.
"Realistically he could have killed at least the ten people that were over on that side," said Cheyenne Scrivner, the founder of the National Cornhole League. "It was close to last second, they were able to jump out of the way."
Fortunately nobody was hurt, but officers say people had to move out of the way abruptly.
Police say the suspect's business, the Oregon Music Academy, is next to the pub, and that he became disgruntled because the cornhole tournament appeared to be taking up parking spots.
"That's what he told me is that he owns that music building, that's his spot and he wanted to park there," Scrivner added.
After driving over several cones and cornhole boards, police say 41-year-old Matthew Dolphin of Sherwood left his truck and went back into his store.
It's estimated he destroyed more than $2,000 worth of equipment.
Dolphin was booked into the Washington County Jail on reckless driving and criminal mischief charges.
Schrivner is just glad no one was hurt, and that he had spare boards ready to go.
"So we are going to keep playing and the show will go on."Starship Troopers: Invasion (スターシップ・トゥルーパーズ インベイジョン) is a Japanese-American 2012 computer-animated military science fiction film directed by Shinji Aramaki. The film is a sequel to Starship Troopers (1997), ignoring the events of Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004) and Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008). It is the fourth installment of the Starship Troopers film series. The film was released in Japan on July 21, 2012 and in North America on August 28, 2012 as a direct-to-video title.
The film was followed by Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017).
Plot [ edit ]
On an asteroid, the Terran Federation's Fort Casey is crawling with bugs. The starship Alesia begins to deploy its Mobile Infantry troopers, by dropship, to seize and control the hangar and rescue any survivors. Lieutenant Daugherty's 'Alpha' team lands and immediately engages bugs, fighting through to rendezvous with the surviving Fort Casey troopers. After setting explosives charges, the troopers head to the starship John A. Warden for evacuation, only to see it leave dock without them—Minister Carl Jenkins has commandeered the Warden from Captain Carmen Ibanez, sending her to Alesia. Before leaving, Jenkins orders that Major Henry "Hero" Varro, the commander of Fort Casey's K-12 troopers, be escorted to Alesia as a prisoner. Alesia docks with Fort Casey for emergency evacuation of the surviving troopers, and the Fort Casey asteroid is successfully destroyed.
While en route to Earth, Alesia is contacted by General Johnny Rico from High Command at L-6 Base. When he orders Alesia to search for the Warden, which has broken all contact, the Fort Casey troopers agree to do so on condition that Varro leads them during the mission. When they find the Warden, Daugherty's team escorts Ibanez to the bridge while Varro's team secures the Engine Room, both teams finding nothing but dead crewmen and a few dead bugs. Varro finds a deranged Jenkins and is warned—too late—not to power up the Warden as'she' has hacked all the systems. As the engines recharge the Warden, an Arachnid Queen inside takes control of all systems and opens bulkhead doors to release her bugs. As Ibanez and the troopers attempt to return to Alesia, the Queen uses the Warden's main weapons to destroy the other ship, then flies Warden into a wormhole whose outlet is in near-Earth space. The troopers return to the Warden's bridge, where Varro reveals he was arrested when Jenkins had ordered his unit to capture the Queen alive on Fort Casey, but Varro had refused to sacrifice his squad.
General Rico deploys three starships from the L-6 Base in Earth orbit, but they are unable to stop the Warden. The Queen sets the bug-infested Warden on a trajectory to crash land in Paris, but Alpha Team sniper Trig manages to shoot out the wires linking the Queen to the ship, allowing Ibanez to re-direct the Warden to crash land in the Alps. Meanwhile, General Rico leads a squad of troopers in Marauder suits to stop the bugs from escaping the crash site, while high command gives him 30 minutes before they will drop nukes from the L-6 Station to sanitize the site.
Back on the Warden, the five surviving troopers make their way towards the Queen. Ice Blonde protects Ibanez at a nearby airlock while Mech and Ratzass go to the engine room to blow it up. When Varro and Bugspray find Trig's corpse, Bugspray uses Trig's family-made sniper rifle to buy Varro some time to reach the Queen. Jenkins, having recovered from his mental breakdown, provides Varro back-up with bugs under his mind control—revealing an important Terran breakthrough in the war and the reason for capturing a live Queen.
Rico is the only one from his squad to reach the Warden. The extraction shuttle from L-6, and the nuclear strike, are all destroyed by the Queen's control of the Warden's weapons. As Jenkins leads the team to his shuttle from Fort Casey, Rico rushes to distract the queen and rescue Varro. Varro, critically injured, blows a grenade when surrounded by bugs. Rico abandons his broken Marauder suit and uses a combat knife on one of the Queen's eyes, buying Ibanez time to make take-off preparations. Rico barely sprints back into the dropship as it escapes the Warden before the explosives detonate and destroy the Warden.
Mech, Ice and Ratzass pay their respect to their fallen comrades while Ibanez confronts Jenkins over the recent crises. Jenkins sidesteps the issue, telling Rico and Ibanez that his research will someday save the entire galaxy. In the aftermath, one warrior bug is seen navigating a sewer system, having survived the Warden's destruction.
Cast [ edit ]
The voice cast as presented in order of closing credits:
Luci Christian as Carmen Ibanez, captain of the John A. Warden
Justin Doran as Carl Jenkins, Minister of Paranormal Warfare
David Matranga as Johnny Rico, general from High Command at L-6 Base.
David Wald as Hero, Major Henry Varro, commander of K-12 team. He is brave and considered an incredible soldier, killing bugs even after grievous injuries and loss of limbs. He is one of the last soldiers to die, sacrificing himself for Rico.
Andrew Love as Bugspray, Lieutenant Otis Hacks, acting commander of K-12 team. He forms a relationship with Trig after saving her and is overrun by bugs after fulfilling her desire, simultaneously buying Hero time to reach the Queen. He is close friends with Ratzass.
Leraldo Anzaldua as Ratzass, sergeant from K-12 team. He is a rowdy soldier with a raging libido, although his fighting skills are not to be questioned. He is close friends with Bugspray.
Sam Roman as Daugherty, Lieutenant Tony Daugherty, commander of A-1 team. He is respected amongst his subordinates, but is killed when the John A. Warden crashes.
crashes. Emily Neves as Trig, Tia Durer, sniper from A-1 team. She fights for vengeance for a previous battle that left hundreds of civilians dead, swearing that one bug will die for each victim of the battle. She is killed by the Queen's bugs after severing the Queen's connection to the John A. Warden. She forms a relationship with Bugspray, who saves her from death at the beginning of the movie.
. She forms a relationship with Bugspray, who saves her from death at the beginning of the movie. Melissa Davis as Ice Blonde, corporal from A-1 team. She flirts with her teammates but is a soldier at heart. She is revealed to be mother and widow whose husband died on another planet
Kalob Martinez as Holyman, private from K-12 team. He rarely speaks, he mostly points at various tattoos of prayer symbols and pantomimes certain actions. He believes different symbols will protect him and his teammates in different battles, and he is killed saving Ice Blonde. He is close friends with Kharon.
Chris Patton as Kharon, private from K-12 team. He is killed during the John A. Warden's evacuation, caught by a bug on the way to the airlock. He holds the line, and is swiftly overrun. He is close friends with Holyman.
evacuation, caught by a bug on the way to the airlock. He holds the line, and is swiftly overrun. He is close friends with Holyman. Adam Gibbs as Shock Jock, medic from A-1 team. He dies when the Queen fires the John A. Warden's weapons at the Alesia.
weapons at the. Jovan Jackson as Mech, sergeant and explosives specialist from A-1 team.
Corey Hartzog as Chase, scout from K-12 team. He is Hero's right hand, accompanying him to the airlock, but fails to make a jump, falling into a pit of bugs. He then detonates a grenade, killing himself to buy time for Hero.
Josh Grelle as Chow, private first class from A-1 team. He is a solitary martial artist and technical expert, focusing on speed. He fights Ratzass hand-to-hand after being provoked, a match which ended in a tie with Ratzass in a daze from various kicks and headlocks from Chow, and one single heavy blow from Ratzass. He reactivates the engine of the John A. Warden but inadvertently also releases the bugs. He kills many bugs as well, even killing one with his martial arts skills after losing his rifle, but is eventually overrun and stabbed in the shoulder.
but inadvertently also releases the bugs. He kills many bugs as well, even killing one with his martial arts skills after losing his rifle, but is eventually overrun and stabbed in the shoulder. Karl Glusman as Gunfodder, private from K-12 team. He loses an arm at the beginning of the film, which is replaced by a prosthetic by Shock Jock. He is caught after Kharon, just barely before reaching the airlock. A bug snaps his prosthetic off, and |
on its July 1 debt payments, but it found enough money to make all of them.
This time may be different. The governor's chief of staff, Victor Suarez, said earlier this week that the island won't make all of its August 1 payments.
If Puerto Rico doesn't make this payment, it will short change its own people and credit unions, not Wall Street hedge funds. The $58 million is suppose to go to Puerto Rico's Public Finance Corporation -- where roughly 900,000 Puerto Ricans own a small slice of the debt via credit unions.
Puerto Rican officials are strategically choosing to default on this debt because there's a low risk that these creditors will have the legal willpower to sue the government, expert say. The commonwealth will probably make its other debt payments next week owed to creditors who have more legal power and could threaten to sue.
"The PFC debt: it's a small amount, it has very weak legal protection and it's owned by people who are unlikely, necessarily, to sue the government," says Cate Long, founder of Puerto Rico Clearinghouse, a research firm focused on Puerto Rican debt.
In the big picture, next week's payment (technically due by Monday, Aug. 3) is another chapter in Puerto Rico's economic tragedy.
Related: Why Puerto Rico's economy is in a 'death spiral'
Economy in collapse: The island's economy is in crisis mode after years of massive government spending, huge energy costs and mounting pension liabilities.
The population is shrinking by tens of thousands as Puerto Ricans flee to Florida and Texas in search of more stable work. The exodus is reaching levels last seen during the 1950s -- the "West Side Story" era, according to the Pew Research Center.
Puerto Rico's unemployment rate is 12.6%, more than twice the U.S. unemployment rate (5.3%), according to the Labor Department.
To help Puerto Rico elude some of its debt burden, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has implored the U.S. Congress to give Puerto Rico something it badly needs: Chapter 9 bankruptcy rights.
Related: Puerto Rico's terrible economy is causing a population exodus
Chapter 9 for Puerto Rico looks unlikely: Puerto Rico wants the same thing all U.S. states have: Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It's a part of the bankruptcy code that gives states the right to allow towns, municipalities and local institutions in their state to declare bankruptcy. For example, Detroit was allowed to file for bankruptcy because Michigan has Chapter 9 rights.
Since it isn't technically a state, Puerto Rico was never given Chapter 9 bankruptcy rights. The island's government also can't appeal to an outside fund, like the International Monetary Fund, for help because it isn't a country. Puerto Rico's representative in Congress has gathered some support for a bill to give Puerto Rico chapter 9 bankruptcy rights, but it's unlikely to become law, experts say.
Even if Puerto Rico got Chapter 9 rights, much of Puerto Rico's current debt likely wouldn't be eligible for bankruptcy courts, according to a Moody's report. That's because the island itself couldn't declare bankruptcy, only municipalities within Puerto Rico.
Still, Puerto Rico needs a way out. The governor has put together a task force to come up with a work out plan by the end of the summer.
"They need some type of mechanism to restructure their debt," says Mark Heppenstall, portfolio manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. Heppenstall would not comment on whether his firm owns Puerto Rican debt.On the heels of Goldman Sach’s Peak Coal (i.e. Coal production has reached a top) report, we looked at data to see which countries had the biggest decline in Coal production.
Countries Change from 2008 in Coal Production (Million Tonnes) 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Spain -62% 10.2 9.4 8.4 6.6 6.2 4.4 3.9 Venezuela -49% 4.9 3.3 2.7 2.1 1.2 2.6 2.5 South Korea -37% 2.8 2.5 2.1 2.1 2.1 1.8 1.7 United Kingdom -36% 18.1 17.9 18.4 18.6 17.0 12.8 11.5 Romania -34% 35.9 34.0 31.1 35.5 33.9 24.7 23.6 Greece -25% 65.7 64.9 56.5 58.7 63.0 53.9 49.3 Ukraine -24% 79.9 74.4 77.3 85.1 87.3 85.6 60.9 Czech Republic -22% 60.2 56.4 55.2 57.9 55.0 49.0 46.9 Pakistan -21% 4.0 3.5 3.4 3.4 3.2 3.0 3.2 New Zealand -18% 4.8 4.6 5.3 4.9 4.9 4.6 4.0 US -15% 1063.0 975.2 983.7 993.9 922.1 893.4 906.9 Turkey -11% 79.4 79.5 73.4 76.0 71.5 60.4 70.6 Poland -5% 144.0 135.2 133.2 139.3 144.1 142.9 137.1 Germany -4% 193.1 184.0 182.6 188.8 196.5 190.3 185.8 Other Europe & Eurasia -3% 97.9 99.4 101.3 106.6 97.2 108.4 95.1 Kazakhstan -2% 111.1 100.9 106.6 111.4 115.7 114.4 108.7 Thailand -1% 18.1 17.6 18.3 21.3 18.1 18.1 18.0The problem with the sex offense registry is the type of people who can be put on it.
Such things are the following.
Peeing on a tree or the bushes
Being a prostitute
Soliciting a prostitute
Being naked in public even if it is the privacy of your own home, such as when pagans go sky clad for their rituals.
Being at or having an orgy even in the privacy of your own home.
Being a teenager who has sex with another teenager of the same age.
None of these types of people should be on the sex offender registry but they can be there.
The only people that should be on the sex offender registry are rapists and child molesters.
As for not be able to give sexual consent when drunk, is to ignore over 10,000 years of human history.
Most people tend to go to bars and parties for one reason, to get drunk and screw. It should be recognized
by any adult, that if you go to a bar with the intent to get drunk.
That sex with a complete stranger that otherwise you will not have sex with while sober could be a possible outcome.
In addition, if you do not like that outcome do not go into that situation or get drunk in the first place.
Yet another flaw in the law is that a person can give permission for sex while sober. Then get drunk and forget that they gave permission why they were sober.By Omer Farooq
BBC News, Hyderabad
Holy men are renowned for their healing powers
The 80-year-old holy man, Yanadi Kondaiah, claimed to have healing powers in the leg.
He is now recovering from his ordeal in hospital in the city of Tirupati in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
Local people believed they could be healed of spiritual and physical problems if they touched his leg.
They also believed in Mr Kondaiah's predictions of the future.
Police say the incident happened 550 km north of the state capital, Hyderabad.
'Brutal manner'
Police say that the self-styled 'Godman' - who lives in a village near the city of Tirupati - was approached a few days ago by two strangers who came to seek his advice over a medical problem.
Holy men are revered throughout much of India
They say that the pair returned to the old man on Tuesday ostensibly to thank him for his help.
"As the old man had the weakness of drinking, he accepted their invitation to have drinks with them," said local police Sub-Inspector Pendakanti Dastgiri.
"They took him to a deserted spot in the outskirts of the village.
"After the old man had passed out under the influence of liquor, they cut off his right leg from the knee," he said.
Mr Dastgiri said that the amputation was carried out in a very "brutal manner" and that police are still looking for the leg and the men who so cruelly took it.
He said that the assailants used a sharp hunting knife, and left the old man alone and bleeding slowly to death.
Mr Kondaiah was popular among Hindu devotees
Local people who found him unconscious alerted the police, who rushed him to hospital in Tirupati.
After regaining consciousness Mr Kondaiah said that he had no idea why he was targeted in such a manner, and did not understand the motive of the miscreants in taking away his leg.
"I have always been good to others and helped who ever came to me. Then why has this been done to me?" he asked amid his tears.
Police say the reason for the attack could be because Mr Kondaiah told too many people of the alleged magical powers of his right leg.
"This might have motivated some people to take away his leg hoping to benefit from it," a police spokesman said.
"But it is difficult to say that this was the only motive. It could also be a case of a revenge attack."‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ star Keir Dullea lands at Lyric Hall in New Haven
Keir Dullea, here as scientist David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is in New Haven Sunday. Keir Dullea, here as scientist David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is in New Haven Sunday. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ star Keir Dullea lands at Lyric Hall in New Haven 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
NEW HAVEN >> Forty-five years ago, director Stanley Kubrick gave the world “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The film became so iconic that people remember exactly where they saw it (Exeter Theater, Boston, for me), but some are probably still discussing just exactly what it all meant.
You might get some answers from as close to the source as possible when actor Keir Dullea, who played scientist/mission pilot David Bowman, appears at a special benefit screening of the iconic film and Q&A at 1:30 p.m. Sunday in Lyric Hall, 827 Whalley Ave. (tickets $20, 203-393-0733).
Producer Bernie Kaufman of Woodbridge and Dullea have been friends for years, and when Lyric Hall owner John Cavaliere approached him about ideas for a fundraiser for new seats for the 100-year-old gem, he said, “Let me talk to Keir. He’s an old friend, and I remembered that he once came to Bow Tie Cinemas to introduce ‘2001’ and stayed afterward and signed autographs.”
Dullea, 77, who lives in Fairfield, said sure. Film historian and author Foster Hirsch, who has interviewed Dullea several times, will handle the Q&A. There’s a sold-out dinner and silent auction afterward in a private home, which Dullea and his wife, Tony Award-nominated actress Mia Dillon (“Crimes of the Heart”), will attend.
Dullea is the 1968 film’s biggest booster — as if it needed any more notoriety.
He’s been appearing at screenings and ComicCon-type conventions and signings since 1998, when his co-star Gary Lockwood (Dr. Frank Poole) urged him to join him for a 30th anniversary event.
It’s been nothing but a labor of love, he says by phone from his home.
What’s the first question fans ask?
“I could tell you right off the bat that it’s, ‘What was it like to work with Stanley Kubrick?’ My short answer is it doesn’t get better than that. It was a wonderful experience. He was the most prepared director I ever worked with. A bit anal, you might say, but that’s all right.
“He only averaged about four films a decade, if that. That’s because he usually took two years or so to prepare for them.
“The second most-asked question is, ‘What does the ending mean?’” he says with a laugh.
Dullea says he’s always “amazed” at the number of young people who come to the functions, and notes that “it’s Tom Hanks’ favorite film of all time.”
In a recent appearance with Lockwood on actor Alec Baldwin’s talk show, Dullea says Baldwin asked if he would record his voicemail message on his iPhone.
“So I did. Guess what it was? ‘Open the pod bay doors, HAL.’”
As for that ending, Dullea reminds that many of Kubrick’s films are similarly open to interpretation. His personal favorite is Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” starring Kirk Douglas (1957).
“Kubrick never gave you a pat plot windup in his movies. And his visuals were extraordinary. The fact that ‘2001’ has no computer-generated special effects, that it was all done physically, but never with a computer, is amazing.”
Dullea calls the film’s opening Dawn of Man segment when the ape tosses the bone into the air, and it morphs into a space vehicle,” “one of the greatest jump cuts in film history...”
Dullea, whose other notable films include “The Hoodlum Priest,” “David & Lisa,” “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” says his first love is theater, calling his recent turn as Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tim Roof — 30 years after playing Brick on Broadway — with his wife as Big Momma at Provincetown’s Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, “the peak of my acting career.”
Partly, it was because he says, “If I were a casting director, Keir Dullea would not be at the top of the list, but I never felt a role take me over as much.... ”
But Dullea is fine with the fact that most fans associate him with “2001,” saying, “If one can only be remembered for one film, one can do a lot worse.”
Contact Donna Doherty at 203-789-5672.Before he was a Disney Legend, Tony Baxter was a Disney fan. He was just a teen when he landed a job at Disneyland selling ice cream, and later, when he needed a senior project in college, he decided to submit a ride concept for one of his favorite Disney movies: 1964 film Mary Poppins. The result was a ride-through attraction he called "Jolly Holiday."
To start, guests would board horses on mini-carousels reminiscent of the scene inside the chalk drawing. As the ride got underway, the horses would "jump" from the carousel into the rest of the chalk picture, out into the countryside and through the fox hunt. This would all be accomplished by a revolving theater mechanism, similar to the Carousel of Progress. After meeting the famous penguin waiters, a toe-tapping, supercalifragilistic sing-a-long would ensue. Then, a flash of lightning would signal a rainstorm that would "wash" guests out of the painting.
But the fun didn't end there. After the chalk melted away, guests would find themselves on London rooftops with the dancing chimney sweeps. Finally, the big finale: "Let's Go Fly a Kite."
Baxter took the concept book to one of his connections at Disneyland, who presented it to his superiors. Shortly thereafter, the hopeful student got a call to meet with Disney producer Bill Anderson. Though Baxter was convinced they were going to offer him a job, instead, Anderson offered some encouragement and advice on how to get the proper training to move forward with a career at Disney.
Baxter took the tips to heart. "It certainly got me excited that there might be a potential to make a career out of it," he says—and he was right. Baxter joined Disney shortly after graduating from the School of the Arts at Cal State Long Beach, then headed to Florida to help with the construction of Walt Disney World. It was just the beginning of his 47-year career with Disney.
Is it too late for a Mary Poppins ride? According to Baxter, no: “I still look at it and I think, you know, it would be... a great ride.”
Check out Baxter's full concept work here:
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.1 / 25
NASA image captured July 12, 2011 - With his feet secured on a restraint on the space station remote manipulator system's robotic arm or Canadarm2, NASA astronaut Mike Fossum (frame center) holds the Robotics Refueling Mission payload, which was the focus of one of the primary chores accomplished on a six and a half hour spacewalk on July 12. The failed pump module is with DEXTRE on left side of the photo. NASA astronauts Fossum and Ron Garan performed the six-hour, 31-minute spacewalk, which represents the final scheduled extravehicular activity during shuttle missions. Among Atlantis’s final contributions to the ISS is the Robotic Refueling Mission, developed at Goddard Space Flight Center. Atlantis brought this module to the International Space Station, where it will provide key support in maintaining future spacecrafts for years to come. STS-135 astronauts traveled to Goddard to complete special training for these robotics, a major component of the final shuttle mission. RRM is one of dozens of Goddard payloads to travel aboard orbiters into space throughout the 30-year flight history of the Shuttle Program. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.CNBC reports insider selling-to-buying ratio for top firms is a staggering 3177 to 1
Eric Blair
Activist Post
If you’re a baby boomer who still believes in the stock market since the financial collapse of 2008, listen up. The floor of this Ponzi scheme is about to drop out, leaving you punching a clock for some time to come and holding an empty retirement bag for your effort. The engineered crash is coming and the elite are jumping ship in droves — you should join them and get out ASAP.
Stock market insider selling has now reached record highs. The trend has been increasing for the last several years, but now the ratios are getting beyond ridiculous. Earlier this month, Zero Hedge reported that the insider selling-to-buying ratio is 2341 to 1.
Tyler Durden wrote:
After last week saw an insider selling to buying ratio of 1,411 to 1, this week the ratio has nearly doubled, hitting a ridiculous 2,341 to 1. And while Wall Street’s liars and CNBC’s clowns will have you throw all your money into “leading” techs like Oracle and Google, insiders in these names sold a combined $200 million in stock in the last week alone.
Today, CNBC reported that the insider selling activity at some of the largest traded companies is at an all-time high. This can’t be a good sign of things to come. The article points to the analysis of Alan Newman, a market strategist who tracks insider trading: “The overwhelming volume of sell transactions relative to buy transactions by company insiders over the last six months in key leading sectors of the market is the worst... ever.” CNBC reported that industry leaders have a staggering 3177 to 1 insider sell-to-buy ratio:
Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?
Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets The largest companies in three of the most important leading sectors of the market have seen their executives classified as insiders sell more than 120 million shares of stock over the last six months. Top executives at these very same companies bought just 38,000 shares over that same time period, making for an eye-popping sell to buy ratio of 3,177 to one. The grand total for the three sectors are “as awful as we have ever seen since we began doing this exercise years ago,” said Newman, who was ahead on such trends as the dangers of high-frequency trading and ETFs before the ‘Flash Crash’. “Clearly, insiders are seeing great value only in cash. Their actions speak volumes for the veracity for the current rally.”
Also quoted in the CNBC piece was Simon Baker, CEO of Baker Asset Management, who said the insider data “is good reason for considerable caution once the price action fades,” and “insiders normally buy early and sell early too. Longer term — 12 months out — it is more of a red flag.”
It’s pretty difficult to excuse these levels of insider looting, but the experts are doing their best to claim that these poor executives (the titans of their industries) must take profits from stock sales because their salaries and bonuses have been cut. Who do they think they are kidding? Wall Street is still paying record salaries and bonuses, reportedly worth $144 billion (about a $1000 for every working American). There also has been very little news of other industry executives taking pay cuts, as American companies are holding record levels of cash to the tune of over a trillion dollars. In fact, the flush-with-cash CEOs continue to blame the consumer class for joblessness.
Despite the mass exodus of executives from their own company’s stock, the S&P continues to remain somewhat stable since gaining 16% from July lows. Well, those gains seem somewhat pathetic since the value of the dollar — measured against the human inflation indexes such as food and oil — has plummeted. Major food commodities are up over 50% since their July lows, while oil prices have climbed $10 to over $81/bbl, or around 14% for the same time period, with predictions to break the $100/bbl mark very shortly.
Barely covering the cost of real inflationary measures is hardly success, especially with the current risks involved with being in the stock market. These risks have only increased since the 2008 financial collapse that eventually caused the stock market to bottom out the mid-6000 range. The market has been propped up with TARP funds and driven by scandalous front-running by Goldman Sachs and other large firms leading to 70% of stock purchases to be held for an average of 11 seconds. Consequently, these robo-trading programs have also been blamed for the freak “Flash Crash” in May where the stock market plummeted over 900 points in just minutes.
The charade is almost up, as the bad-but-getting-even-worse main street economy is not remotely factored in to Wall Street’s casino calculations. Truth is, most states are approaching bankruptcy, unemployment continues to worsen, and yet another major scandal is playing out with Fraudclosure Gate. Newman, the insider trading expert, says, “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we expect a significant correction.”
Unless you are an ultra-sophisticated trader with access to front-running software, it is time to follow these insiders out of the stock market and into real assets. As the Fed announces plans for QE2, which the stock market actually views as a good thing, the elite seem to be flocking to precious metals, commodities, and large agricultural land purchases on the expectation of an even weaker dollar. This appears to make gold, food, and oil pretty safe bets for the average bloke.
Recently by Eric Blair:
U.S. Debt Woes Expose Hidden Austerity and Looting of Public Assets
The After-the-Fed Solutions Debate Begins: Greenbackers vs. GoldbugsPosted October 3, 2016 at 5:59 pm
- Part 3, Reply Hazy covers most of this
I love being able to just reference part 3 for Diane / Susan stuff now.
I anticipate two fair questions that I'm not bothering to address in the comic itself for the sake of pacing, but I will address them here:
1 - Shouldn't Elliot know why Ellen's nervous? He didn't consider that aspect of it right there and then. Not a huge mystery, but it's a fair question and I didn't have him say "oh, right" or anything to acknowledge him knowing about it before (would've clashed with the "half-sister" reveal), so bam.
2 - Why aren't Tedd and Grace all like "sisters?!" right now? They were told about the twin possibility before Nanase and Mr. Verres joined them downstairs. Once they were all down there, however, it was on to other business, hence Ellen not yet knowing about the half-sister theory.
EGS:NPThe security flaw was actually in the Tor browser, which is based on Firefox's source code. Rather than shutting down Playpen, the FBI found a vulnerability in the code that allowed the agency to install malware and track Playpen's users. A judge in Washington State has granted one defendant's lawyers the right to review the malware, and in February a separate judge ruled that the FBI must turn over the malware code. Mozilla, however, is arguing that they should have the first crack at the security flaw so that it can be patched to prevent further harm in the meantime.
In a blog post, Dixon-Thayer writes: "if our code is implicated in a security vulnerability, that the government must disclose the vulnerability to us before it is disclosed to any other party. We aren't taking sides in the case, but we are on the side of the hundreds of millions of users who could benefit from timely disclosure."
In Massachusetts, a judge ruled that evidence obtained through the malware infection was inadmissible in court due to an invalid warrant.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
May 1, 2017, 7:16 PM GMT / Updated May 1, 2017, 9:19 PM GMT By Jane C. Timm
Donald Trump opened the door to a potential gas tax hike on Monday as a way to pay for infrastructure improvements — despite the GOP's likely opposition and his team's promise that the building plan wouldn't cost taxpayers.
“It’s something that I would certainly consider,” Trump of a federal gas tax increase in a Bloomberg News interview that underscored just how tough it will be to accomplish the $1 trillion infrastructure investment Trump promised as a candidate.
Democrats typically champion infrastructure investments, but have shown little appetite to cooperate with the Republican president, while Trump's own party historically has opposed the spending or tax hikes needed to fund road and bridge repairs.
White House Communications Director Sean Spicer was asked about Trump's comments later in the day, and suggested the president was simply considering the idea out of respect to the truckers' industry group.
Trump said in another interview Monday morning that he expected the infrastructure plan to be released in two-three weeks.
Related: Both Parties Say Trump's Infrastructure Plan Needs Repair
The federal gas tax is currently 18.4 cents per gallon and 24.4 cents for diesel and hasn’t been raised in twenty years, leaving the Highway Trust Fund broke. State gas taxes range from 12-58 cents per gallon on top of that.
Advocates of infrastructure investment have called for hiking the gas tax — or tying it to inflation — but Republicans have typically shot the idea down and argued that it hits the middle class. What's more, the memory of fill-ups that cost more than $4 per gallon in the height of the recession have left little appetite in Congress, even though gas prices are down more than a dollar per gallon since then.
Americans for Tax Reform, the lobbyist group run by Grover Norquist, has opposed hiking the gas tax in the past. Armed with a widely-signed lawmaker pledge not to raise taxes that aren't being offset, the group holds enormous power on the issue.
"There is no need — and no excuse for a tax hike," Norquist wrote in a lengthy statement to NBC News suggesting other legislative alternatives to hiking the gas tax, including stopping the diversion of highway trust funds to non-highway projects, and streamlining permitting and impact studies to reduce costs. "We can have more roads at lower prices if Congress repeals destructive laws and rules it itself established for sordid reasons."
Trump and his allies in the GOP have said public-private partnerships would help them accomplish the investment without significant public funding, though few believe it's a fix-all solution and American public-private partnerships typically include significant taxpayer dollars.Rep. Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.) is sponsoring a bill to revamp the National Flood Insurance Program. The lawmaker, whose Staten Island district was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, is trying to erase a bad-boy image spurred by his televised tongue-lashing of a reporter in January after the State of the Union address. (Tom Williams/Getty Images)
In an era when many Americans dismiss the House and Senate as entities incapable of action or accomplishment, Congress actually did something this week to rebut its do-nothing image.
The legislation passed and sent to President Obama won’t name a new post office or avert another fiscal crisis. It also won’t fix major problems with the health-care law, immigration reform or the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. But the bills do address modest concerns that lawmakers hope will improve their poor public standing and help ordinary people.
On Tuesday, the Senate gave quick final approval to a measure that would divert federal funding for political conventions to help pay for pediatric cancer research — a plan that originated in the House. Two days later, the Senate put the finishing touches on a plan to revamp the National Flood Insurance Program that the House approved last week. And senators toiled away for more than two days on proposals to update federal child-care standards.
Friday marked the 73rd day of the year but only the 33rd day that either the House or the Senate had been in session. Next week will be the third week-long break of the year for Congress. Aides say lawmakers will head home to work on district and home-state concerns, but many also will be campaigning ahead of the fall midterm elections, hoping to prove their value and influence to wary voters.
That’s why Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) so eagerly sought credit for the proposed changes to the flood insurance program. They’re expected to face off in one of the most competitive Senate races this year in a state still rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) became angry Thursday with some of his Republican colleagues, who objected to legislation that would aid Ukraine’s government. (The Associated Press)
Neither of them sits on the committees that wrote the bill, but that didn’t stop Landrieu from dominating the Senate floor debate on the measure and from publishing several pages on her Senate Web site documenting constituents’ concerns.
And it didn’t stop Cassidy, either. After the bill passed the Senate 72 to 22, he issued a press release with laudatory statements from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who called Cassidy “a leader in the fight to ensure flood insurance remains affordable.” Rep. Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.), a lead sponsor of the bill, was more explicit. “Bill Cassidy literally wrote the bill with me,” he said, calling his colleague “probably one of the most knowledgeable members of Congress on flood insurance.”
Grimm, whose Staten Island district was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, also could face a difficult reelection battle as he tries to erase a bad-boy image prompted by his angry confrontation with a reporter in January after President Obama’s State of the Union address. He called passage of the flood insurance bill “one of the proudest moments of my life.”
But it’s unclear whether voters care about statements like those coming out of Washington. Only three in 10 Americans think their lawmakers deserve another term and more than half of voters are looking to elect someone else, according to a national poll released this week. Fifty-four percent of Americans want to replace every member of Congress. More than 80 percent of Americans are willing to support lawmakers who compromise and work with the other party, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. That seems to be feeding a renewed eagerness among Democrats and Republicans to cut deals.
Congress isn’t done with its partisan bickering. The House tried again this week to delay the individual mandate in the new health-care law and passed a bill that would make it easier for lawmakers to sue Obama if he doesn’t fully enforce federal laws. When they return to Washington, there will be fresh fights over extending unemployment insurance and raising the minimum wage. And lawmakers are expected to approve billions of dollars in assistance to Ukraine, but disagreements about whether to include the International Monetary Fund in the package sparked an angry exchange among senators Thursday.
But the fighting came only after a remarkably bipartisan week in the Senate.
“Congress Gets Something Done!!!” screamed an e-mail Cantor’s aides sent Tuesday after senators quickly approved a measure he had written. Rather than spending federal money to help Democrats and Republicans hold their presidential nominating conventions every four years, Congress agreed to divert about $126 million over the next decade to pediatric medical research. Federal funding for security operations will still be provided. The House passed the bill in December along a mostly party-line vote and senators approved it unanimously, without debate.
“It’s a great example of what we can accomplish when members are willing to work together on behalf of the American people,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said later.
Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.), who helped Cantor steer the measure through the Senate, said he didn’t know of any other bills languishing on either side of the Capitol that could be approved so quickly and without much drama. “But we ought to look,” he said. “It’s in both sides’ interest to do stuff rather than not do stuff.”
Later in the week, senators approved the reauthorization of federally subsidized child care. About 1.6 million children in low-income families benefit from the program and lawmakers have been eager to update several federal child-care standards.
The legislation was debated as part of a plan brokered by several senior senators concerned about recent partisan fights and eager to restore a sense of productivity in the Senate. Lawmakers are expected to soon discuss bipartisan proposals related to federal sentencing reform, assistance for the manufacturing sector and ways to promote energy efficiency.
“They’re not in the top five in terms of what must pass or should pass this year, but they’re important bills,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who pushed to allow the votes.
As part of the agreement, the bill’s Democratic and Republican sponsors get to lead debate on the bill. So for most of the week, Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) called votes on dozens of amendments from members of both parties. Burr served as emcee, providing frequent updates on the vote schedule, while Mikulski served as cheerleader.
“This has been really very good,” she said at one point. “This is the way the Senate ought to work. There were differences, but differences doesn’t mean that it has to be filled with rancor all the time. After all is said and done, people want us to get more things done and less things said.”
The bill easily passed 96 to 2 Thursday during a flurry of last-minute activity.
The fast pace was proving almost too much for some senators unaccustomed to the productivity. After racing between her office and the Senate floor several times, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joked with reporters that she shouldn’t have worn heels.
Paul Kane contributed to this report.Takara Tomy will be going at it alone when it comes to releasing a Unicron in the Transformers Prime line, according to online toy retailer Fan to Fan. The website lists Transformers Prime AM-19 Gaia Unicron as a Takara Tomy exclusive and that the figure will come with one Arm Micron.The Voyager-sized figure can be used as armor for AM-01 Optimus Prime and AM-15 Darkness Megatron, according to the website's description and the solicitation image attached to the product listing.This was also shown in a previous solicitation image AM-15 Darkness Megatron was given a full reveal this past weekend at the Tokyo Toy Show.Unicron is set for a September 2012 release.
bwbm - 2012-06-22 @ 8:04 pm
The image definitely shows that he will form an armor for Optimus Prime. How this works, or why, I have no idea.
KFGatri - 2012-06-22 @ 1:33 pm
I do not see Unicron splitting apart to make armor, that is why Optimus will have the shielf and Matrix, and Darkness Megatron has the wings made of Dark Energon. Well, I may have misread the article, I admit. But selling Unicron in a two-pack, even as an exclusive, might be the way to go.
I do not see Unicron splitting apart to make armor, that is why Optimus will have the shielf and Matrix, and Darkness Megatron has the wings made of Dark Energon.
Logos Prime - 2012-06-22 @ 3:24 am
(link)
I can understand Megatron using Unicron's armor, as it's been done before (a'la Cybertron). Plus Megs infused himself with Dark Energon, which is from Unicron. However, the Prime armor is actually from the Matrix of Leadership. I think it's listed in that same link as the lead in this thread.
KFGatri - 2012-06-21 @ 9:35 pm
why does Unicron form armor for his enemies!? After Prime and Megatron defeat Unicron, they split up his corpse as a trophy.
puma - 2012-06-21 @ 9:31 pm
why does Unicron form armor for his enemies!?
KFGatri |
it is unclear whether the proposed deal will reach fruition, both sides hope to move quickly enough to be able to announce a transaction soon after Thanksgiving.
The talks are part of the third known attempt by Meredith to purchase Time Inc. In 2013, a deal collapsed when the two publishers could not agree on which magazines Meredith would buy. At the time, Meredith reportedly did not want to acquire four of Time Inc.’s best known titles: Time, Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated.
Earlier this year, Meredith was said to have been among parties interested in buying Time Inc. Those discussions ended when Time Inc. said it did not want to sell itself.
An obstacle that stalled negotiations earlier this year was Meredith’s inability to secure sufficient financing from banks. With the addition of the Kochs, with their deep pockets and apparent desire to make themselves players on the media landscape, that problem could vanish.
It is not clear how much influence — if any — the Kochs would have on a Meredith-owned Time Inc. if the deal were to go through.Alber Halul, who was stabbed Saturday night by a group of masked men he claims are haredim, recounted the attack Sunday. "They threatened to shoot us if we resisted and stabbed me 10 times – in my head, my leg, and my neck," he told Ynet.
Halul, a 22-year old Christian Arab from the Galilee town of Gush Halav, was assaulted while with a group of friends at Ein Zeitim forest, near Safed.
Alber Halul at Safed hospital (Photo: Avihu Shapiro)
He says that at around 12:30 am two vehicles arrived at their gathering place and eight masked men alighted, and attacked them. Halul is currently being treated for wounds in his back, head, and legs at Ziv Hospital in Safed.
"At around 12:30 five masked drove up in a Nissan jeep and began driving in circles near us. Then they left and came back with another vehicle, and came closer," he recalled from his hospital bed.
"They threw stun grenades and fired in the air. Then eight masked men got out of the car and began to attack us. The guys I was with ran away but I stayed to protect a girl who was with us. They stabbed me 10 times in my head, my leg, and my neck until they hit me hard and I fell to the ground."
Halul says he knows the men were ultra-Orthodox Jews although they wore masks. "While they were attacking us one of the said that if we dared to resist they'll shoot us and we knew from their accent and their clothes that they were ultra-Orthodox," he said.
It wasn't the first time the 22-year old was attacked due to his race. "I won't return to the forest again. The Jews' hatred and racism against us has reached a point of real violence that threatens our lives," he said.
But police have not yet made any arrests in the case, and say they have no suspects. "The case is still being investigated," police said in a statement.TurboCool Canned Beer Chiller
Warm beer. Do you think there is someone out there that really likes it? One sick individual with tastebuds long dead that enjoys a non-cold one? For the rest of us, a properly chilled beer is part of what is so enjoyable about a nice brew. We’ve all had times when we have a beer that isn’t ideally cooled. You can make sure your brew is always nice and cold with the TurboCool.
The TurboCool quickly chills your beer cans down to just the right temp without batteries or electricity. Simply put your can of brew in the TurboCool along with some ice and water and pump it for about a minute to cool it down to the perfect drinking temp. The TurboCool is great for in the woods or tailgating as it requires no power but that provided by your arms pumping it. No need for a huge cooler to pack a weekend worth of craft beer cans and keep them cool. The cans aren’t shaken while inside so your beverage is ready to drink as soon as you’re down chilling it. It’s perfect for on the boat where space is at a premium as a bit of cold water from the lake and a small handful of ice will return a cold brew.
Warm beer is something no one wants to mess with. Make sure you can cool your cans anytime and anywhere with the TurboCool. The company is currently funding the production of this beer gadget and hopes to start shipping soon. Get over to their Kickstarter project and get yourself a TurboCool while helping to make this happen. Checkout their Kickstarter page here.10 Amazing Tiny House Vacation Rentals
Before living in a tiny home I was obsessed with research tiny house options across the country. Like the ones that are between 200 and 300 square feet. I thought it’d be awesome to try out “tiny home” life and stay in one for a weekend to give it a whirl. With a little digging on Airbnb and a few other vacation rental sites, I found out that this is actually an option. Check out these 10 amazing tiny house vacation rentals where you can try a tiny house on for size.
You might be finding yourself in the same place as I did years ago. Just so you know, the answer to my urge for tiny house life came in 2016 when I bought a 4×4 Mercedes Sprinter Van and built it out into the ultimate tiny home. Check out the van life section on Bearfoot Theory, where I share all the van life tips I’ve learned from the road as well as information about my build and van conversion. Renting a campervan for your next vacation is also an option, we’ve created a separate blog post on great places to rent a campervan for your next US vacation.
Modern Whidbey Island Tree House (Puget Sound, WA)
This cedar tree house on Whidbey Island, just 1 hour north of Seattle, will completely transcend you out of the hustle and bustle of the city. The 250 square foot octagon tree home will have you blissfully sleeping 13 feet above the ground amongst a forest full of cedar, hemlock and maple trees as well as a variety of ferns. It’s the kind of place that might just convince you that tree house living is the way to go. Read more.
Caravan the Tiny House Hotel (Portland, OR)
This Portland tiny house hotel consists of six 100-200 sq foot tiny houses, all with their own bathrooms and basic kitchens. Located right in the middle of the hip Alberta Arts District of Northeast Portland, Caravan guests have dozens of restaurants, shops, and cafes right at their fingertips. Read more.
Pirates of the Caribbean Getaway (Topanga Canyon, CA)
This bungalow is located on the tropical grounds of a Topanga Canyon home where waterfalls and lush plant life will make you forget that you are a mere 15 minutes from some of LA’s finest hotspots. Also within a short jaunt are some really beautiful hiking trails and the beach. The rental comes with a private hot tub, hammocks, a fire pit, and all the other amenities you need for a romantic weekend getaway. Read more.
White Salmon Yurt (White Salmon, WA)
This yurt boasts wide open views of Mount Hood, and its Hood River location is a great base camp for all kinds of outdoor adventures. From rafting and fishing to hiking and biking, there is no shortage of things to do while calling this yurt home. Read more.
Big Island Mountain View Tiny Home (The Big Island, Hawaii)
This new, modern tiny house features an original 1920’s propane stove and solar panels to complete the off-the-grid feel. For those wanting to explore the South side of the island, this rental is only 20 minutes from the entrance to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and close to the towns of Hilo and Pahoa. Read more.
Cozy Cabin Near Sun Valley (Bellevue, ID)
You won’t need your car in the summer at this cozy cabin. The Wood River Valley bike path runs just in front of this cabin and takes you all the way to Ketchum. Don’t worry, two cruisers are included in your stay. The cabin is also just 30 minutes from Sun Valley. After a day of soaking in Idaho’s nearby hot springs, fishing in the Big Wood River, or skiing the slopes of Sun Vally, come home to a memory foam mattress and heated cozy cabin. Read more.
Read about my experience staying at a dude ranch in Jackson, Wyoming.
Geodesic Dome Cabin (Aptos, CA)
This mushroom dome cabin is advertised as the #1 listing on AirBnb in the entire world. It is set amongst a Redwood grove only 25 minutes from Santa Cruz, CA. The owners encourage you to be harmonious here whether that is just petting the goats or helping to milk them, it’s a community space shared by animals, including numerous hummingbirds, and humans. Read more.
SLC Airstream Abode (Salt Lake City, UT)
If you haven’t heard, Airstreams are totally making a comeback. And it’s one with a vengeance. Introducing the modern airstream. Beautiful, sleek, and this one’s even got a retro touch. In winter, hit the slopes up at Alta or in summer, mountain bike the Wasatch. Then come home to your super cool space and clean up before walking to a new hip downtown bar. Sounds like fun! Read more.
Wine Country Cabin (Gaston, OR)
Here at this wine-country cabin, you are bound to spend most of your time on the deck enjoying the fruits of this 40 acre Pinot Noir vineyard. At 900 square feet, it’s not a tiny house in the traditional sense. But with it’s cozy feel and gorgeous view, you’ll be eager to return after a day touring the area’s best wineries. Read more.
Bayside Bungalow (Olympia, WA)
Nestled in the trees above the Puget Sound, this hand-built tiny house offers a Pacific Northwest retreat in the finest sense. Just adjacent to the property is Tolmie State Park. Wander through the forests of ferns or head to the beach where on a clear day you can catch magnificent views of Mt. Rainier. Afterwards, head back home and enjoy a home cooked meal and a glass of wine next to your tiny fireplace. Sounds so relaxing. If I lived in Seattle, I know where I would be this weekend. Read more.
Can’t get enough of these tiny houses? Follow my “Tiny House Mania” board on Pinterest for more tiny house eye candy.“Yes! I said closer! Move as close as you can and engage those Star Destroyers at point-blank range.” –Lando Calrissian
You and your wingmates barely manage to evade the laser blasts fired by the trio of TIE interceptors on your backs long enough to weave through an asteroid field, only to find an Imperial Star Destroyer dropping out of hyperspace ahead of you on the opposite side…
Welcome to life in the Star Wars®: Age of Rebellion™ Roleplaying Game!
As a member of the Rebel Alliance, you’re part of an outmatched, rag-tag resistance group fighting in a civil war that spans the galaxy. Your enemies are more numerous and better funded. Their tactics rely upon the overwhelming strength of their TIEs, troopers, and Star Destroyers, and they’re everywhere.
Every hero needs a worthy adversary, and in an Age of Rebellion campaign, you’ll gain a newfound respect for the military might of the tyrannical Galactic Empire. In previous previews, we’ve looked at what it means to play a part in a war against the galaxy’s ruling government. We saw how your participation in the Rebellion effort gives meaning to your actions, and we saw how it influences your view of the galaxy.
Today, we look at the challenges ahead of you. What stands between the Rebel Alliance and galactic freedom? A horde of Imperial adversaries, and a whole navy’s worth of vehicles and starships. Altogether, the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook features more than two-dozen pages of Imperial adversaries, vehicles, and weapons, as well as a host of others that the Empire can recruit or co-opt.
Adversaries
You’ll find entire legions of Stormtroopers, Snowtroopers, and even Dark Troopers among the various minions, rivals, and nemeses presented in the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook. Alongside such Imperial troops, you’ll also find DeStab agents, Imperial Moffs, military informants, and TIE aces.
The Core Rulebook divides the Empire’s forces into two categories, bureaucratic and military, and the result is an Imperial menace that operates on multiple levels simultaneously. It’s not just a collection of troopers waiting to gun you down; it’s also a soul-crushing organization that looks to root out dissension, sow distrust, spread fear through the galaxy, and extinguish the last flames of hope and resistance.
Accordingly, you’ll find all the adversaries you need to enjoy a wide variety of stories, ranging from those that feature heated firefights to those that focus on the Rebellion’s efforts to rally support and acquire resources without alerting the Empire’s attention. You’ll find minions to defend your Imperial bases, and you’ll find cruel and aspiring agents capable of matching wits with the Rebellion’s greatest heroes.
Vehicles and Starships
Of course, the Empire’s military consists of more than just soldiers, pilots, commanders, and agents. Its strength stems largely from its use of powerful, technologically advanced vehicles and starships, many of which you’ll find presented in the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re part of a Rebel strike team tasked with jamming Imperial transmissions from one of their reconnaissance outposts. At first, everything seems to go well. You get the jump on their perimeter and quickly move through a handful of defenders toward the compound’s communications array. However, as you start placing your explosives on the bunker doors, you hear the thunderous sound of something bad. One of your teammates steps around the corner and confirms your suspicions: an AT-AT has just returned to base…
It’s not impossible for Rebel characters to prevail against AT-ATs or Star Destroyers, but such situations are truly desperate and should lead your group to perform an immediate reevaluation of its tactics. Moreover, these are the sorts of situations that may punctuate the key turns of an Age of Rebellion campaign. After all, in the heat of a galactic civil war, you should expect both sides to make use of all the weapons at their disposal.
That means, too, that while the Imperials gain vehicles like the AT-AT and AT-ST, along with a veritable swarm of TIEs and capital ships, the Rebels gain the T-47 airspeeder and such classic starfighters as the X-wing, A-wing, and B-wing.
Shedding more light upon the many vehicles and starships that you’ll find in the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook is contributing author Jason Marker:
“I'm a huge fan of starships, so when I was offered the chance to work on the serious business military ships featured in Age of Rebellion, I jumped at the chance.
“Age of Rebellion is, necessarily, military-oriented and the ships included in the Core Rulebook reflect that. With them, you’ll be able to fly space superiority missions in brand new X-wings, lead a squadron of B-wings against a squadron of capital ships and turn them into hot scrap, blast swarms of TIE fighters into clouds of dust with stolen Lancer-class frigates, and generally have a great time at the controls of a spaceship.
“There’s a deep well of great Star Wars ships, ranging from tiny little scout ships to fast-attack starfighters like the X-wing to lumbering Super Star Destroyers, so one thing I really wanted was to bring the Anaxes War College into the game. Using the Anaxes War College gave the setting a more military-style system for naming and classifying ships and allowed for specific categories of ships that I could populate with a rich collection of established favorites.”
Using the Anaxes War College as a guide, the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook categorizes the starships it presents into starfighters, gunships, cruisers, and battleships, and you’ll find starships of all sorts, ranging from the A-wing to the Imperial-class Star Destroyer. Moreover, you’ll find new rules for barrage fire that will allow you to make good use of the Core Rulebook’s capital ships in dramatic and engaging space combats.
As Jason explains, the Core Rulebook’s collection of starships also helped to establish the game’s tone:
“The Imperial Navy has the resources of the entire galaxy at its beck and call. They have the most money, the best designers, the most respected shipyards, and they can turn out ships at an incredible rate.
“On the other hand, the Alliance is using second or third-hand ships that are decades old – fighters that were old during the Clone Wars, and sub-capital cruisers and frigates that are long past their prime.
“I wanted to make it clear that the Imperial Navy was a new, shiny, deadly efficient military force and the Alliance fleet was a rag-tag collection of antiques, repurposed freighters, and salvaged warships doing the best they could in an ugly situation.”
Resist the Empire’s Tyranny
Though you manage to salvage the damaged CR90 corvette and its armaments, there’s no time to celebrate. Your hyperdrive is offline, and sensors indicate a swarm of TIEs headed your way. Quickly, your team jumps into action. Talvin races to engineering. Kyle and Pol’tura head to the nearest gunnery stations. Drezzen boosts the sensors and finds the ship that launched those TIEs – a Vindicator-class heavy cruiser. You won’t last long against that ship, especially while your corvette is already damaged. As the Vindicator rounds the desert moon, you order the gunners to lay down a blanket barrage. You’re outnumbered and outgunned, but if you can make the jump to hyperspace before you’re obliterated, you’re going to strike a major blow against the Empire…
In the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook, you’ll find an Imperial menace worthy of the galaxy’s greatest heroes. Are you one of them? The Rebel Alliance needs you.
The Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook is due to arrive at retailers late next week. Until then, stay tuned for more information, including a preview of your adventures in Age of Rebellion!ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan kept a key border crossing into Afghanistan closed to NATO convoys Thursday, despite U.S. apologies for a fatal airstrike that killed or wounded six Pakistani soldiers and prompted the blockade.
In a news conference in this capital, Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said Pakistan was still considering whether to reopen the Torkham pass in the northwestern part of the country.
"Our authorities are evaluating the security situation, and a decision regarding the reopening of the supply route will be taken in due course," he said.
As trucks carrying fuel and supplies for NATO troops remained idle at the crossing, a new apology was issued by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a letter written to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani and released Thursday by the U.S. Embassy here, Mullen said U.S. military officials would "review the investigation thoroughly with an eye toward avoiding recurrence of a tragedy like this."
That followed two other U.S. apologies issued Wednesday, nearly a week after the U.S. missile strike, acknowledging that two of the American military's Afghanistan-based assault helicopters had entered Pakistani airspace "several times" and mistakenly fired at a military post.
Statements from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and coalition force headquarters in Kabul largely agreed with Pakistan's initial assessment that its troops had fired rifle shots to warn the helicopters they were on the Pakistani side of the border. The helicopters, on an anti-insurgent mission, responded with missiles that destroyed the post, killing two Pakistanis and wounding four. Coalition statements initially said the missiles were fired in self-defense.
"We deeply regret this tragic loss of life and will continue to work with the Pakistan military and government to ensure this doesn't happen again," Gen. David H. Petraeus, the coalition commander in Afghanistan, said in a military statement that pledged better coordination. U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson extended "our deepest apology to Pakistan and the families" of the casualties.
A senior Pakistani military official described the statements as "good gestures" that would be "taken positively by everybody in Pakistan," along with an assurance that "these attacks won't be repeated." Pakistan had demanded a statement of fault and an apology.
The main Torkham border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan, shut in response to the attack, remained blocked Wednesday, extending a backup of coalition military supplies. Gunmen have carried out several attacks on supply trucks in Pakistan, including a strike Wednesday in which up to 25 fuel tankers were torched in the southwestern city of Quetta.
The fatal airstrike, the latest in a series of air incursions into Pakistan, heightened tensions between the South Asian nation and the United States, uneasy allies even in the best of times. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan is very unpopular in Pakistan, where many see it as a catalyst for homegrown militancy.
The Obama administration has become frustrated with Pakistani reluctance to launch a full offensive against insurgent sanctuaries in the border region, from which attacks in Afghanistan are launched. Beginning late last year, the administration has issued several warnings to Pakistan that if it does not move aggressively against the sanctuaries, the United States will have to take action.
A report President Obama sent to Congress this week criticized Pakistani efforts. "The Pakistan military continued to avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or al-Qaeda forces in North Waziristan," the remote border area where sanctuaries are located, it said. "This is as much a political choice as it is a reflection of an under-resourced military prioritizing its targets."I want to share with you some simple scoring solutions I’ve come across and use a few myself. Music is often not dealt with as part of pre-production in tight budget scenarios. A lot of time and effort goes into location scouting, production design, casting and the monumental task of simply scheduling everything. Editing becomes a priority immediately after shooting simply because you want to see what you got. But the score is often ignored by most filmmakers and becomes an afterthought. Not because of ignorance or poor planning mostly because they are the last steps and often fall under the proverb “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it”!
Often times scoring falls to the editor by default and he or she will score with temp music that you do not have the rights to but helps with pace and tempo. That becomes a slippery slope, you can become married to a tempo and energy and then never get the rights to that track. Also if your picture cuts are married to the music once you change it out recutting is inevitable and that’s going to be double the work. Worst case scenario is your cut was better with music you cannot obtain, that will haunt you. My hack is simple, create a music library of the vibe you want for your project. I Would recommend 3 to 1, three song options for each scene or a moment you will be scoring. Make it clear these are the only options. That way the editor can audition the tracks from that group of preselections that are in your budget or already cleared.
The good news is great news actually, getting the rights to a piece of music to score your production has become very affordable and there are many free options. Filmmakers can get cheap or free scores by creating them through software programs like GarageBand or an online service like Filmstro that allows you to score your video with their library. Websites like Pond5 and Audiojungle have tracks you can get the rights to for around $20. If you consider the time investment of the free options $20 is a bargain. Also with the low-cost sites like AudioJungle and Pond5 you can download any track before you actually buy it. This makes it easy to fill up your projects music library. It will have an audio watermark but that is fine for trying out tracks in your edit. You can also find some free options too. I’ve used Free Stock Music quite a few times. And for free sound effects an excellent resource is Freesound.
GARAGE BAND
Creating your own scores with GarageBand can be rewarding, it’s not too difficult to learn and with the newer version you can import your video. GARAGE BAND TUTORIAL
FILMSTRO
Is a customizable music library that always you to control several aspects of a music track to customise it to your image. It is subscription based. FILMSTRO TUTORIALS
AUDIO JUNGLE
Is part of Envato Market. At AudioJungle you can buy royalty-free music and sound effects inexpensively. The site is home to a bustling community of audio composers and producers. They offer ‘Music Kits” to customise and rearrange music tracks without using complex software. Basically, they give you the separate elements of a track.
POND 5
Similar to AudioJungle, Pond5 is a New York-based online marketplace for royalty-free media. The company licenses stock footage, stock music, stock photography sound effects, after effects, images and 3-D models.
Free Stock Music
There are many free tracks on this site. They offer a 100% royalty free license that allows you to use the music in all types of productions, for worldwide distribution, forever. There are never any licensing fees.
FREESOUND
Freesound is a collaborative database of creative-commons licensed sound for musicians and filmmakers. They have just about any sound effect you are looking for.
There should be an option on this list to fit your creative and budgetary needs. I hope you found this article useful. For more tips and shared experience visit my youtube channel Create Sci-Fi with plenty of informative videos on creating content.We rewind a bit to National Menu Update Day on March 1st, 2016 to get caught up on some comings and goings at Disney’s Hollywood Studios before heading back to Epcot for some general updates and a wide-reaching look at the Flower and Garden Festival that doesn’t have anything to do with two bites of grouper.
Of course, we are waiting to see what happens come April 3rd when Lights Motors Action? Benign Driving Exhibit closes, in addition to just about everything that makes up The Streets of America, including Honey I Shrunk the Kids Playground, Studio Catering, Writer’s Stop, etc.
For a moment in time there was no stage in front of Great Movie Ride as the dance party that took place here is no longer scheduled.
That is no longer the case as construction on a new stage began on the evening of March 9th to house the new Star Wars stage show, Star Wars: A Galaxy Far, Far Away coming April 4th. There was some chatter that the show would be staged in the Hollywood Hills Amphitheater that houses Fantasmic! but that fell through, perhaps leaving the theater open for something else. The stage show should be scheduled multiple times throughout the day and will hopefully be easy enough to see. You’ve probably seen the announcement:
The Force will officially awaken at the park April 4, with the debut of the brand new Star Wars stage show, “Star Wars: A Galaxy Far, Far Away.” The new show will play out iconic moments from the film saga on Center Stage (in front of the Chinese Theater), and will feature appearances from Star Wars characters like Kylo Ren, Chewbacca, Darth Vader and Darth Maul.
And starting this summer, fans won’t want to miss the grand debut of a new Star Wars fireworks show, “Star Wars: A Galactic Spectacular.” This new nightly show is the next generation of the current Star Wars-inspired fireworks show. The show will combine fireworks, pyrotechnics, special effects and video projections that will turn the nearby Chinese Theater and other buildings into the twin suns of Tatooine, a field of battle droids, the trench of the Death Star, Starkiller Base and other Star Wars destinations. The show will be punctuated with a tower of fire and spotlight beams, creating massive lightsabers in the sky. This new show will be the most elaborate fireworks display to take place in the history of Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Also starting April 4, Captain Phasma will begin leading a platoon of First Order stormtroopers on a march from Star Wars Launch Bay to Center Stage multiple times each day.
One thing to note here is that the Phasma-led Procession and stage show are starting April 4th, while the enhancements coming to the fireworks are arriving in “summer.” The Star Wars fireworks as they appear now will continue until the new show debuts, which is a departure from the original plans. The fireworks here were supposed to end around the time Rivers of Light came online. But I think Disney realized that they don’t really want 15,000 people sticking around Animal Kingdom until 11:30pm at night and it would be less expensive and more profitable to hold them here at a Park that is otherwise used to staying open until 10pm in the summer. There would be relatively little interest in a rehash of Frozen Summer Fun.
So while you might argue that it’s sort of a down time at Walt Disney World with entertainment cuts etc., the summer should be booming with two new nighttime spectaculars and significant additions at Studios and Animal Kingdom, in addition to the Frozen additions and new film at Soarin’ opening at Epcot, and then the new stage show coming to Cinderella Castle. So the news isn’t all bad.
Speaking of cuts, I was somewhat amused to see Pluto and Goofy meeting separately. Every time I’ve visited over the last five years they’ve met together.
10 of 29 Streetmosphere characters will not have their contracts renewed. One assumes that if this guy was actually hustling guests out of money that he would probably still have a job. But while cuts like these make headlines, this is not the sort of thing that will impact most guests’ stays in more of a macro sense. It’s significantly reduced staffing at the more routine front- and back-end-of-house side of things. Ask any cast member what their hours going into spring break look like and they’ll tell you that they’re reduced about 25%, assuming of course that they were around last year, which is becoming less and less common.
Changes at the Studios’ quick services and restaurants are not as “interesting” as Animal Kingdom so I will not waste your time going over 20-cent price increases on hot dogs. It’s potentially worth noting that Min & Bill’s has made yet another round of changes.
Above is the current menu.
This is what they served back in December.
This was just last month. The “Golden Fried Chicken” actually sounded pretty good and was a large portion. You may also note the “unique and craft beers available” designation on the sign. Both of those things are out. Now it’s just Yuengling and Bud Light. I will reiterate that the Foot-long Hot Dog is legit – much longer and thicker than what they serve at the other Parks. Looking at you Casey’s Corner. It’s otherwise difficult to find much value in a $17 to-go container of Yobogoya-style beef, I think.
I was also surprised to see ABC Commissary’s menu cut back so much:
This is in the wake of Pizza Planet closing down for what will still be about 7.5 more months and in addition to Studio Catering, a pretty significant quick service, closing in just about three weeks.
Above is about half of the old menu – note the uniqueness of the burger with the Sriracha and fried shrimp.
Part 2 of the old menu. The Salmon, which is still served at Columbia Harbour House, was pretty decent and a nice topping on the Asian Salad as well. That and the shrimp and fried fish are not part of the current menu. Neither was very good, mind you, but it’s hard to advocate a reduction in options.
The first part of the new menu is above. There are so few options that they don’t even have an entree to list in the fourth box.
We’re almost to the point where there’s more cupcake choices than entrees.
Three options for kids.
I’m not sure if anyone has had a better experience with the steak than I had. I was served a very dry, overcooked piece of meat that tasted much more like an old hamburger than a “New York Strip.” I am actually an advocate of Liberty Inn’s steak, where what I was served was very good. Feel free to weigh in if you’ve tried either.
The BB-8 and creepy Chewbacca head are up $2 a piece while the TIE Fighter is actually down $6 to match Disneyland’s price. The Han Solo replaces the Darth Vader Helmet.
Backlot Express continues its kind-of-Star-Wars-inspired menu. They dropped the “Corellian-spice Fries” in favor of a unique-sounding Caprese Sandwich that actually looks pretty good. The Royal Guard Burger is up $1, Bacon Cheeseburger is up $1.30, and Nuggets are up 20 cents. With tax, the Chewbacca is 17 cents less expensive than the outdoor vendors.
Oh good the Chili Cheese Dog is still there said no one ever. That and the iffy “Galactic Salad” are the same price as they were a month ago. The Blue Milk Panna Cotta is no longer available.
Also, the two drinks advertised in this image of the original menu are no longer available.
Woodbridge is back as Zipz gets the bootz. Sea Dog Sunfish Ale is also available here for $8.50.
Drinks are otherwise the same price.
Over at Studio Catering, the only change is the Spicy Chipotle Ranch Chicken is up 30 cents. You wonder if enough people will order it between March 1st and April 2nd to pay for the sign necessary to print that increase.
Beers are up 75 cents each, Beso Boxed is up $1.05, Woodbridge again replaces Zipz. Note that the Walgreens on my corner sells 1.5 liter jugs of Woodbridge every day of the year for $9.99.
Sam Adams seems to be on the way out, though its seasonal was still on tap at High Octane Refreshments next to Studio Catering. Almost every Epcot location dropped it.
The price of all these drinks is up.
Over to Sunset Boulevard, where we’ll find Sunset Ranch Market on the left after the stores.
Prices on the alcoholic drinks at Anaheim Produce are higher.
Here we are. Note the new awnings and roofs as walls are down throughout much of the seating area.
Though not all, at least as of last week.
Here at Fairfax Fare, the Chicken/Ribs is up from $15.69 to $17.19, the ribs are up 50 cents, the chicken is somehow the same price, the pork sandwich is up 50 cents, the Chili Cheese Hot Dog is up $2 and likely the same as what’s served at Min & Bill’s, and then the other two hot dogs have been eliminated (macaroni & cheese with bacon and truffle oil and the barbecued pork & coleslaw). Pricing is a little strange as the same chicken will run you $13.79 at Cosmic Ray’s and $13.99 at Flame Tree.
I would reiterate that I like the Fairfax Salad here a lot and it’s a relative bargain at under nine bucks.
Turkey Legs are served here when nearby Toluca Legs is closed, which it often is.
I haven’t gotten over here to try the Fried Green Tomato Sandwich, which sounds like a unique and interesting vegetarian dish. The price on that stayed the same while others went up.
With Pizza Planet closed, this is your shot at a reheated frozen pizza. The Chicken Pesto Flatbread introduced last August sounds like it has some promise.
Dessert.
Starring Rolls added a couple of sandwiches a few months ago, including a Pastrami and Roasted Vegetable, in addition to dropping sushi.
The $8.19 Funnel Cake remains one of the most expensive snack-credit-eligible items.
Path of the Jedi is still showing in case you want all six of the “original” movies ruined in nine minutes.
Jedi Training signups remain in between Indiana Jones and 50’s Prime Time. Disney continues to try a few different things with getting kids signed up for a show. You may be able to sign up well before the rest of the Park opens, which would give you a better opportunity at positioning yourself for the rush to Toy Story Mania. With the show doubling in capacity, you can very safely head to Toy Story Mania and potentially Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and Tower of Terror before needing to sign up. The problem with that is the signup process is lengthy and very long lines can form later in the morning. And I really don’t want to be the guy that says “oh no don’t worry about signing up” only for some girl scout troop to take every spot on the day you visit and leave you out on Hoth.
It sounds like the Olaf Meet and Greet is coming here where the walls are up across from Backlot Express and in front of Star Tours. That doesn’t make a lot of thematic sense. But then what is the theme of Hollywood Studios other than cold and sadness.
Mickey and Minnie are expected to move inside in the back of the building that houses the Frozen Singalong across from Sci Fi.
Disney’s reluctance to add new characters in a timely fashion is sort of strange. Frozen obviously came out years ago and we’re just now receiving the snowman. Obviously with a sequel in production, the characters should have significant staying power. On the other hand, Joy and Sadness from Inside Out will debut at Epcot next month, a full ten months after arriving in theaters. And they’ve had those costumes available literally the entire time. And even if there were plans to make a sequel, you know it’s like eight years off.
Now that each Jedi Training show features twice the number of kids, the viewing area has in turn been expanded.
Kylo Ren has replaced Darth Maul towards the end of the show in what I’m told is an improvement.
Darth and the 12th Sister still appear.
Pew pew.
My guess is that we’ll see walls here to the left of Sci-Fi once the Streets close.
It’s kind of strange to see the even numbers on Disney menus. For years, it would have been $14.99 instead of $15. With the price of quick service food increasing so much, it makes a sit-down meal look a bit more attractive. For just 50 cents more than the Royal Guard Burger at Backlot Express, you can sit down and enjoy a Smoked Turkey Sandwich in comfortable air-conditioning and darkness. The food at Sci-Fi is by no means great, but it’s also not much more expensive than Fairfax Fare.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, after one too many Chivas, Walt had said, “Everything you see will be here forever. |
affordable housing, having been part of the strategic team delivering Inclusionary Zoning within both the UK and Australia. Currently Edward is a member of the Economic Development Urban Renewal Team, focusing on the Downtown and Community Improvement Areas and general housing matters throughout Hamilton. 2:15 p.m.
Jennifer Juste (@JennieJuste) Program Manager, Transportation Demand Management at City of Guelph
Talk: Taking to the streets: how UX of cyclists is transforming how we design urban streets The problem with North American road design is that it assumes only people in cars will use them. This talk will reveal some alternative approaches to how we engineer our roads, such as tactical urbanism and gamification, which integrate and improve the user experience of people on bicycles. Bio: Jennifer has been planning cycling routes and programs in Guelph for over a decade. Her research, experience and travels have shed light on the various approaches to street design and transportation behaviours. Her role as TDM Program Manager involves the review of road and development designs, policy writing, and master planning, providing opportunities at all scales to consider how best to build cities for the end users. 2:30 p.m.
Jason Hofing (@RelayCoffee) Owner, Relay Coffee
Talk: UX Always: Succeeding in Chaotic Times For most of 2014, the entire street in front of RELAY’s Concession St. coffee bar was ripped up limiting access to its front door. In this talk, Jason will share his team’s story of abandoning panic and instead see it as an opportunity to engage their audience and customers with creativity, positivity, and hospitality. Bio: Jason Hofing is the owner of RELAY Coffee Roasters, a craft coffee roaster of with two coffee bars and roasting for the best restaurants in Hamilton. Jason is the recipient of the First Ontario and Hamilton Spectator 1AWARD in 2012, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce Outstanding Small Business Award in 2013 and a 40 Under 40 Award in 2014. Jason believes in a human-centric approach to taking your business to where your customers are and serving their needs. 3:00 p.m. Panel Discussion The User Experience Experience, with Janna Cameron, Abeiene Nejar, Adam Waselnuk and Tom Creighton. Four UX professionals speak to their experience from diverse backgrounds, roles, and company sizes/focuses. No matter your interest in UX, whether general or deeply specialized, junior or senior, design or research-focused, there’s a little something for everyone in this panel.
5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. Beer and pizza! Make connections, ask more questions of the presenters, and start great conversations. Have fun!
Sponsors and organizers Thanks to our proud sponsors! If you are interested in sponsoring or contributing in some way please e-mail hamontconf@outlook.com or details!
FAQs What dietary options are available?
Gluten free and vegetarian options will be available. Although everything will probably be nut free we cannot guarantee this. If you have any other concerns or requests please contact us.
Are there ID or minimum age requirements for the event?
Students are welcome, but the minumum age for attendance is 16. If you are under 16 and would like to attend contact us for additional information.
What are my transportation / parking options for getting to and from the event?
CoMotion is located in downtown Hamilton so getting here by public transit is easy. During the weekend there's lots of parking within a few blocks
Do I have to bring my printed ticket to the event?
No. Unless you want to give your ticket to someone else at the last minute in which case we will need to see the printed version of the ticket
How is this event only $20!?
We have a firm policy: we only organize events that we would want to actually go to ourselves! That means good food, a limit to total attendance, opportunities to learn and interact and a price that is actually affordable for everybody. Thank the sponsors for helping us to make this vision happen :)
HamOnt Events Calendar There are more awesome events ahead! Be sure to check Software Hamilton for the latest news.
Have questions about HamOnt UX? When & Where
CoMotion On King
115 King Street East
(3rd floor)
Hamilton, ON L8N 1A9
Canada
Saturday, 28 October 2017 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM (EDT)
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Outlook Calendar Google Calendar Yahoo! Calendar iCal Calendar Organizer Software Hamilton View organizer profile 3 past events on EventbriteEvangelicals look down on atheists’ values. Nonreligious people fear that conservative Christians want to limit their freedoms. Republicans worry that Muslims pose a threat to their physical safety.
In short, many American identity groups are awfully concerned about one another. That’s the takeaway from a new survey, released Thursday morning by Baylor University, which polled Americans about their perceptions of their fellow citizens.
Part of the study, called “Fear of The Other,” examined negative attitudes toward four groups — atheists, conservative Christians, Jews and Muslims — and found that Americans generally harbor fears and judgment about all four. What those fears were, however, differed by the group.
“People think atheists have terrible values, but they’re not a physical threat. They think Muslims have inferior values and are also a physical danger,” said Paul Froese, the sociologist at the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion who led the survey. “People make distinctions between ‘you’re a deviant person’ versus ‘you’re a dangerous person.’ … Over one-third of Americans don’t fear their safety when it comes to conservative Christians, but think they’re out to limit their freedom. You have that interesting dynamic: different kinds of threats.”
The survey demonstrated who fears or mistrusts whom. For example, 40 percent of people who are religiously unaffiliated said that conservative Christians have inferior values, while about 20 percent of mainline Protestants and just 3 percent of Jews agreed with that statement.
Baylor Religion Survey
About 52 percent of white evangelicals said that Muslims want to limit their freedom, and 46 percent said the same of atheists. Other groups were much less likely to agree, but 50 percent of Jews and 66 percent of people who said they have no religious affiliation viewed conservative Christians as a threat to their freedom.
Baylor Religion Survey
When it comes to physical safety, most groups still didn’t agree. Evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics saw Muslims as the biggest threat. Black Protestants saw atheists as the biggest threat to physical safety, while Jews and nonreligious people saw conservative Christians as the most dangerous.
Baylor Religion Survey
Negative perceptions of Jews were less common, but still prevalent among some Americans: About 10 percent of people who have no religious affiliation said that Jews want to their limit freedom and have inferior values, and similar numbers of evangelicals and black Protestants agreed with at least one of those statements.
The study demonstrated that partisanship also has a strong effect when it comes to predicting peoples’ views on these topics, with Republicans offering more negative views of Muslims and atheists, and Democrats offering more negative views of conservative Christians.
Froese said partisanship is becoming as strong a marker of cultural differences as religion, or sometimes stronger. “We are finding more and more that party identity is a cultural identity as much as religion is,” he said.
Want more stories about faith? Follow Acts of Faith on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter.
PRRI poll: White evangelicals make up just 1 percent of D.C. residents
Washington National Cathedral removes windows honoring Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson
Damaged by the church? This pastor has a congregation full of ‘recovering Christians’By Karen Stillerman
As a food lover and an agriculture geek, I frequently plan vacations around what there is to eat. This summer, I traveled to Iceland, ostensibly to admire its breathtaking scenery and ride its tough little horses. As a bonus, I escaped a couple weeks of DC's stifling heat. But of course, I also took the opportunity to see (and taste) this unique country's equally unique food and agriculture system up close. Here are my observations.
Weird Food is Just the Beginning
Icelanders are known for eating some very strange things. Nothing is stranger than hákarl or fermented shark, which I did not sample. Not because it sounds thoroughly disgusting—though it really does—but because sharks have been dangerously overfished around the world and I couldn't guarantee the sustainability of this delicacy. Or at least that's what I told myself. Ditto for whale, another traditional food, though one most Icelanders don't eat much today. I had no such convenient excuse for not trying pickled rams' testicles…
I did eat skyr, which is not yogurt (though I'm not entirely sure why not.) And I enjoyed salty Icelandic licorice enrobed in milk chocolate, though this proved to be a flavor combination my colleagues in the office did not appreciate for some reason. (Sorry, folks. At least I didn't bring back hákarl.)
But beyond these novelties lie a cuisine and food production systems that are closely tied to the local land and waters and influenced by past and present sustainability challenges.
Icelanders Grow (and Eat) What They Can
Iceland is a large volcanic island located just south of the Arctic Circle. As such, it's subject to some pretty serious climatic, geographic and geologic challenges. Though winter temperatures in Reykjavik—the world's more northerly capital—are moderated by the Gulf Stream, Icelandic summers are still quite cool. So while its coastal waters and rivers provide a bounty of fish and seafood, the island's volcanic soils are thin and much of its interior is covered by lava fields, mountains and glaciers, which is pretty limiting for agriculture.
Still, about 3.8 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture as of 2006 (the latest stats I found). According to the Farmers Association of Iceland, top crops include cold-lovers you might expect: potatoes, turnips, carrots and cabbage. Rhubarb does well in the climate and you can find it in gardens and escaped into the countryside from abandoned homesteads.
What you wouldn't expect are Icelandic tomatoes. But with a midnight sun shining above and the island's famous geothermal heat radiating from below, Iceland does indeed produce tomatoes (as well as peppers and even bananas!) in greenhouses. I got a chance to see these in Hveragerði, which is home to many hot springs and a horticultural college.
More than crops, though, Iceland's vast land resources are well-suited for grass and grazing animals, most notably sheep. There are some 800,000 sheep in Iceland, an astonishing number considering the human population of the entire country currently stands at just 332,000. The large national sheep herd explains why nearly every restaurant in Reykjavik offers its own variation on homey kjötsúpa or lamb soup. (Every one I tried was delicious.)
But I wondered, are all those sheep sustainable?
A Troubled Environmental History and an Uncertain Future
Iceland was first settled by Nordic explorers (aka Vikings) more than 1,100 years ago and it's thought that about 25 percent of the island was forested. But those forests were decimated for firewood and timber and the grasslands overgrazed by sheep, cattle and horses. About 30 percent of the country has been classified as man-made desert. (This 2007 NPR story features Icelandic soil scientists working to restore the environment and is worth a listen.)
Today, Iceland has a national strategy for sustainability and is carefully cultivating its image as an ecotourism mecca. As part of my horseback trip, I had the unique opportunity to stay a night on an Icelandic sheep farm and to chat a bit with the farmer.
Aðalsteinn Sigurðarson (it's a mouthful, so he goes by Alli, pictured here on the left) operates a 6,600-hectare farm (about 16,308 acres) near the city of Egilsstaðir in eastern Iceland. His great-great-grandfather bought the land in 1922 and his family has farmed there ever since. Alli's parents retired to Egilsstaðir a few years ago and none of his sisters opted to stay on the farm. Though they come and help out on weekends, he's basically managing the place by himself. The farm, called Vaðbrekka, was profiled by Forbes in 2014.
Vaðbrekka is located at 400 meters (about 1,300 feet) above sea level. (See this amazing aerial photo of the place. My group rode our horses down out of the mountains to the left one evening and crossed the river to get there.)
Alli told me proudly that there is only one farm in Iceland that is higher and farther from the coast. His flock ranges from 300 sheep in the wintertime to more than 800 during the summer.
Though I was there in July, the only sheep I saw were two hand-raised orphan lambs loitering outside Alli's back door. The rest of the flock was high up in the hills, grazing on the rich summer grasses. Alli told me his fields produce enough hay to keep the sheep fed when they come back down to the barn for the long winter.
It was hard for me to gauge the sustainability of this operation, though it seemed idyllic.
My colleague and agroecologist Marcia DeLonge studies the sustainability of grazing, mostly in the context of beef cattle here in the U.S. We know that cattle and sheep can damage fragile grasslands if not managed correctly and that they produce heat-trapping methane emissions that pose a problem for our planet. At the same time, as Marcia has written, well-managed grazing can be a better alternative to croplands in many ecosystems and can even add carbon to the soil and provide other environmental benefits.
Like Marcia, scientists in Iceland are studying the best ways to manage grazing in that country. Aided by science and science-based public policies, I hope farmers and ranchers in that country and in my own can find the right balance. Our future depends upon it.We can't get enough of friendships between animals of different species, whether it's a dolphin and a dog, a deer and a cat or a puppy and a duckling. One of the sweetest examples of inter-species friendship we've seen yet is the one between a ewe named Annabelle and a dog named Boomer.
Despite the fact that she's an adult sheep, Annabelle is "still a lamb who thinks she's a dog," explains owner Suzanne McMinn, who writes a blog called Chickens in the Road about her experiences living among sheep, goats, cows, miniature donkeys, dogs and other animals on a farm in West Virginia.
Annabelle doesn't have many friends among her fellow sheep, but she loves both people and dogs. "You can't walk into the pasture without her bouncing right over to you, following you around," McMinn writes. "You might even call her obnoxious occasionally, like when she almost knocks you down -- except that she's so sweet and cute."
Cute she definitely is, especially when she's hopping around like mad, chasing Boomer around a pasture -- and Boomer seems to be having a great time too.
RELATED UNUSUAL ANIMAL FRIENDSHIPS:
• Your morning adorable: Dog and bird play ball
• Your morning adorable: Piglet and dog play together
-- Lindsay Barnett
Video: ChickensintheRoad via YouTubeJanuary 29, 2014 by Kate Harrington
Capital Metro is planning to make its first major improvements to the MetroRail system since that commuter rail started running in 2010. With the help of an $11.3 million federal grant, Capital Metro plans to spend $27 million over the next two years to add a second track at three of its stations, improve signal and crossing equipment, make track modifications to increase speed, and make some changes to the trains themselves to make them sturdier. The grant money, as well as the agency’s general revenue, will also go toward bridge and track repairs.
A separate $4.3 million federal grant will help Capital Metro shift the MetroRail track between IH-35 and Plaza Saltillo. The agency plans to develop that land. Capital Metro officials have said that will be the first project to take shape.
The changes could shave a few minutes off rush hour commutes and increase weekday boardings by about 10 percent, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Capital Metro also plans to eventually purchase up to six more train cars, but doesn’t currently have the funding to do so.
What improvements should Capital Metro make to the public transit system? Dou you currently use the MetroRail trains? Leave your comments below.
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commentsDemocratic leaders have spent many dark, post-Trump nights trying to figure out where the party went wrong. We’ve called in well-credentialed experts to draft policy papers. We’ve consulted pollsters to re-slice the electorate. We’ve even read “Hillbilly Elegy.” But unfortunately, none of these efforts seems to be working.
Those in leadership claim they’re being proactive, but the “Better Deal” policy framework hasn’t made an impression on anyone outside the offices of the DNC. As a result, recent polls by Gallup and CBS show more people trust Republicans with the economy than Democrats, and that the economy is a rare bright spot for the president’s approval rating.
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The problem is, Democrats have a giant blind spot that keeps us from seeing why we’re failing and why we have so little credibility with voters who should be part of our natural base: Democrats have a classism problem.
If someone assembled an all-male committee to make decisions on women’s health, Democrats would immediately howl that this was unacceptable. If anyone formed an all-white committee to make decisions on racial justice, the party would rightly scorn it. But somehow, it hasn’t occurred to Democrats that as we need ethnic and gender diversity, we need economic diversity as well. We should insist that workers be included in the discussion of policies affecting the multi-racial working class.
The party is certainly conscious of the electoral importance of working people. We use them as props in campaign ads and as human backdrops at rallies. We’ve used focus groups to conduct a sort of condescending anthropological research on our fellow citizens. We’ve done everything but elevate actual working-class citizens into Congress.
In rural America, from Youngstown, Ohio, to Huntington, W.Va., to Galesburg, Ill., we’ve seen shockingly fast and severe economic decline as the coal, steel and other industries that were once the backbones of these communities collapsed. No one feels the pain caused by this decline more than the broader, multi-racial working class.
American workers haven’t had a raise in 40 years. The three most common jobs in this nation today are cashier, retail sales clerk, and fast food worker. None provides the dignity of being able to support a family without assistance; all are threatened by automation. The official unemployment rate may be low, but the spike in suicides, liver disease, and drug addiction tells us all is not well. The American working class is literally dying.
Our economy is divided between the servers and served. The central challenge of our time is restoring some balance to our modern, Gilded Age economy. The Democratic Party will only survive if a new paradigm, where lives of dignity are available for the many, not just the lucky few, is developed. The key to developing that paradigm is for us as a party and nation to stop merely talking about the working class, but to elect members of this demographic to Congress.
This idea will strike many in the elite class — and Democratic establishment — as radical. Undoubtedly there will be claims of class-warfare from many and shrugs from others.
But ask yourself: How can we call ourselves a truly representative American democracy without involving working class people in the decision-making process that is going to shape their own futures?
Politicians have, at best, only pretended to care about working people and, at worst, have screwed them over. From trickle-down economics to anti-worker trade deals to union busting to Wall Street bailouts, leaders from both parties have advanced policies that suck wealth out of rural America.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The two parties are led by remarkably similar groups of people. There are lawyers, of course. But out of 535 members, 273 are business execs and owners. Precisely zero come from the service sector jobs most commonly held by Americans. In Congress today, there are as many rodeo announcers as there are trade union members.
Here’s how the game works: Republicans use cultural and racial appeals to pander to the white working class. Those appeals drive working people-of-color to the Democratic Party, which pleads their case publicly while catering behind closed doors to the same wealthy donors as Republicans. This tidy dance has divided white and black workers who share economic interests.
It’s time for a new leadership paradigm that will bust the politics of tribalism. This new direction is never going to come from the current beneficiaries of the status quo. It’s not going to come from yet another Harvard-trained lawyer who gets their knowledge of the plight of regular folks from the New York Times. What we really need are some people with first-hand understanding of the world most Americans live in. We need people who get charged for the uniforms they’re required to wear to work, who check their balance before they pull out cash at an ATM and who know what it means to struggle to make ends meet.
There are candidates out there, working hard out of the media spotlight, without access to donors or support from the Democratic establishment. We need people like Mariah Phillips, a teacher and mother of five whose idea of “me time” is putting in extra hours as a Starbuck’s barista. Her decision to run to represent Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District was driven by her experience with restaurant staffs who had never had health insurance. She knows what it’s like, she says, “to wonder what bills you’re going to pay this month … how it hurts your pride.”
No white paper is going to be more convincing than having representatives with backgrounds similar to Mariah’s. Do you think when the lobbyists come calling she’ll be talked into selling out her family and friends for a campaign contribution? Do you think she’s going to divide workers by race in order to keep a grip on power?
If Democrats are going to reclaim the votes of the working people, they’re going to have to welcome those people into the halls of Congress. Only when workers have real power will Democrats have credibility with the multiracial American working class. Only when workers are treated as a group worthy of representation will we be able to reject the myth that white and black workers are adversaries. Only then, when Democrats become once again the party that respects, supports, and elevates working class people as leaders rather than props, will we be a party worthy of their votes.
Krystal Ball is the president of The People’s House Project. She formerly was a candidate for Congress in Virginia and a host on MSNBC’s “The Cycle.” Follow her on Twitter @krystalball.As President Trump settles into his new job, analysts are reflecting on how the Dow industrials surged and slumped under his 44 predecessors.
Who oversaw the biggest gain for blue-chip stocks?
MarketWatch and others have written about stocks generally faring better when there’s a Democrat in the White House, but the crown goes to a Republican, Calvin Coolidge.
DJIA, -0.14% Bespoke Investment Group has created the chart below showing the Dow Jones Industrial Average’srise of 252% on Coolidge’s watch.
Coolidge took office in August 1923 after President Warren Harding’s sudden death and served until March 1929, when Herbert Hoover was sworn in.
The Vermont native occupied the White House during the exuberant Roaring Twenties. “Silent Cal” later acknowledged that he bore some responsibility for the Great Depression that began in late 1929, just a few months after he left the White House.
Five other presidents saw triple-digit percentage gains for the Dow during their terms: Democrats Bill Clinton (227%), Franklin Roosevelt (197%) and Barack Obama (148%), along with Republicans Ronald Reagan (135%) and Dwight Eisenhower (120%).
What about the biggest slumps?
Coolidge’s successor Hoover, a Republican, experienced the largest-ever Dow drop (-83%), according to Bespoke’s data.
The second- and third-biggest falls also occurred under Republicans, with George H.W. Bush seeing a tumble of 22% and Richard Nixon, a 16.5% decline.Since joining Grey’s Anatomy in Season 9, Jerrika Hinton — aka Dr. Stephanie Edwards — hasn’t exactly had the easiest character arc. She’s suffered through the loss of fellow interns, that embarrassing day bumping into everything after LASIK surgery and the episode where she inadvertently hit on a high-schooler.
Oh, yeah! We nearly forgot. There was also that one time her then-boyfriend, Dr. Jackson Avery, broke up a wedding, simultaneously (and very publicly) dumping Edwards in the process.
Of course, notes Hinton with endearing modesty, it could be worse. Her character could be dead. “I just feel fortunate we have survived this long,” she told us, laughing, when we chatted about Season 12 recently.
More: Grey’s Anatomy: Spoilers and other stuff to know before Season 12 starts
You can’t have highs without lows, after all — it’s the law of nature. And happily for Hinton, those valleys are coming fewer and farther between. Her character now rests comfortably in the realm of peaks. Last season, we saw her start to come into her own, which made us wonder: Is Season 12 going to be the season Stephanie slides into the ranks of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital’s top doctors?
On social media, she and Dr. Jo Wilson (played by Camilla Luddington) are being compared to another iconic doctor duo: Grey and Yang. But Hinton, who for the record is quite possibly one of the most charming people on the planet, isn’t ready to acknowledge the notion that she and Jo could potentially be the next generation Grey and Yang.
“I resist that idea. I think that’s a lot of pressure!” she says, laughing. “The show is Grey’s Anatomy — it’s about Meredith. I think they will continue to explore that dynamic between close friends and competitive coworkers and somebody being more relationship-oriented and somebody else perhaps being more ambitious career-wise. There are so many different ways to explore that dynamic that fall outside of the realm of Yang and Grey.”
More: Grey’s Anatomy: Why the loss of Patrick Dempsey is great for the show
Clearly, Dr. Edwards isn’t gunning for Pompeo’s spot in the Grey Sloan social hierarchy. So what can we expect in store for the character this season? Hinton had a few telling teasers for us.
Her voice will strengthen
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Edwards is her progression over the seasons. Last season, we saw her voice strengthen so much. Will that upward trend continue? “Yes… and that’s something I’m excited and so pleased about,” Hinton told us.
We’ll actually learn about Edwards pre-GSMH
Unlike so many of the major characters on GA, we know very little about Edwards — but that’s about to change. “As she continues to find her way in the world of Grey Sloan, you’ll find out more about her and where she comes from — how and why she’s in this place, and why she is the kind of person that has no compunction about speaking out about what she feels is right,” Hinton explains. “You know, she’s a woman of conviction, and we’re going to continue to find out more about why that is.”
She’s involved in a progressive medical case of some sort
Real talk: Edwards is kind of a big deal. Last season, she really stepped up to the plate when it came to competing for and contributing to major surgeries (hello, Dr. Herman’s brain surgery!). Will Season 12 see her assume a leadership role? Time will tell. “Right now, we’re going into filming Episode 6 and, up to this point, there haven’t been any major surgeries Stephanie has been involved in,” says Hinton, adding with emphasis, “but there has been one case of postoperative care that a bit groundbreaking Stephanie has to be involved in.” Fun fact: Hinton records all of Edwards’ major surgeries and cases in a notebook she carries around set.
We may learn something traumatic about her past
Speaking of the groundbreaking post-op care Edwards is involved in, Hinton tellingly reveals that it “kind of triggers some stuff for her, and that’s one of the ways you come to find out more of her backstory.” Interesting! Could Edwards have something dark and painful in her past? It would seem so.
There’s basically zero chance Edwards and Avery will rekindle
When we admit we liked Edwards and Avery together — and quite possibly simply because we adore Edwards’ character and we adore looking at Avery thus, convenience — Hinton jokes, “Did you really? Don’t put that in print! People will burn your house down,” referencing fans’ dislike of the pair as a couple. For her part, Hinton wasn’t in favor of the coupling because she feels like Edwards didn’t know who she was when she was with Avery. “So I have always pushed for more of a commitment to investigating her as a standalone individual rather than as byproduct of someone or as being someone’s girlfriend. I think that results in more worthwhile storytelling.”
More: How Jesse Williams is revolutionizing Twitter
But Edwards will find love again
And soon! “There is a new love interest on the horizon, but for the first few episodes, I feel like the focus is on her,” Hinton says. “You’re going to understand her more as a person, and I think that’s a great metaphor for life as well — you need to understand yourself as a full person before you go jumping back into something else.”
Don’t miss Hinton on Grey’s Anatomy, Thursday at 8/7c on ABC.Even though Anchorage has received its first few measurable snowfalls, most trails aren't quite ready to accept our family's wintertime ski traffic, so we've been hoofing it a lot lately. Plus, the weather has been gorgeous, and nothing is as invigorating to a work-weary parent as a walk in the woods after a busy day.
Usually we have time for an hour of uninterrupted family time on trails near our home, between pick-up from school and homework (I firmly believe that kids do more productive homework, with less complaining, if they play outside first).
Our favorite trail, and one of the easiest to access, is the Campbell Airstrip Trailhead in East Anchorage.
Popular with local hikers, bikers, runners and dog mushers, the Campbell Tract and adjacent Far North Bicentennial Park are a diverse set of trails that provide far more than a place to run the ya-yas out after a day spent sitting at a desk.
I became interested in the history of the area after passing an interpretive sign along the new section of paved trail leading from the intersection of Tudor Road and Campbell Airstrip Road to the trailhead. "Can you see the foxhole?" the sign said. "This area was once part of Campbell Garrison."
Campbell Garrison? I needed a bit more information, so I turned to the Bureau of Land Management field office and Jenny Blanchard, the archaeologist and cultural resources program manager for the agency.
Blanchard told me that after Pearl Harbor, the military didn't want all of its forces concentrated at Fort Richardson should a Japanese attack occur, so they set up four smaller satellite garrisons (groups of troops) around Southcentral Alaska.
The four, located in Anchorage, Birchwood, Willow and Goose Bay, were designed strategically to provide both access and protection in case the Japanese forces came calling.
We often use the trails without thinking about the reasons they're named the "Campbell Airstrip Trailhead" or "P-38 Lightning Trail," but in truth the Campbell Tract was an integral part of the nation's defense system between 1942 and 1944.
"The Campbell Garrison was mostly wall tents and bunkers made up of tree saplings and sod," Blanchard said. "But Quonset huts eventually replaced the temporary shelters, and the military had fighter planes stationed right where we walk today."
There were foxholes too, dug by soldiers and never filled in to preserve the integrity of the tract's history. Today they look different, half-filled with more than 70 years of forest debris, but whenever I spot one, I feel like I've discovered a treasure.
That's no mistake, Blanchard said.
"We have the interpretive signs and trails that take visitors past the largest and most visible features, but we don't show every fortification and feature in order to preserve them for the future," she said, adding that both state and federal laws protect historic resources, even way out in the forest.
Blanchard recommends the following route for families, especially those with smaller kids. It's also a great mountain or fat bike route, with the ability to extend your ride.
Remember to stay on marked trails for both your safety and the protection of the area and watch for wildlife. If you find an artifact you think might be part of the Campbell Garrison's past, Blanchard recommends taking a photo, getting a GPS location if possible and sending it to the BLM field office.
Maps are available at the same BLM website (although I had to Google "BLM Campbell Tract" to find a printable version), at the Alaska Public Lands Information Center on Fourth Avenue or at trailheads.
Start at the Campbell Airstrip Trailhead, where you can follow the trail across Campbell Creek. To your left is a one-mile loop with two options: Birch Knob and Viewpoint. Pick either one; you'll end up in the same place.
Along Birch Knob, a short but steep hill leads to an area where the Army planted gun emplacements as a lookout mechanism, with several foxholes still remaining along the trail itself. At the bottom of the hill, take a left again and walk back toward Viewpoint Trail, taking note of the remains of building foundations on either side.
Viewpoint Trail features several signs providing the story of the Campbell Tract's history, with photos of how the area looked during the 1940s. Keep an eye out for more foxholes.
One of the original roads, and an airplane taxiway from the war, has become the P-38 Lightning Trail. It's a dog-mushing-only trail during the winter, so you'll need to wait until the snow melts to see the features there. However, parts of the Moose Track Trail and Campbell Airstrip Trail have features along them, and they are open to everyone year-round.
Why is a place like this important? Blanchard summed it up perfectly in an email.
"Campbell Tract has been recognized as a significant historic district — eligible for the National Register of Historic Places — so we want Alaska's kids to know about it and be good stewards of this part of Anchorage history into the future."
Hear that, kids? It's up to you to keep the story alive.SALT LAKE CITY — Most brands are bombing on YouTube, but the LDS Church's brand is the bomb on the social media video site.
The Mormon Channel is one of the top 5,000 YouTube channels, with 58.7 million views. That's a rare achievement for any brand, let alone The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to an analysis of the top YouTube brands by the Touchstorm Video Index.
Brands are underperforming on YouTube. Just 74 of the top 5,000 channels — fewer than 2 percent — belong to brands like Coke, Pepsi and Disney Parks. Some of the world's largest brands don't crack the list, which means they are being whipped by musicians, teens with webcams and professional YouTube content producers.
Touchstorm's analysis found that other brands, like the Mormon Channel, Blendtec and the Paley Center for Media, beat top-five global brands because they do a better job getting people to become subscribers to their channels.
"The Mormon Church outranks Apple and Microsoft, Ford Models tops Ford Motors, and Little Tykes buries Toys ‘R Us when it comes to YouTube subscribers, per Touchstorm," Adweek's Mike Shields reported. "That’s where brands blow it... Even companies like Lego and EA that have produced standout YouTube content are lousy when it comes to converting subscribers and bringing back repeat viewers...."
As of Oct. 5, the Mormon Channel had 58,737,563 views and 210,631 subscribers.
"The more subscribers you have, the easier it gets to launch more content," Touchstorm's the analysis found. "They see it in their newsfeeds, watch it and share it — which creates velocity. YouTube takes note of velocity, and that video will likely end up featured in more places. This creates more velocity. Subscribers help you create a cycle of success."
Touchstorm's analysis found that some brands scored massive numbers of views from three or fewer viral videos, while other channels spread their views broadly across their video library.
The Mormon Channel fits the latter category. It had published 1,875 videos as of the Oct. 5 Touchstone report. The analysis included a graphic that showed the Mormon Channel receives an above average of subscribers per million page views.
Today, the Mormon Channel has 1,963 videos online.
Just 5.3 percent of the Mormon Channel's views came from its top three videos, Touchstorm found.
"When views are dispersed in this way, it often is a sign of a brand that is publishing regularly and building a base of evergreen content able to grow over time," Touchstorm reported.
To make the top 5,000, a YouTube channel needed 43 million views. The LDS Church nearly qualified a second website, Mormon.org, with its 42 million views and 37,500 subscribers.
An official LDS Church blog post about the Touchstorm analysis noted that the church has several other YouTube channels:
Mormon Tabernacle Choir (40,000 subscribers and 5.5 million views)
Mormon Newsroom (21,000 subscribers and 3.5 million views)
FamilySearch (7,200 subscribers and 1 million views)
The three most popular videos on the Mormon Channel are:CNN's Brooke Baldwin Breaks Down When Anti-Trump Pundit Drops N-Word
CNN's Brooke Baldwin Breaks Down When Anti-Trump Pundit Drops N-Word
Breaking News
CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin was NOT having it when a guest on her show used the n-word while criticizing Donald Trump's appointees, and she abruptly pulled the plug on the interview.
Author Charles Kaiser was ripping Stephen Bannon when he claimed Trump's Chief Strategist uses the racial epithet. Watch the reaction from Brooke and Paris Dennard -- a Trump supporter who's black and shocked as hell at the turn in the conversation.
The buck stopped with Brooke... real quick.
2:00 PM PT |
to be considered.[11]
Fourteen teams paid the 500,000 € fee to apply for one of the four wild card spots. FIBA then whittled down the teams to eight semifinalists – Cameroon, Germany, Great Britain, Korea, Lebanon, Lithuania, Nigeria, and Russia.[12] On Saturday, December 12, FIBA awarded Germany, Lebanon, Lithuania and Russia the four wild cards.[13]
List of qualified teams [ edit ]
The following 24 teams qualified for the final tournament (FIBA World Ranking at start of tournament in parentheses):[14]
Group Draw [ edit ]
The draw held on December 15 divided the qualified teams into four groups of six, groups A, B, C, and D, as listed for the preliminary round. Aside from the fact that those teams in the same line would not be in the same preliminary round groups, there were no other restrictions on how teams may be drawn.
Squads [ edit ]
At the start of tournament, all 24 participating countries had 12 players on their rosters. Final squads for the tournament were due on August 26, two days before the start of competition.[15]
Angola and the United States were the only teams made up of entirely domestic players (Jordan and Russia each had 11 domestic players). Slovenia was the only team composed entirely of individuals playing outside the domestic league. The Canada squad also consisted entirely of individuals playing outside the country, but at that time Canada had no professional league operating exclusively in the country (a minor professional league was scheduled to begin play in 2011). The National Basketball Association, based in the U.S., has a Canadian team, and several minor leagues operate on both sides of the U.S.—Canada border. Four Canadian squad members played in U.S.-based competitions—two with U.S.-based NBA teams, and two for Gonzaga University's team. Forty-one NBA players were selected to compete in the tournament, the most of any league.
Preparation matches [ edit ]
Acropolis Tournament [ edit ]
Greece and Serbia both began the tournament shorthanded when each had two players suspended for their roles in a brawl at the World Championship tuneup Acropolis Tournament, held in mid-August. The two teams engaged in a chaotic brawl with 2:40 left when Greece's Antonis Fotsis threatened Serbia's Miloš Teodosić after Teodosić committed a foul.[16] The fight spilled off the floor and into the locker room tunnel; the game was thus terminated with final score the score at the time of the interruption (74–73 for Greece). Serbian center Nenad Krstić was arrested and held overnight for throwing a chair in the brawl.
For their roles in the melee, Krstić was suspended for the first three games of the tournament, while Teodosić, and Greece's Fotsis and Sofoklis Schortsanitis were suspended for the first two games. Both Greek coach Jonas Kazlauskas and Serbian coach Dušan Ivković criticized FIBA for waiting until less than 48 hours before the tournament – over a week after the brawl – to announce the suspensions, citing the unfairness of playing shorthanded for the first games.[17] Greece eventually won their first two games in spite of the suspensions, while Serbia won two of their first three games.
Bamberg Super Cup [ edit ]
Preliminary round [ edit ]
2010 FIBA World Championship final rankings.
The top four finishers in each of the four preliminary round groups advanced to the sixteen team, single-elimination knockout stage, where Group A teams would meet Group B teams and Group C would meet Group D. European teams proved the most successful in the first round, as nine of the ten teams advanced to the knockout stage (only Germany did not progress). Both Oceanian teams qualified for the next round, as did three of the five FIBA Americas teams. The three African and four Asian teams struggled, with only Angola and China reaching the knockout stage after each finished fourth place in their group.
There were few surprises in the early round; each team that advanced to the knockout stage was ranked in the top 20 of the FIBA World Ranking at the time of the tournament. Defending champions Spain struggled early, losing two of their first three games before recovering to finish second in Group D. Argentina and the United States, the two top teams in the FIBA rankings, both cruised to the knockout phase, as the United States went 5–0 and Argentina went 4–1, with their only loss coming to Number 5 ranked Serbia.
Tie-breaking procedure [ edit ]
At the end of the preliminary round, any ties will be broken by the following criteria, ordered from the one that will be applied first to the last:
Game results between tied teams Goal average between games of the tied teams Goal average for all games of the tied teams Drawing of lots
Group A (Kayseri) [ edit ]
Team Pld W L PF PA PD Pts Tie Serbia 5 4 1 465 356 +109 9 1–0 Argentina 5 4 1 413 379 +34 9 0–1 Australia 5 3 2 381 341 +40 8 Angola 5 2 3 340 414 −74 7 1–0 Germany 5 2 3 378 402 −24 7 0–1 Jordan 5 0 5 361 446 −85 5
Group B (Istanbul) [ edit ]
Team Pld W L PF PA PD Pts United States 5 5 0 455 331 +124 10 Slovenia 5 4 1 393 376 +17 9 Brazil 5 3 2 398 354 +44 8 Croatia 5 2 3 395 407 −12 7 Iran 5 1 4 301 367 −66 6 Tunisia 5 0 5 300 407 −107 5
Group C (Ankara) [ edit ]
Team Pld W L PF PA PD Pts Tie Turkey 5 5 0 393 285 +108 10 Russia 5 4 1 365 346 +19 9 Greece 5 3 2 403 370 +33 8 China 5 1 4 360 422 −62 6 1−1, 1.0127 Puerto Rico 5 1 4 386 401 −15 6 1−1, 0.9939 Ivory Coast 5 1 4 334 417 −83 6 1−1, 0.9938
Group D (Izmir) [ edit ]
Team Pld W L PF PA PD Pts Tie Lithuania 5 5 0 391 341 +50 10 Spain 5 3 2 420 356 +64 8 1−1, 1.0705 New Zealand 5 3 2 424 400 +24 8 1−1, 0.9708 France 5 3 2 351 339 +12 8 1−1, 0.9595 Lebanon 5 1 4 339 440 −101 6 Canada 5 0 5 330 379 −49 5
Final round (Istanbul) [ edit ]
Championship bracket [ edit ]
Consolation bracket [ edit ]
Classification round Fifth place September 10, 2010 Spain 97 September 12, 2010 Slovenia 80 Spain 81 September 10, 2010 Argentina 86 Russia 61 Argentina 73 Seventh place September 11, 2010 Slovenia 78 Russia 83
Round of 16 [ edit ]
September 5
18:00 Report Slovenia 87–58 Australia Scoring by quarter: 16–8, 26–13, 29–24, 16–13 Pts: Lakovič 19
Rebs: Rizvić 5
Asts: Dragić 8 Pts: Ingles 13
Rebs: Nielsen 8
Asts: Mills 3 Sinan Erdem Dome, Istanbul
Attendance: 15,000
September 5
21:00 Report Turkey 95–77 France Scoring by quarter: 19–14, 24–14, 28–17, 24–32 Pts: Türkoğlu 20
Rebs: İlyasova 5
Asts: Tunçeri 3 Pts: Diaw 21
Rebs: Diaw 5
Asts: Piétrus 4 Sinan Erdem Dome, Istanbul
Attendance: 15,000
Quarterfinals [ edit ]
5th–8th classification [ edit ]
Semifinals [ edit ]
Third–place game [ edit ]
Final [ edit ]
Statistical leaders [ edit ]
Individual tournament highs [ edit ]
Individual game highs [ edit ]
Team tournament highs [ edit ]
Team game highs [ edit ]
Final rankings [ edit ]
Flag of the top three teams at the medal ceremony
Method of breaking ties:
Result of classification game
Place in preliminary round group
Winning percentage
Overall points average
Awards [ edit ]
2010 FIBA World Championship Winner
United States
4th title
All-Tournament Team [ edit ]
Referees [ edit ]
On August 18, 2010, FIBA named the forty referees that officiated at the tournament.[47] Below are the referees, along with the first round group that each was assigned to:
Broadcasting [ edit ]
Rights [ edit ]
FIBA announced that the championship will be shown in 183 countries, beating the record set be the 2006 championship which was 132. Countries that aired the championship for the first time were India and the United Kingdom, while Canada covered the event for the first time since hosting the 1994 FIBA World Championship.[48]
TV ratings [ edit ]
According to FIBA secretary general Patrick Baumann, the TV ratings for the 2010 championship exceeded the 2006 FIBA World Championship's and the FIBA EuroBasket 2009 numbers, with an expected audience of 800 million people in 200 countries, while 30 million people visited the official website.[49]
The preliminary round game between China and Greece was watched by around 65 million Chinese.[citation needed]
The U.S. TV ratings for the Final between the U.S. and Turkey, on the other hand, was watched by less than 900,000 viewers in American cable network ESPN, worse than the average audience of the broadcast of the 2009-10 NBA season, but double than the airing of the first game of the 2010 WNBA Finals on its sister terrestrial network ABC which was aired on the same timeslot.[50]
List of broadcasters [ edit ]
TV broadcasters[51]
See also [ edit ]Click on image to enlarge
Drew Geraci just shared a good news about the new Sony A7rIII:
“Very Excited to share this side by side comparison of the A7RIII (full production model) shooting Astrophotography at 3.2″ and 10” at ISO 12,800 utilizing the Sony 16-35mm GM lens. As you can see in the side by side comparison, with ALL noise reduction turned off in the main menu, you can easily see that all stars are present and accounted for when blown up at 100% resolution. The star-eater is no more.
Download RAW images here: https://www.dropbox.com/…/ejyad8…/AAApFpv-kmRWfslWZ0-69awRa…
Password: star”
This is definitely good news as it shows Sony is aware of the issue and actually knows how to fix this. Let’s hope there is a firmware fix coming soon for current Sony A7/A9 cameras!
Preorders:
Sony A7rIII at Amazon, Bhphoto, Adorama, BuyDig, FocusCamera, Calumet DE, Wex UK. Photo Porst Neuwied. Sony Netherland. Sony Australia. Sony Japan.
Sony 24-105mm at Amazon, Bhphoto, Adorama, BuyDig, FocusCamera, Amazon DE, Calumet DE, Wex UK.
Join the A7rIII facebook group to discuss the camera features and tests!
–
Thanks Chris!GREEN BAY — Some might argue that this latest run of Green Bay Packers' success doesn't match that of Curly Lambeau's and Vince Lombardi's great teams.
View the most dominant teams of all time
For the record, of the Packers' NFL record 13 league championships, six were won under Lambeau and five under Lombardi.
Lambeau is tied with George Halas for most NFL titles won by a head coach. In all, he was credited with coaching the Packers for 29 league seasons. And over the first 27 of those, he had only one losing team. Halas is the only coach in history to have had more winning seasons with one team, but his tenure as coach of the Chicago Bears was interrupted three times.
Lombardi won his five championships in just nine years.
The Lombardi Era certainly qualified as a dynasty, maybe the greatest in NFL history. And the 16-year period, from 1929 through 1944, when Lambeau won all six of his titles perhaps qualifies, as well. The debate would center on the length of time it took Lambeau's teams to win the crowns and whether the term dynasty would apply when a franchise's roster is completely overhauled between its first and last championship.
That's why the ‘D' word has been rarely used to describe the Packers of today. Their last two Super Bowl victories came 14 years apart.
But talk of a dynasty will certainly heat up if the Packers win another Lombardi Trophy on Feb. 5. Any team with a chance to win three straight is going to be the object of intense and endless discussion on that topic. After all, only twice in the 92-year history of the NFL have teams won three in a row: The 1929-31 Packers before there were playoffs - when the title was decided by the final standings - and the 1965-67 Lombardi teams.
But even if the Packers fall short this year, their current run of success still ranks among the best ever.
It started in 1992 with the arrival of Ron Wolf, Mike Holmgren and Brett Favre, and it hit the 20-year mark this season with Ted Thompson, Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers leading the way.
During that period, the Packers have finished with a winning record 16 times and made the playoffs 14 times.
They also can subjectively claim the longest uninterrupted streak of great quarterback play in the history of the NFL. For 20 years, they've had two quarterbacks: Favre, a cinch to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and Rodgers, who is building a similar resume.
Maybe the Packers haven't won enough Super Bowls lately to satisfy some of their fans. But, clearly, what they have accomplished over the past 20 years qualifies as one of the 10 most dominant eras in league history.
Maybe the fans in Pittsburgh have it better. Over the past 40 seasons under Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin, the Steelers have been to the playoffs 24 times and won six Super Bowls. But the Packers have finished with a losing record only twice in their last 20 seasons; the Steelers have finished under.500 seven times in those 40 years.
During a 34-year stretch that spanned the coaching tenures of Don Shula, Jimmy Johnson and Dave Wannstedt, the Miami Dolphins finished with a winning record 27 times and qualified for the playoffs 21 times. But they won only two Super Bowls, and those were both under Shula in the first four seasons of that run.
The Dallas Cowboys enjoyed a 20-year period from 1966 to 1985 under Tom Landry where they didn't have a losing season. But they also won only two Super Bowls during that stretch and endured five straight losing seasons when it ended.
San Francisco's powerhouse teams from 1981-98 produced five Super Bowl victories. But they, too, pretty much collapsed when it was over.
The Packers' streak figures to continue well beyond this year with Rodgers in the prime of his career. Favre and Rodgers endured some occasional rough times in the last 20 years, but neither one had what you'd label a bad year. San Francisco is the only franchise that has ever had a comparable run, but the Joe Montana-Steve Young union covered only 18 seasons.
The Packers' future, win or lose over the next four weeks, couldn't look brighter. And that means this era of Packers football could soon match the Glory Years of Lambeau and Lombardi if it hasn't already in the eyes of fans and football historians.
But it will take winning more Super Bowls... and winning back-to-back titles would certainly help.
Former Press-Gazette sports editor Cliff Christl offers analysis of the Green Bay Packers each week.Austin, Texas, Approves Another 162 MW Of Solar
October 27th, 2015 by Jake Richardson
Austin, Texas just might become the most solar powered city in America. About two weeks ago, it approved the development of a new round of 288 MW of solar power projects. Even more recently, it approved an additional 162 MW, bringing the total to 450 MW, and that is just for new projects. If these new projects are completed, and it seems reasonable to believe they will be, Austin will have about 670 MW of solar power. In case you are wondering about costs, the 162 MW round of project set of contracts were at $38-$40/MWh.
“This deal is another hedge against the volatility of prices in the fossil fuel market. It is a win for the environment, a win for clean energy, and a win for Austin ratepayers,” explained Cyrus Reed, Conservation Director of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter.
So, which city in America has the most solar power at the moment? On a per capita basis, Honolulu was ranked first in a Forbes article. However, Los Angeles has more megawatts of solar power installed, with about 141.
Austin should not have too much trouble easily surpassing Los Angeles, considering its recent moves to greatly expand its solar power capacity.
It might be surprising that America’s number one solar city could be in Texas, which is a more conservative state and very obviously quite partial to petroleum. The thing about Austin though, is that it is sort of a progressive anomaly in the enormous state, with a huge and very reputable public university.
Education levels in Austin are higher than in most places in Texas, and in the rest of America. It ranked no. 15 in a list of 150 American cities for education. While education may not seem to be the most relevant criterion when solar power is considered, there has been some indication that the most educated people also have the highest view of solar power, “While favorable opinions were high among all education segments, those with the highest level of education had the highest favorable rating for solar energy, at 77%. Those with the lowest level of education, a high school diploma or less, exhibited a distinctly lower percentage of favorable responses (58%), the study found.”
Image Credit: Davey Dickler, Wiki Commons
Reprinted with permission.New evidence photos recently turned over to Congress show a stash of grenade parts, fuse assemblies and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition.
Evidence photos just turned over to Congress under subpoena show a frightening stash of grenade parts, fuse assemblies and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition. It was all hidden in a spare tire of an SUV crossing from the US to Mexico in 2010. The accused smuggler, an alleged drug cartel arms dealer named Jean Baptise Kingery, was questioned by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) but released.
Documents handed over to Congress by the Justice Department shed new light on missteps in the grenades case, and how ATF tracked the suspect for years.
ATF started watching Kingery in "2004 related to AK47 purchases," according to an internal email, "it is believed that he is trafficking them to Mexico." A full five years later in late 2009, ATF also learned Kingery was dealing in grenades: he'd ordered 120 grenade bodies on the Internet.
Grenades are weapons of choice for Mexico's killer drug cartels. An attack on a casino in Mexico last year killed 53 people.
Documents show ATF secretly intercepted the grenade bodies Kingery had ordered, marked them, and delivered them to him on Jan. 26, 2010. Their plan was to follow Kingery to his weapons factory in Mexico, with help from Mexican authorities Immigration and Customs (ICE).
Jean Baptise Kingery AP
ATF realized they might lose track of Kingery and the grenade parts in Mexico. But their emails show little attention to those who could be killed. Instead, officials expressed concerned with tying the grenades to Kingery after they reached Mexico. "Even in a post blast, as long as the safety lever is recovered we will be able to identify these tagged grenades," says one email.
An official now investigating ATF and the Justice Department for their actions in the Kingery case tells CBS News: "All the usual safeguards of law enforcement were thrown out. They were more worried about making a big case than they were about the public safety."
The plan to allow Kingery to traffic grenade parts into a foreign country and track him to his factory drew strong internal objections.
"That's not possible," wrote a lead ATF official in Mexico. "We are forbidden from doing that type of activity. If ICE is telling you they can do that, they are full of [expletive]..."
ATF officials in Mexico worried that once Kingery and the grenades crossed the border, they would disappear. And that's exactly what happened. Though ATF agents say they'd given all the specifics to Mexican military and police, the Mexicans failed to stop Kingery once he crossed into Mexico.
Four months later, Kingery surfaced again in the U.S. This time, the Border Patrol caught him trying to smuggle the new stash of grenade hulls shown in the photos. ATF questioned him but, once again, he was let go. Nobody has stepped forward to explain why Kingery was released after this incident. He allegedly continued to supply the Mexican drug cartels for another year and a half.
Evidence photos turned over to Congress
Kingery might still be on the street if Mexican authorities hadn't arrested him last August after raiding his stash house and factory. Police say they found enough parts to build 1,000 grenades. They also say Kingery confessed to teaching cartels how to make grenades, as well as helping them convert semi-automatic weapons to fully-automatic.
The Justice Department Inspector General is investigating the Kingery case along with ATF's Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed thousands of assault rifles and other weapons to "walk" into the hands of Mexican drug cartels in a failed attempt to take down a major cartel.
There are some similarities between the Kingery grenade case and Fast and Furious. The chief suspect in Fast and Furious, Manuel Celis-Acosta was stopped by law enforcement three times but released -- while allegedly trafficking firearms for cartels. It wasn't until weapons linked to him turned up at the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry that ATF finally charged Acosta.
The Kingery case and Fast and Furious were both supervised out of ATF's Phoenix office by Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell. It was Newell who wrote an email and delivered the bad news about Kingery to Washington DC headquarters: Mexican officials "lost Kingery" even though "they had plenty of notice and descriptive info."
The Justice Department and ATF had no immediate comment.In case you missed it, American publisher Kiss Ltd. recently brought the Guilty Gear series spin-off, Guilty Gear Isuka, to Steam. While Isuka isn’t one of the most popular or current iterations in the series, its sudden availability on the world’s largest digital distribution network for PC games raised many questions.
First and foremost, naturally, is if we will see other Arc System Works games appear on Steam.
Folks across the Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and Persona communities are pushing for increased availability of the company’s latest titles, particularly Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R, and Persona 4 The Ultimax Ultra Suplex Hold. Much like they’ve done in the past, Guilty Bits’ Novril and Carlos “Specs” Alexandre recently put together a special video to help mobilize fans.
Luckily, they’re being noticed. While Kiss acknowledges that a great deal of it is out of their hands (they issued a statement on their future with ArcSys on Facebook and discussed it further on Isuka’s Steam page), they also mention they are aware of the interest and are working towards that goal.
If you want to get in on the effort, be sure to reach out to the folks at Kiss Ltd. through both Facebook and Twitter. As always, courtesy and respect go a long way in discussions of this nature, so keep that in mind when contacting the publisher.
Sources: Novril (tip via FluffyM), Kiss Ltd. (1, 2)Aizawal: People wait at a polling station to cast their votes during Assembly elections in Aizawal on Monday. PTI Photo
Mizoram's normally high voter turnout and peaceful polls saw a repeat as the state went to polls on Monday, with people queuing up at polling stations even before they opened at 7 am and the turnout already touching 81.19 percent by the end of polling even as data from 90 remote polling stations had not yet filtered in by the time of filing this report.
This marks the highest turn-out on record as far as voting by EVMs is concerned, the previous record being 80 percent in 2008.
This year's postal ballots turn-out, open till December 8, still remains to be added to the present count. Joint CEO H Lalengmawia said looking at past records of postal ballots at least two percentage points may be added to the final turnout.
Hlumte polling station in Lunglei East constituency and Taitowkawn in Lengteng constituency registered 100% turnout.
Two centenarians, 104-year-old Kimchawngi of North-East Khawdungsei and 103-year-old Lianengi of Baktawng Tlangnuam, voted in the elections to determine Mizoram state's seventh legislative assembly.
There were no incidences of violence in spite of some alleged militant activity in the northern regions where some armed groups from Manipur are active, and turn-out in the three seats there stood at around 82 percent overall, according to CEO Ashwani Kumar.
All the four main parties' presidents except the Mizo National Front's Zoramthanga, who was in his East Tuipui seat near the Indo-Myanmar border on poll day, voted in their home constituencies in Aizawl.
While ZNP president Lalduhoma and MPC president Lalhmangaiha Sailo voted almost as soon as the polling stations opened, CM Lal Thanhawla cast his vote around 9.45 am.
The incumbent said he expected a "thumping majority" for his Congress party, which currently holds 32 of 40 seats in the state assembly.
... contd.
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsLooks like HBO maybe be giving Utopia, the American adaptation of British drama series, another go. Per Production Weekly, HBO has ordered another iteration of the show which is set to go in production this year.
HBO previously tried to adapt the British comedy by giving the project from David Fincher a straight to series order in 2014. But the project was ultimately cancelled a year later because of budgetary issues before it went into production.
According to Production Weekly, the production team from the 2014 version again seems to be involved in the project including David Fincher and Gillian Flynn. The show will go into production in October and production will last till May of next year.
The show revolves around the die-hard fans of an iconic underground graphic novel who are suddenly launched into their own pop-culture thriller when they learn that the author has secretly written a sequel. Unfortunately, the new manuscript is much more than just a book and those on the hunt for it suddenly find themselves in a game of shifting loyalties, conspiracy and shocking twists as the true meaning of the book is slowly revealed.Top mountain cross point is a project was designed by Mike Brötz that host the road toll station, restaurant and a Vintage Motorcycle Museum under a giant roof.
Project descriptions: Thanks to the gently curved, organic lining the building almost seems to merge with its surroundings – it was much better than using cubistic architectural elements. The choice of materials was essential, strongly focusing on natural designs, although we also used ferroconcrete. But wood still remains the main construction element from a visual point of view. Stylistically, I tried to combine timeless modern architecture and traditional shapes of typical Alpine houses. Therefore the Restaurant‘s front view has a saddleback roof that gently levels off in a huge curve towards the mountain gondola hall and the western part of the building which hosts the Road Toll Station on the ground floor and the Motorcycle Museum on the upper floor. The heart-warming interior design is characterized by wooden surfaces and steel shells combined with natural stone. Slightly influenced by industrial design, the building is strongly connected to technical elements as shown in the museum and the mountain gondola station.
One of the biggest challenges in planning this project was the harmonious connection between the different parts of the building. Under one giant roof you will find the road toll station of Timmelsjoch High Alpine Panorama Road, the base station of Kirchenkarbahn mountain gondola (state-of-the-art 10-person cabins), the Restaurant accommodating more than 200 persons including also a spacious sun terrace and a top-class Vintage Motorcycle Museum covering some 2000 m². Visitors are warmly invited to enjoy a great skiing day on the area‘s superb slopes, followed by a fabulous rest stop at the motorbike museum where countless classic gems are on display. Afterwards, mouth-watering delights await you at the restaurant before you leave the ski region. Also in the summer months you shouldn‘t miss a panoramic ride on the popular Timmelsjoch High Alpine Road leading past the marvelous "Top Mountain Cross Point" that offers uninterrupted outlooks and insights
> Futuristic architecture: KAFD Metro Station by Zaha Hadid
> Architectural concept: Makkah Metro C-Line StationsTexas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. Between 2010 and 2012, the rate doubled. And the rate in Texas between 2012 and 2014 remained high, with approximately 35 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Texas' rates are about seven times greater than in Canada and European countries.
As a result, the Texas Legislature established the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force in 2013. This 15-member task force of mostly physicians and healthcare experts set out to find out why pregnancy-related deaths have skyrocketed and what can be done to decrease them.
In a July 2016 report, the task force indicated that the most common causes of maternal death were cardiac events, overdose from illicit drugs (mostly opioids) and hypertensive disorders. Though cardiac events and hypertensive disorders are not surprising, it was surprising to see the opioid epidemic is now one of the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths.
The task force also found that black women were three times more likely to suffer from maternal mortalities.
"I was mortified," said Rep. Shawn Thierry (D-Houston) when she read the report. "And no one was doing anything to figure out why black women were more likely affected."
That's what compelled her to introduce HB 11, the "Texas Mothers Matter" bill. One of the primary directives in this bill is for the task force to prioritize why black women are disproportionately more likely to die.
"I was talking to other doctors, ob/gyns, and they didn't know about this statistics," she said. "I spoke to African-American women in the community, and they didn't know."
Unfortunately, the health disparity of black women dying disproportionately as a result of pregnancies is nothing new. The risk of maternal mortality in black women has been 3 times to 4 times higher in the United States for the past six decades.
"There are likely multiple factors, and more detailed reviews are needed to figure out why," said Dr. Lisa Hollier. She is a maternal and fetal medicine physician at Baylor College of Medicine, and she is the chair of the task force.
BEHROUZ ZAND: How obesity is shrinking our lives in Texas
Black women are more likely to have preexisting medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes or obesity. They are also less likely to begin prenatal care in the first trimester and less likely to receive adequate care.
They also have high rates of being uninsured and having access to health care. One significant issue in the United States that especially among African Americans and Hispanics is that access and affordability to health care are abysmal.
THE UNINSURED rates around the country have improved significantly since the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But Texas continues to have the largest uninsured rate in the country. One major reason why Texas did not have a more significant decrease in the uninsured population, from 23 percent to 18 percent, was because the legislature refused Medicaid expansion. That has been costly. If Texas were to expand Medicaid, it would provide coverage to more than one million uninsured Texans.
But the state legislature rejected billions of dollars in federal aid to expand Medicaid, calling the program "broken." Now, the state is asking the White House to renew a deal that brought in more than $6 billion a year under Medicaid to help the poor.
More than half of all Texas women giving birth are covered under Medicaid. Medicaid allows low-income women to receive coverage when they become pregnant, but they lose their coverage 60 days after delivery.
And that loss is significant because the task force found that the majority of maternal deaths occurred between 42 days to 52 weeks after delivery.
If Texas accepted Medicaid expansion, though, then all low-income women would be covered regardless of the need to become pregnant or the 60-day cutoff afterward. Importantly, many mothers at risk of dying after the 60-day cutoff would continue to have access to their health care under Medicaid.
Interestingly, most of the states that have refused expansion have been in the South – the very places where mortality rates and uninsured rates are the highest. The states that have accepted expansion have seen positive impacts. They have seen improved access to healthcare, affordability and financial security among their low-income population. Medicaid expansion has also significantly helped reduce the gap of racial disparities.
It has also improved treatment for substance use disorders. Medicaid's improved access to the life-saving drug Naloxone has been a major player in reversing opioid-related overdoses.
And it has also improved mortality rates. In a long-term study of expansion in New York, Arizona, and Maine, researchers found increased coverage of care from Medicaid expansion resulted in a 6 percent decrease in mortality rates.
And in 2013, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) produced a committee opinion that increasing access to healthcare for women through Medicaid expansion would allow for better continuity of care, decrease complication rates from pregnancies and enable women to seek appropriate medical help when needed.
SO THE Texas maternal task force recommended increasing access for women through the first year after delivery and throughout their reproductive lives to improve maternal health.
They also stated that increasing Medicaid coverage to one year after birth would reduce costs in the Medicaid program by decreasing unintended pregnancies, managing chronic diseases like high blood pressure or mental health illness like depression and prevent its complications.
GRAY MATTERS: Two Texas counties. In one, you'll live almost a decade longer.
But the state of Texas has taken a different approach. In 2016, Texas launched a state-run program called Healthy Texas Women. This program provides some limited care for low-income women. The funds came after the State Legislation cut two-thirds of the family planning budget and stopped funding Planned Parenthood in 2011.
As the state of Texas has struggled with having the highest uninsured rates and one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world, state lawmakers like Rep. Thierry are continuing to push fellow lawmakers to put the maternal health and disparities – especially among black women – as a high priority.
In the meantime, as we wait to see whether the task force gets an extension to 2023 so it can complete their findings and recommendations, Texas has the opportunity for another step in the right direction in women's health by accepting the Medicaid expansion.
Dr. Behrouz Zand (@Behrouz_Zand) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gynecologic Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He also blogs about the health care system, patient experiences and population health.
Bookmark Gray Matters. The states that have accepted it have seen positive impacts.Google has more than 50,000 employees right now, and they earn great salaries. Average pay at Google is $141,000. It's relatively easy to get a job at Google, too. The company is so large and has such a massive need for talent that hiring for Google is something of a headache, so if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you.
Especially if you know how to use MatLab, a code and data analysis and management tool.
On Thursday night, Google's former svp/product management Jonathan Rosenberg was in London with chairman Eric Schmidt to promote their new book "How Google Works." During a Q&A at the University of London, Rosenberg said he once had to give a speech in front of a room full of Rhodes scholars (about 70 people receive the scholarship each year). He offered them all jobs at Google right there on the spot - and even comped their airfare to San Francisco. A few of them actually took up the offer.
The fact that Google is willing to hire an entire room of bright people, sight unseen, tells you how desperately the company needs smart workers.
If, on the off chance, you're not a Rhodes scholar, Schmidt had some more down-to-earth advice. Google really needs data analytics people and folks who have studied statistics in college, he said.
Big data - how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use - is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about.
And then Rosenberg said something really interesting. If you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab, he said.
We had never heard of MatLab, so we asked Rosenberg afterward what it was. For the uninitiated, MatLab lets developers code and arrange data and algorithms so that results are visual. (Yes, it's complicated). The key here is that data is produced visually or graphically, rather than in a spreadsheet. Here is an example:
This is a Matlab |
greatly angering disabled rights groups.[110] The airline argued that this provision was the responsibility of the airport authority, stating that wheelchairs were provided by 80 of the 84 Ryanair destination airports,[111] at that time. A court ruling in 2004 judged that the responsibility should be shared by the airline and the airport owners;[112] Ryanair responded by adding a surcharge of £0.50 to all its flight prices.[113] In July 2012, a 69-year-old woman, Frances Duff, who has a colostomy, was refused permission to bring her medical kit on board, despite having a letter from her doctor explaining the need for her to carry this with her, and was asked by Ryanair boarding staff to lift up her shirt in front of fellow passengers, to prove that she had a colostomy bag. Duff had previously attempted to contact Ryanair on three occasions to inquire about their policy on travellers colostomy bags, but each time no one had answered the phone after half an hour.[114] On 4 April 2011, Ryanair began adding a surcharge of €2 to its flights to cover the costs arising from compliance with EC Regulation 261/2004, which requires it to pay for meals and accommodation for passengers on delayed and cancelled flights.[115]
Ryanair did not offer customers the possibility of contacting them by email or webform, only through a premium rate phone line, by fax or by post; however it does now have a webform contact option. An early day motion in the British Parliament put forward in 2006 criticised Ryanair for this reason and called on the company to provide customers with a means to contact the company by email.[116] Ryanair offers a basic rate telephone number for post-booking enquiries in the United Kingdom, which chose to omit the exemption for passenger transport services when enacting Article 21 of Directive 2011/83/EU on Consumer Rights under Regulation 41 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Payments) Regulations 2013.[117]
Improved customer service and attracting families [ edit ]
On 17 June 2014, Ryanair announced a new campaign to re-invent itself as a more family-friendly airline. Speaking at the company's 2014 AGM, chief executive Michael O'Leary said that the airline needed to "stop unnecessarily pissing people off". Ryanair says up to 20% of its 81 million customers are travelling as families and it wants to raise that figure. Kenny Jacobs, Ryanair's chief marketing officer, said: "Families are a big deal for us. It's a group of customers that we want to get closer to".[118] As another step, the company launched LiveChat on their website to improve the quality of service and experience provided by the company.[119] The change in the approach almost immediately had positive effect on the finances of the company.[120]
Flight cancellations September and October 2017 [ edit ]
Ryanair was subject to widespread criticism[121][122][123][124][125] after it announced that it would be cancelling between 40 and 50 flights per day (about 2% of total daily flights) during September and October 2017. Flights were cancelled with very little notice, sometimes only hours before departure. People who had already taken outbound flights were left with no flight home. Ryanair said that the cancellations aimed "to improve its system-wide punctuality"[126] which had dropped significantly in the first two weeks of September, which the airline attributed to "ATC capacity delays and strikes, weather disruptions and the impact of increased holiday allocations to pilots and cabin crew".[126] In subsequent statements, Ryanair acknowledged that it had "messed up" holiday schedules for pilots, including a change to the calendar year for how vacations were calculated.[127]
In late December, a survey rated this airline the worst in the world for customer service among short-haul carriers in the Which? survey. (In truth, bottom place was shared with Vueling.) Ryanair responded as follows. "This survey of 9,000 Which? members is unrepresentative and worthless, during a year when Ryanair is the world’s largest international airline (129m customers) and is also the world’s fastest growing airline (up 9m customers in 2017). We have apologised for the deeply regretted flight cancellations and winter schedule changes, and the disruption they caused to less than 1% of our customers".[128]
Publicity [ edit ]
Controversial advertising [ edit ]
"bye bye Latehansa" titles referring to German competitor A Ryanair Boeing 737-800 displayingtitles referring to German competitor Lufthansa in 2008
Ryanair's advertising and the antics of Michael O'Leary, such as causing deliberate court controversy to generate free publicity for the airline,[129] have led to a number of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and occasionally court action being taken against the airline.[130][131][132][133]
An example of this was the live BBC News interview on 27 February 2009 when Michael O'Leary, observing that it was "a quiet news day", commented that Ryanair was considering charging passengers £1 to use the toilet on their flights. The story subsequently made headlines in the media for several days and drew attention to Ryanair's announcement that it was removing check-in desks from airports and replacing them with online check-in. Eight days later O'Leary eventually admitted that it was a publicity stunt saying "It is not likely to happen, but it makes for interesting and very cheap PR".[134] The concept of Ryanair charging for even this most essential of customer services was foreseen by the spoof news website "The Mardale Times" some five months previously, in their article "Ryanair announce new 'Pay-Per-Poo' service".[135]
Ryanair often use their advertising to make direct comparisons and attack their competitors. One of their advertisements used a picture of the Manneken Pis, a famous Belgian statue of a urinating child, with the words: "Pissed off with Sabena's high fares? Low fares have arrived in Belgium." Sabena sued and the court ruled that the advertisements were misleading and offensive. Ryanair was ordered to discontinue the advertisements immediately or face fines. Ryanair was also obliged to publish an apology and publish the court decision on their website. Ryanair used the apologies for further advertising, primarily for further price comparisons.[130]
Another provocative ad campaign headlined "Expensive Bastards!" compared Ryanair with British Airways. As with Sabena, British Airways disagreed with the accompanying price comparisons and brought legal action against Ryanair. However, in this case the High Court sided with Ryanair and threw BA's case out ordering BA to make a payment towards Ryanair's court costs. The judge ruled "The complaint amounts to this: that Ryanair exaggerated in suggesting BA is five times more expensive because BA is only three times more expensive."[136]
In 2007, Ryanair used an advertisement for its new Belfast route which showed Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness (Northern Ireland deputy First Minister and a former senior commander of the IRA) standing alongside party president Gerry Adams with a speech bubble which said "Ryanair fares are so low even the British Army flew home".[137][138][139] Ulster Unionists reacted angrily to the advertisement, while the Advertising Standards Authority said it did not believe the ad would cause widespread offence.[140]
An advertisement depicting a model dressed as a schoolgirl was accompanied by the words "Hottest back to school fares". Ryanair ran the advertisement in two Scottish and one UK-wide newspaper. After receiving 13 complaints, the advertisement was widely reported by national newspapers. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) instructed them to withdraw the advert in the United Kingdom, saying that it "appeared to link teenage girls with sexually provocative behaviour and was irresponsible and likely to cause serious or widespread offence". Ryanair said that they would "not be withdrawing this ad" and would "not provide the ASA with any of the undertakings they seek", on the basis that they found it absurd that "a picture of a fully clothed model is now claimed to cause'serious or widespread offence', when many of the UK's leading daily newspapers regularly run pictures of topless or partially dressed females without causing any serious or widespread offence".[141]
The airline has proposed the introduction of pay-per-view pornography on its flights, CEO Michael O'Leary revealed to British newspaper The Sun. O'Leary likened the service to those commonly provided in hotels, saying "hotels around the world have it, so why wouldn't we?"[142]
Misleading advertising [ edit ]
Although it usually does not serve the primary airport of major European cities, Ryanair has been criticised for placing the names of famous cities on distant secondary airports that were not built for tourist traffic and lacked transit links to the main city. Examples include "Paris Beauvais" (85 km outside Paris), "Brussels South" (46 km to the south of Brussels), "Milan Bergamo" (45 km from Milan), "Frankfurt Hahn" (102 km outside Frankfurt), "Stockholm Skavsta" (89 km from Stockholm), and "Barcelona Reus" (88 km from Barcelona). Frommers has dubbed Ryanair the "ultimate bait-and-switch airline" for this deceptive practice.[143]
Ryanair was ordered by the ASA to stop claiming that its flights from London to Brussels are faster than the rail connection Eurostar, on the grounds that the claim was misleading, due to required travel times to the airports mentioned. Ryanair stood by its claims, noting that their flight is shorter than the train trip and that travel time is also required to reach Eurostar's stations.[144][145]
In April 2008, Ryanair faced a probe by the UK Office of Fair Trading, after a string of complaints about its adverts. It was found to have breached advertising rules seven times in two years. ASA's director general Christopher Graham commented that formal referrals to the OFT were rare, the last occurring in 2005. He added that the ASA "would prefer to work with advertisers within the self-regulatory system rather than call in a statutory body, but Ryanair's approach has left us with no option". Ryanair countered with the claim that the ASA had "demonstrated a repeated lack of independence, impartiality and fairness".[146]
In July 2009, Ryanair took a number of steps to "increase the clarity and transparency of its website and other advertising" after reaching an agreement with the OFT. The airline's website now includes a statement that "fares don't include optional fees/charges" and they now include a table of fees to make fare comparisons easier.[147]
In July 2010, Ryanair once again found itself in controversy regarding alleged misleading advertising. Ryanair circulated advertisements in two newspapers offering £10 one-way fares to European destinations. Following a complaint from rival carrier EasyJet, the ASA ruled the offer was "likely to mislead".[148] Ryanair made no comment on the claim but did hit back at EasyJet, claiming they cared about details in this regard but did not themselves print their on-time statistics. EasyJet denied this.[citation needed]
In April 2011, Ryanair advertised 'a place in the sun destinations' but the advert was banned when it was found that some of the destinations experienced sunshine for as little as three hours per day and temperatures between 0 and 14 °C (32 and 57 °F).[149]
In 2016, Ryanair stated that websites like Opodo, CheapOair etc. and their partners engage in screenscraping and false advertising, and attempted to prevent them from showing Ryanair data.[150]
Criticism of surcharges [ edit ]
In February 2011, a Ryanair passenger, Miro Garcia, brought a claim against Ryanair for unfair surcharges, claiming that the €40 (£30) surcharge on passengers who failed to print out a boarding card prior to arrival at the airport was unfair. Judge Barbara Cordoba, sitting in the Commercial Court in Barcelona, held that, under international air travel conventions, Ryanair can neither demand passengers turn up at the airport with their boarding pass, nor charge them €40 (£30) if they do not, and that the fines were abusive because aviation law obliges airlines to issue boarding passes. Judge Cordoba stated that: "I declare abusive and, therefore, null, the clause in the contract by which Ryanair obliges the passenger to take a boarding pass to the airport... the customary practice over the years has been that the obligation to provide the boarding pass has always fallen on the airline". The judge ordered a refund for Mr Garcia and said the fact the company was a low-cost carrier did "not allow it to alter its basic contractual obligations".[151] Ryanair appealed the decision and the Appeals Court in Spain overturned the ruling in November 2011, holding that the surcharge is in compliance with international law.[152]
In December 2011, Ryanair announced that they would fight against the UK Treasury's plan to ban what Which? magazine calls "rip-off" charges made when customers pay by credit card.[153] EU legislation has already been drafted against surcharges for methods of payment.[154]
Fuel incidents [ edit ]
On 26 July 2012 three Ryanair aircraft inbound to Madrid–Barajas Airport diverted to Valencia Airport due to severe thunderstorms in the Madrid area. All three aircraft declared an emergency (Mayday) when the calculated usable fuel on landing at Valencia Airport was less than final reserve (30 minutes of flight) after having been held in the air for 50 to 69 minutes.[155] The Irish Aviation Authority investigated the incidents and came to a number of conclusions, including:
"The aircraft in all three cases departed for Madrid with fuel in excess of Flight Plan requirements"; "The Crew diverted to Valencia with fuel in excess of the minimum diversion fuel depicted on the Flight Plan"; "Diverting with fuel close to minimum diversion fuel in the circumstances presented on the evening in question was likely to present challenges for the crew. Initial holding was to the Southwest of Madrid which increased the diversion time to the alternate"; "The Crew declared an Emergency in accordance with EU-OPS when the calculated usable fuel for landing at Valencia was less than final reserve"; "The Met conditions in Madrid were more significant than anticipated by the Crew when reviewing the Met Forecast. Consequently the additional fuel carried was influenced by the forecast"; "Operations into a busy airport such as Madrid in Thunderstorm conditions with the associated traffic levels can add significant delays to all traffic"; "Air Traffic Control in Valencia was under significant pressure with the number of diversions arriving in their airspace."[156]
The Irish Aviation Authority made a number of recommendations, including that Ryanair should "review their fuel policy and consider issuing guidance to Crew with respect to fuel when operating into busy airports with mixed aircraft operators and types particularly in poor weather conditions when diversions are likely."[156] The IAA also recommended that the Spanish Aviation Safety and Security Agency "review delays into Madrid to consider if additional fuel should be recommended or required to be carried in normal operations particularly where the southerly Runways are in operation."[156]
Among the causes of the incident, the Civil Aviation Accident and Incident Investigation Commission concludes that "the company's fuel savings policy, though it complies with the minimum legal requirements, tends to minimise the amount of fuel with which its aircraft operate and leaves none for contingencies below the legal minimums. This contributed to the amount of fuel used being improperly planned and to the amount of fuel onboard dropping below the required final fuel reserve."[157]
In an interview with the Dutch investigative journalism programme KRO Reporter, four anonymous Ryanair pilots claimed they are being pressured to carry as little fuel as possible on board to cut costs.[158][159] Ryanair and its CEO Michael O'Leary denied the allegations and sued KRO.[160][161] On 16 April 2014, the Dutch Court decided that KRO had provided sufficient evidence in two television episodes of Mayday, Mayday broadcast in 2012 and 2013 to back their claims in respect of Ryanair's fuel policy and "fear culture". It also found that Ryanair had been given a right of reply in response to the claims. The broadcast of the programmes was found to be in the public interest. Ryanair were ordered to pay the legal costs of the case.[162]
Competitors [ edit ]
Ryanair has several low-cost competitors. In 2004, approximately 60 new low-cost airlines were formed. Although traditionally a full-service airline, Aer Lingus moved to a low-fares strategy from 2002, leading to a much more intense competition with Ryanair on Irish routes.[163] Ryanair is a member of Airlines for Europe, having formerly been a member of the defunct European Low Fares Airline Association.[164][165]
Airlines which attempt to compete directly with Ryanair are treated competitively, with Ryanair being accused by some of reducing fares to significantly undercut their competitors. In response to MyTravelLite, who started to compete with Ryanair on the Birmingham to Dublin route in 2003, Ryanair set up competing flights on some of MyTravelLite's routes until they pulled out. Go was another airline which attempted to offer services from Ryanair's base at Dublin to Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland. A fierce battle ensued, which ended with Go withdrawing its service from Dublin.[166]
In September 2004, Ryanair's biggest competitor, EasyJet, announced routes to the Republic of Ireland for the first time, beginning with the Cork to London Gatwick route. Until then, EasyJet had never competed directly with Ryanair on its home ground. EasyJet later withdrew its Gatwick-Cork, Gatwick-Shannon, Gatwick-Knock and Luton-Shannon routes.[167]
In 2012, Ryanair also responded to the decision of another low-cost carrier, Wizz Air that planned to move its flight operations from Warsaw Chopin Airport in Poland to the new low-cost Warsaw Modlin Airport in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki.[168] Ryanair had previously operated the route to Dublin from Warsaw but they withdrew claiming that the fees at Warsaw's main airport were too high. When Wizz Air began operations from Modlin Airport, Ryanair began several new routes from the same airport, most of which were identical to routes offered by Wizz Air.
In 2008, Ryanair asked the Irish high court to investigate why it had been refused permission to fly from Knock to Dublin. This route was won by CityJet, which was unable to operate the service. The runner up, Aer Arann, was then allowed to start flights, a move Ryanair criticises on the basis that not initiating an additional tender process was unlawful.[169]
DFDS Seaways cited competition from low-cost air services, especially Ryanair, which now flies to Edinburgh Airport and London Stansted Airport from Gothenburg Landvetter Airport, as the reason for scrapping the Newcastle–Gothenburg ferry service in October 2006.[170] It was the only dedicated passenger ferry service between Sweden and the United Kingdom, and had been running under various operators since the 19th century.
Destinations [ edit ]
Ryanair's largest base is at London-Stansted with 44 aircraft followed by its home base at Dublin.[171] Ryanair operates from 84 bases connecting 35 countries across Europe and North Africa, some of which only base a single aircraft.[172] Several non-base airports serve more flights and/or destinations than certain base airports.
Ryanair traditionally prefers to fly to smaller or secondary airports usually outside major cities to help the company benefit from lower landing fees and quick turn-around times to reduce costs. For example, Ryanair does not fly to the main Düsseldorf airport. Instead, it flies to Weeze, 70 km from Düsseldorf. Ryanair has even referred to Bratislava Airport in Slovakia as "Bratislava Vienna", despite Vienna being 80 km (50 mi) away, across a national border. In some cases, secondary airports are not distant from the city they serve, and can in fact can be closer than the city's major airport; this is the case at Rome-Ciampino.
Ryanair does still serve a number of major airports, including Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona El Prat, Brussels Zaventem, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dublin, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Lisbon, London-Gatwick, Madrid Barajas, Marseille, Oslo-Gardermoen and Rome-Fiumicino. Some of these cities do not have a viable secondary airport that Ryanair could use as an alternative.[143] In more recent months/years, Ryanair has grown more at primary airports as it looks to attract more business passengers. For Summer 2014, the airline opened bases in Athens, Lisbon and the primary airports of Brussels and Rome for the first time.
Ryanair flies in a point to point model rather than the more traditional airline hub and spoke model where the passengers have to change aircraft in transit at a major airport, usually being able to reach more destinations this way.[173][174] In April 2017 however, Ryanair announced to add more indirect flights to its portfolio, starting with a new transfer hub in Rome-Fiumicino airport (FCO).[175] Ryanair has 50 European bases. Despite it being an Irish airline, and having a significant presence there, it also has a significant presence in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom as well as many other European countries (although the airline has no bases in France). Currently, its biggest country market is Italy, with fourteen bases and nine non-base airports.
Ryanair's largest competitor is EasyJet which has a far greater focus on larger or primary airports such as Amsterdam and Paris-Charles de Gaulle, heavily targeting business passengers. Ryanair also serves sun and beach destinations with bases in the Canary Islands, Cyprus, the Greek Islands and Malta amongst others. In August 2014, the airline unveiled ambitious plans to establish a major hub in Israel to service a broad range of European routes.[176] In December 2014 Ryanair announced plans to open its 72nd base in 2015 in the Azores.[177] In February 2018, due to the Scottish Government not abolishing or reducing Air Passenger Duty (APD), Ryanair announced that they would cut many flights out of Glasgow Airport resulting in the airline closing their base there. The only routes out of Glasgow by end of October were Dublin, Kraków and Wroclaw, with the rest being suspended permanently. This resulted in the loss of 300 members of airport staff. [178]
Top airports by destinations 2007-17[179] City IATA destinations retention[a] London Stansted STN 184 73% Dublin DUB 131 69% Bergamo BGY 124 65% Charleroi CRL 116 70% Girona GRO 112 35% Hahn HHN 103 44% Weeze NRN 97 45% Alicante ALC 89 61% Madrid MAD 86 57% Pisa PSA 86 53%
Choosing destinations [ edit ]
When Ryanair negotiates with its airports, it demands very low landing and handling fees, as well as financial assistance with marketing and promotional campaigns.[180] In subsequent contract renewal negotiations, the airline has been reported to play airports against each other, threatening to withdraw services and deploy the aircraft elsewhere, if the airport does not make further concessions. According to Michael O'Leary's biography, A Life in Full Flight, Ryanair's growing popularity and also growing bargaining power, with both airports and aircraft manufacturers, has resulted in the airline being less concerned about a market research/demographics approach to route selection to one based more on experimentation. This means they are more likely to fly their low cost planes between the lowest cost airports in anticipation that their presence alone on that route will be sufficient to create a demand which previously may not have existed, either in whole or in part.[181]
In April 2006, a failure to reach agreement on a new commercial contract resulted in Ryanair announcing that it would withdraw service on the Dublin–Cardiff route at short notice.[182] The airport management rebutted Ryanair's assertion that airport charges were unreasonably high, claiming that the Cardiff charges were already below Ryanair's average and claimed that Ryanair had recently adopted the same negotiating approach with Cork Airport and London Stansted Airport.[183] In 2009, Ryanair was reported to have adopted 'harsh' negotiating with Shannon Airport, threatening to close 75% of its operations there from April 2010.[184] Ryanair was forced to give up its Rome Ciampino–Alghero route, after the route was allocated to Air One, as a public service obligation (PSO) route. The European Commission is investigating the actions of the Italian Government in assigning PSO routes and thus restricting competition.
Outside Europe [ edit ]
Ryanair has also helped with the launch of low-cost airlines: VivaAerobús (Mexico) and VivaColombia (Colombia).[185] In 2016, it planned to help to develop a new low-cost airline in Costa Rica, named VivaCan.[186][187][188][needs update]
Fleet [ edit ]
Current fleet [ edit ]
As of January 2019, the Ryanair fleet consists of the following aircraft:[189]
Former fleet [ edit ]
Ryanair has operated the following types of aircraft in the past:
Fleet development [ edit ]
Ryanair claims to operate the newest, and quietest fleet of aircraft in Europe.[198][199] As of March 2018, the average age of the Ryanair fleet was around 6.5 years.[200] When Boeing builds an aircraft for Ryanair, it is allocated the customer code AS, which appears in their aircraft designation as a suffix, such as 737-8AS.
Ryanair's fleet reached 200 aircraft for the first time on 5 September 2009.[198][201] All aircraft in the Ryanair fleet have been retrofitted with performance enhancing winglets and the more recent deliveries have them fitted as standard.[202]
The company also owns three Learjet 45, based at London Stansted Airport and Bergamo Airport but registered in the Isle of Man as M-ABEU, M-ABGV and M-ABJA, which are mainly used for the quick transportation of maintenance personnel and small aircraft parts around the network.[203]
On 13 March 2013, Ryanair signed an order for 175 new Boeing 737-800s at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. In the same press conference, Michael O'Leary said Ryanair were still evaluating the possibility of the Boeing 737 MAX, and stated their huge order in March was for the Boeing 737 Next Generation rather than the 737 MAX as they needed aircraft before the 737 MAX would enter service.
On 30 April 2014, Ryanair confirmed that they have ordered 5 more aircraft to add to their fleet, 4 of them to be delivered in 2015 and the last one to be delivered in February 2016, to bring the number of aircraft on order to 180.[204]
Ryanair also showed interest in other aircraft, including the Comac C919, when they signed a design agreement with Comac in 2011 to help produce a rival jet to Boeing's offerings. At the Paris Airshow in 2013, Michael O'Leary stated that Comac could build a larger version of the C919 aircraft that would hold up to 200 passengers.[205]
On 8 September 2014, Ryanair made a commitment to order 100 new Boeing 737 MAX 8s (plus options for an additional 100) for delivery from 2019.[63]
On 1 December 2014, the airline finalised their order for up to 200 Boeing 737 MAX 200s, which are a version of the 737 MAX 8 for low-cost airlines, named after the fact that they can carry 200 passengers. The order includes 100 firm, and 100 purchase rights. This makes Ryanair the launch customer of the Boeing 737 MAX 200.[206]
As of August 2016 around 91% of the Ryanair fleet (316 of 354 aircraft) were owned by the company, with the balance being leased.[80]
Accidents and incidents [ edit ]
On 10 November 2008, Ryanair Flight 4102, from Frankfurt–Hahn Airport, suffered undercarriage damage in an emergency landing at Rome–Ciampino Airport, after experiencing bird strikes, which damaged both engines on approach. There were 6 crew members and 166 passengers on board.[207] Two crew members and eight passengers were taken to hospital with minor injuries.[208] The port undercarriage of the Boeing 737-800 collapsed,[209] leaving the aircraft stranded on the runway and closing the airport for over 35 hours.[208] As well as damage to the engines and undercarriage, the rear fuselage was also damaged by contact with the runway.[210] The aircraft involved was damaged beyond repair and was scrapped. The final report of the accident, investigated by ANSV (National Flight Safety Agency) was released on 20 December 2018, more than 10 years after the accident and only in Italian.[211] An English translation was provided by Aviation Accident Database.[212]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ share of routes operated in 2007-2017 still operating in 2017
References [ edit ]Atlanta-based fast food firm Chick-fil-A has come under fire nationally this week after comments made by its president Dan Cathy, who told the Baptist Press that he was “guilty as charged” of being “very much supportive” of the “biblical definition of the family unit.” Ugh. We know by now that he’s speaking in thinly veiled code for “Gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry because Jesus.” I guess we can take solace that he put his mouth where his money is. More on that in a bit.
Public outrage in progressive locales has begun resonating with their politicians. Boston mayor Thomas Menino wrote Cathy a letter that ended up in every corner of the Internet: “I was angry to learn on the heels of your prejudiced statements about your search for a site to locate in Boston,” the letter reads. “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it.”
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel also hopped on the Eat Less Chikin’ express:
“Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a statement to the Chicago Tribune. “They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents.” Emanuel was vowing his support for Alderman Proco Moreno’s announcement that he would block construction of a Chick-fil-A restaurant in his district. “If you are discriminating against a segment of the community, I don’t want you in the First Ward,” he told the newspaper.
Tonight, Lauren Silich, the owner/operator of Chick-fil-A’s Loyola Water Tower Location–the only branch currently within city limits–posted her response to mayor Emanuel on the franchise’s Facebook page:
While Silich makes some strong points in her letter, she does not even begin to address–let alone take a stand against–the reasons that Chick-fil-A is facing this outrage. Her employees–”leaders for future generations, regardless of sexual orientation or beliefs”–are denied the fundamental pursuit of happiness in the bigoted universe that Chick-fil-A is “guilty as charged” of supporting if they are gay and in love.
Money that Silich’s franchise generates for its parent goes directly towards supporting marriage inequality. While it’s odd that the general public has chosen to become outraged now as opposed to, say, when Chick-fil-A’s charitable foundation, Win Shape, donated $1.1 million to anti-gay groups from 2003-2008 or in 2009 when it gave about $2 million to Marriage & Family Legacy Fund, Focus on the Family, Exodus International, and the Family Research Council, these were values publicly held and supported by Chick-fil-A and Dan Cathy long before Silich opened her franchise in 2011. Chick-fil-A’s values, and the fact that people in Chicago would be offended by them, should not be a surprise to her.
The mitigating factor, of course, is that everyone–gay or straight, tolerant, or bigoted–with good taste in food can agree Chick-fil-A is fucking delicious. Its spicy chicken sandwich’s meat quality and flavor makes it best in class (and if you say Wendy’s is better, you’re wrong). The special sauce–oh my GOD, the special sauce–you guys. And don’t get Drew Magary started on their banana pudding milkshake. The restaurants are always clean, fast, and efficient while the service is universally exemplary. I’ve never heard of an order getting fucked up or a sandwich that didn’t meet quality standards and I keep my ears and eyes out for those sorts of things.
Because Chick-fil-A is so fucking delicious and we all know it, we’ve all collectively neglected to take a moral stance about all this until right now–and, once again, its politics are not a new development–and our decisions have given franchise owners like Lauren Silich the financial incentive to join us in paying no attention to the man behind the curtain. Chick-fil-A could have been donating millions of dollars to nefarious groups that exist only to ruthlessly slaughter adorable puppies and we’d be unable to quell our yearning for the sweet satisfaction of chasing a chicken biscuit with a large Coke and some waffle fries dipped in that godly special sauce mixed with ketchup and ranch.
Gay marriage is undeniably becoming increasingly tolerated and embraced in America. Does our new intolerance for Chick-fil-A’s long-running intolerance mean we are progressing as a society? Maybe? That’d definitely be awesome but we’ll see what sort of legs this story has before we all move on to the next outrage. (Please, dear LORD, let it be guns!) Hopefully this bad will hurts Chick-fil-A’s bottom line enough to get it to stop donating to homophobic organizations masquerading in the name of Christ–what does Dan Cathy value more, “traditional marriage” or money?–but they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place now because they’re based in the South where intolerance is much more, um, tolerated. (Mike Huckabee–remember him?–has declared 8-1 to be Support Chick-fil-A Day.)
And if we’re going to start actually caring about the ethics along our food supply chain, we’re on an awfully slippery slope. If we cease our willful ignorance as to what corners must be cut for dollar menus to exist and processed food to be so affordable and accessible, we’re going to be in for a pretty fucking rude awakening. (Full disclosure: I’ve deliberately avoided watching Meet Your Meat for three years after being made aware of it because I’m too cowardly to face the conscious decision of becoming a vegetarian–or even only eating ethically raised meat–or continuing to consume meat when I’m more aware of inhumane factory slaughter processes.)
Enough of that depressing shit, though, let’s get back to Chick-fil-A and, specifically, INSISTING not to eat there for like a month or until we get an insincere apology–whichever comes first.
Individual franchise owners like Lauren Silich, who have genuine tolerance for homosexuals, are undoubtedly feeling this string of backlash the hardest. They need to band together to do something about the company’s president making defiant, divisive statements that are crushing their opportunities to expand in major cities. (Not that this is a defense but Cathy was playing a home game with the Baptist Press and couldn’t have dreamed his words would create such a shitstorm after America ignored his money trail for so long.)
If the momentum from all this continues past the weekend I bet we get a fake apology from Dan Cathy next week. Stay tuned.Rane history
Rane Corporation, founded and incorporated in 1981 in Washington State, is a privately held company. The owners previously worked together in middle management positions at Phase Linear Corporation, a high-end consumer electronics company. With this background, they pooled over 40 years of combined audio experience to create Rane Corporation. Owners became separate department heads based upon their expertise. This organization created an unusually strong structure, since all department heads had a unique owner’s perspective in making it succeed.
Rane started out with four products aimed at small bands, designed to make their live performances better. With these products, Rane quickly established a new price-point for performance, quality and reliability. Rane products were priced below the top high-end equipment yet outperformed and outlasted them, but were still priced significantly above the low-end products—thus creating a new middle ground. A noteworthy testament to Rane’s design significance and reliability reputation, is that in their first two years of production, Rane designed and shipped eight new products—four of which are still in production today.
DJ
Rane first entered the DJ mixer market upon request from Richard Long of Richard Long & Associates (RLA). Richard Long was a famous sound designer for the biggest names in disco. He designed systems for Studio 54, Annabels (London), Regines (a chain of 19 clubs scattered around the world from Paris and New York to Cairo) and many others that were the vanguard of the disco era.
Richard approached Rane and asked them to redesign his famous X3000 crossover using their proprietary technology. This became the X3000A, built exclusively for Richard Long. They also co-designed a DJ equalizer called the Q5000. Based on his successful relationship with Rane, he persuaded them to research the DJ mixer market. They did and produced their first DJ mixer, the MP24 which rapidly became the industry standard.
Turntablism
After creating many more innovative DJ products following the MP24, Rane was attending an AES (Audio Engineering Society) convention in New York City in 1998. Four extremely talented turntablists introduced them to their art form and invited a couple of Rane guys to join them in their back yard for some tutoring. It was an eye opening experience for a couple of Joes from the sticks of Mukilteo. They felt privileged to be invited, not only to join in the turntablism fun, but also to be the company they selected to build their dream mixer. They knew Rane’s reputation in the club market and they understood Rane’s design philosophy.
The Rane product designers joined a handful of the city’s top scratch performers where they literally spread their ideas on the floor of Wiz’s apartment in Spanish Harlem and went to work. Thus began the anatomy of the TTM 54 Performance mixer. For three days, they enjoyed the company of Rolly Roll, Development, DJ Big Wiz, Sugarcuts, Marz1 and Peter Parker. They watched performances by DJ Quest, The Crash Dummies, The X-Men and many more. During their stay, they defined every detail of the mixer: features, control locations, knob size and feel, as well as fader feel and much more. Collectively, they created Rane’s first hip-hop battle mixer, which became one of the most successful products in Rane’s |
you have to do to claim your bounty is enter the 3 letter captcha presented to you.
Eat the best Local food thanks to Market Research Apps and Websites ( $1040 )
[tweetthis display_mode=”box”]3 ways your computer can fund your #travel [/tweetthis]
Consciously or not, there’s a kind of deal we make when we use many online services — in exchange for free access, we accept ads and give up some of our personal data. Now some companies and startups are helping users to make that exchange a little more rewarding, with real cash.
Types of information collected with Market research apps –
Apps installed Duration that apps are left open (but not app contents) Battery and performance of your phone Location of your device through GPS (if you have it turned on)
You get – $110/yr passively per device
Countries – USA, UK, Germany,Japan
If You are smart about Money and are serious about saving, then you need to get the smart panel, made by one of the leaders in behavioral research – Verto Analytics.
This sleek looking app pays you $5 for just joining their Panel. $5 for every month after that as long as you remain a participant. And a bonus of $5 after the first 3 months, $10 after the first 6 months and a $15 bonus every 3 months you have remained a participant for 9 months.
So, effectively they are putting $9 every month in your pocket for no effort on your part.
The company, like any other market research app included in this guide, does not see the contents of the apps you use, not does it collect any personally identifiable information.
You get – $144 per year
Countries – USA, India
The Big G wants to pay you for using the Internet. Using the information collected, it aims to improve its services like Youtube, Gmail, etc.
Don’t know about you but I would happily grab this money with both my hands. Google earns billions advertising stuff to us, so why not the other way around.
The best part is:
You can connect 3 types of devices(only 1 of each type ) to your CM account – computer, smartphone, and tablet.
The more devices you connect, the more you save for your trip. To be more specific, they give $1 per device per week. So if you connect all three eligible devices, you get $12 per month and help improve Youtube. Improving Youtube means more Cat videos. More Cat videos mean a happier you and a happier you means a better world. And it is everyone’s duty to make this world a better place.
Some users may worry that the data they are consenting to give away is violating their privacy. It states in their FAQ that the data you release may be shared in the form of articles and research summaries. However, all of your data is kept anonymous.
For example, Google may collect what type of sites you are browsing, your search terms, etc. But your personal name will not be associated with any of this. If you visit Facebook and send messages to your friends, there’s no way to find out the content of these messages or the fact that it was you that visited Facebook.
You get – $500 a year if you get in!!
Countries – USA
Platform- Iphone
Another promising startup that is looking to disrupt the market research industry is Data wallet.
Promising the highest return for your data among all the apps and websites, data wallet works as a market place where interested companies offer you a particular amount in exchange for your data, and you can either accept or reject the offer.
What makes Data wallet unique is that it links to your social media accounts and unlocks a whole new level of data for you to sell to companies. Moreover, their platform enables you only to share your data with companies you trust.
“All data shared through DataWallet is encrypted, and consumers can choose to opt out of a sale at any time with the click of a button,” Serafin Lion engel told TechCrunch in an interview.
Expect to earn around at least a couple of hundred bucks each year. The only downside is that there is a waiting line to get inside. Yep, it is that famous.
You get – $120 per year
Countries – USA
Nielsen, the most famous market research company on the planet runs this program. As the name suggests, the app aims to study how you consume media.
While signing up, remember to choose Perk points instead of sweepstakes to be eligible to earn $10 per month passively. If you chose sweepstakes for some reason, which will break my heart for not heeding to my advice, you would be entered into a weekly, monthly and yearly sweepstakes automatically.
There are three ways you can earn points through Media Insiders:
Mobile Meter: Have the Media Insiders installed on your phone. It will quietly run in the background and award you points.
TV Activity: If the app hears a TV running for at least one minute throughout the day, you will be awarded points. The phone just has to be close enough to capture sound for it to count.
M-Connect: This is a VPN service which is completely optional. By using the VPN that they provide, you will earn more points. However, from what I have read online, most users advise against enabling this feature as it interferes in the working of other apps.
If you have more smartphones lying around in your home, you definitely should add them to your media insiders account to boost your savings.
You get – $60 per year
Countries – USA, UK, Australia, Canada
The app works with a variety of different market research panels. These panels are very interested in knowing what places you frequent. This helps them understand where people are going, what they’re doing, so they can get an idea of what’s “popular.” Participating in surveys for these panels means getting points. You’ll get invited to join different panels through Placed.
You can use the points earned on two types of drawing – lottery(for $5-10 amazon gift cards) and guaranteed
drawing which is you redeeming your points for a guaranteed gift card or transferring an equivalent amount to your PayPal account.
Unsurprisingly, guaranteed drawings require more points to get the same amount of gift card/PayPal transfer as compared to sweepstakes.
Coming to the best part about this app – its referral program.
When you refer one of your besties to use this app (and eventually go on that road trip with you), not only do you get 10 % of points your friends and family earn but also 5 % of the points their referrals make. This 2 tier referral program makes this passive source of saving even more Passive!
Just, don’t forget to keep your location services ON.
you get – $80-100 per year
Countries – USA, UK, Australia, Canada
This is an app from the same company – Placed Inc as placed panel app. The app works exactly like panel app, the only difference being you get airline miles for sharing your location data. Their website claims that you can earn up to 100 miles every month.
However, you can have only one app, either placed panel or frequent flyer on your smartphone. If you have two smartphones, and want to have best of both worlds by keeping PP on One and FF on the other one, make sure you don’t use the same email id to signup for both the apps.
If you have just phone, I would recommend keeping the Frequent Flyer for two reasons –
The Obvious advantage of airmiles for us. On a side note, frequent flyer miles are best spent on first and business class tickets than economy as explained by Nick in this blog post. A better referral program than Placed panel. You get 10 % of airmiles earned by your friends, for life. Wish this app was available in India?.
AppOptix
You get – $50 per year
Countries – USA, India
Platform -Android
Don’t let the old look of their website fool you. They are as legit as any other website listed on this page.
I Don’t know why they are interested in scaring away most of their potential users, but one thing is for sure, they pay. With more than 800 combined Positive ratings for their app on Indian and USA app store, I don’t need to say much.
The Indian app does a Rs.50 recharge every month to your mobile, and a gives a chance to win gift vouchers of Flipkart every month.
The American counterpart promises to reward around $50 worth of gift cards a year to its panel members. Not a lot, I agree, but it all adds up.
Moreover, the app uses minuscule space and power on your device.
You get – $96- 100 per year
Countries – USA
Data Coup is a startup founded by Matt Hogan, with an aim to educate netizens about the value of their data and use it for monetary benefits.
Data coup is similar to Data wallet with a few minor differences like – the available platform, Number of services they can link to, etc.
After you have connected your Data Coup account to one or more of the linkable services, you will be able to see how much is your data worth. You can easily get $15 a month by connecting all your accounts. Even if you don’t have accounts with some particular social media services, just sign up with them.
It will take hardly 5 minutes, and you will be able to maximize your Data coup earnings.
Once everything is setup, you can forget about Data coup. Set a reminder 1 year into the future to check your savings. And I am dead serious about it. A Year from now, About $110-130 will be there to greet you.
You get – $180 per year
Countries – USA
Survey Savvy is a Market research program run by Luth Research. When you sign up with them, You get a chance to earn $5 passively every month per device you connect with them. You can connect up to three devices with them – 1 Smartphone, 1 tablet and 1 PC.
No need to tell you that they are paying you to collect anonymous data to conduct research for other companies.
This offer is valid just for citizens of USA. The UK, I know how it feels to be left out. I had been kept out of the school soccer team a lot!
Apart from the 5 bucks you get for each device, you also get a chance to get invited to more and better paying surveys conducted by them. It is up to you, though, to participate in them or not.
I know some of you will be afraid to signup with these websites. But do you know that companies like Acxiom and CoreLogic, which you might have never even heard of, have even more in-depth and vast databases of user data than those of Google and Facebook. These companies sell your data to other companies who use it to fine tune their products and improve their marketing efforts, similar to what google and facebook do.
There is no need to tell you how tremendously valuable your data is for these companies as it helps them improve their bottom line, yet they do not pay you a single dime to collect and use this data. However, the companies listed above reward users who share their data directly with the companies, who have till now bought data from data brokers like Acxiom, for their market research purposes.
These services take the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude to data-snooping.
I will reiterate the fact that these services do not collect any personally identifiable or confidential information like credit card, social security number, etc. And this is why more and more people are signing up with them.
3 Ways to Save for those sweet souvenirs ( $150 approx. )
[tweetthis]9 market research companies give you free money. I am spending it for #travel[/tweetthis]
Featured in TIME, The New York Times, Forbes and many others, this app takes away all the excuses one can think of not to invest in stocks and bonds.
” I don’t have enough money ”
” I don’t know how to invest.”
” I don’t know where to start.”
Acorns help you invest the spare change from your daily purchases in one of the 5 investing portfolios of your choice. The app takes away all the resistance away by automating the process of investing from your credit/debit card or bank account with not only spare change but also the option to set recurring deposits on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
It is a great feeling to know that every time you purchased something, a small amount is being added to your travel fund effortlessly. You can take your automated investment game to the next level with acorns’ “found Money” feature
With their found money program, you can have companies that you have purchased through, will put a part of the payment back in your acorns savings account. The program is still in beta. Therefore, they don’t have many partner companies, but the ones they have are the market leaders in whatever they sell.
Lock screen apps – Basically, these apps pay you to advertise on your lock screen when you wake your phone up. They are nonintrusive and work smoothly.
There are a lot of options to choose from, so I am just going to list the best of them here for you. Download the one available in your country.
Slide
Slidejoy
fronto
S’more
You get – 1 walking $ (W$) for every five miles.
Countries– Global
Unless you have been living in a cave on some remote mountain for the last five years, you must have heard about Bitcoins. At the peak of their popularity, the value of 1 bitcoin reached as high as 1000 dollars. Now, it is hovering around 150 which is great ROI if you mined them in their infancy like this guy did and is now a millionaire.
If you missed hopping early on the Bitcoin train, then pay attention to this.
The bitwalking app launched recently, is all set to disrupt the fitness industry by paying you to walk. And it is not an empty promise. In an interview with BBC, founders Nissan Bahar and Franky Imbesi reveal that they have raised more than $10m (£6.6m) of initial funding from mainly Japanese investors to help launch the currency and create the bank that verifies steps and any transfers.
The app just came out of its beta phase and is available on android play store for everyone to install. Their iOS, they say, is coming soon. The bitwalking store, where you will be able to spend your walking dollars, is going to be launched soon too.
The Idea and execution so far look great. We urge everyone to give it a try!
Time for some Bonuses
I am including 2 extra resources for people who want to save more and are willing to put in little work.
You get – $10 for every review
Countries – USA
Software insiders is one of the many industry-specific search engines owned by graphiq.
What TripAdvisor is for destinations and Yelp is for local businesses, SI strives to be for apps and softwares. And it can’t achieve that goal without a large number of users and user reviews.
Their plan?
They are paying $10 for every software/app review you leave which hardly takes 10 minutes to do so.
Way better than surveys, IMO. Speaking From my limited experience in doing surveys, they promise you to be 15 minutes long and end up taking 25 minutes and still pay a measly $2 for it.
SI has a pretty generous referral program too. You get $10 for every friend who submits his first review.
Dscout
You get – $50 – 150 a month
Countries – Global
Dscout is used by huge companies like Facebook, Intel, and the likes to know how their current and potential users think and know them better.
The payout is decided by the company conducting their study, but it is somewhere around $40- 80 per study. Each study is divided into multiple missions.
TO get qualified for a study you have to answer 4-5 qualifier questions and make a short video of around 60 secs answering a question.
Once qualified, you are invited to participate in the mission/study. Dscout’s FAQ page describes a mission as ” mission is an adventure you’ll go on while using thedisc out the app! Completing a mission usually, involves answering a series of questions several times over a couple of days. Each time you share your experiences and give your opinion by answering those questions (which frequently includes taking a picture or short video), we call that “creating an entry.”
The End
Money is a big pain point for a lot of my fellow travelers, and I hate to see that. Anyone can work for more hours and save more for his dream destination, but I wanted to find a way to help people save more without more work.
This led me to put in more than 85 hours to dig out these gems, test the ones I could read as many reviews as I could. I sincerely hope you like it.
I would suggest everyone set aside a couple of hours this evening to sign up with all of these apps and websites. After all, you are going to get around 1320 dollars for a one time work. Use websites mentioned in the bonus section and got $800 more for your travel fund.
And Please comment below to share with me and the readers where do you plan to go with all this extra savings? We might get some inspiration for our next trip!!
Till next time guys.
[tweetthis]15 apps and websites which will give you money (passively) for travel + 2 bonuses[/tweetthis]
Further reading
How to save money for any trip by nomadic matt
3 ways to save money without being Frugal by Ramit Sethi
27 time tested Money saving tips from grandparents.com
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Abhay Kumar A story Teller. An adventurer. An explorer. This and much more.
Traveling is not my passion, it is my life. And when I am not traveling reading and writing about different places keeps me alive.Bhojpuri film actor Rita Rani.
Though the AAP’s second list of Lok Sabha candidates is yet to be out, the speculation that former minister Rakhi Birla may contest Lok Sabha elections from Northwest Delhi has irked a section of AAP supporters.
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A group of people claiming to be members of the party held demonstrations in front of the AAP office at Hanuman Road in Connaught Place on Saturday afternoon.
“The party is selecting candidates behind closed doors. We are not against the AAP, we are against the manner in which tickets are being distributed. The party has decide to let Rakhi Birla contest Lok Sabha elections from Northwest Delhi. How was this decision made? She is an MLA and was even made a minister in the Delhi government. Could they not find anyone else for the seat?” Mehfooz Alam, a resident of a JJ colony in Bawana, said.
Claiming to be associated with the party since its formation, another protester, Jai Kapish Thakur said, “We do not have anything against Rakhi Birla.We only want to know why the party could not find anyone from the 162 applications it received from that Lok Sabha seat.”
Reacting to the protest, AAP leader Manish Sisodia said, “The opposition shows the extent of the AAP’s popularity and the demand for its tickets.”
Former BJP MP, Bhojpuri actor join AAP
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A former BJP MP from Himachal Pradesh Rajan Sushant and Bhojpuri film actor Rita Rani joined the AAP on Saturday. Hailing from Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, Sushant had launched a Lokpal movement akin to the nationwide Jan Lokpal movement, AAP leader Manish Sisodia said. While the party has not come out with an official statement on whether Sushant will be contesting for Lok Sabha polls, sources in the party said he might be given a ticket from Kangra.A Fuquay-Varina High School teacher is apologizing for an online article he wrote comparing the school to a Nazi death camp and suggesting that it had turned a student gay.
But some parents and students still think Ray Fournier should be disciplined or even fired for the story that ran online for the Christian magazine “No Greater Joy.”
“Walking through the gates of the public high-school where I teach feels as if I were walking into a concentration camp dedicated to the spiritual death of those imprisoned behind these walls,” Fournier, a biology teacher, wrote.
The magazine has since replaced the online version of the article with his apology letter.
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Fournier, a self-described “local evangelist and public school missionary” who has taught at the school since 2000, did not respond to messages left with the school, on his email account and on his personal phone.
“Some people might not understand the seriousness of the spiritual destruction of our children and as a result, might come to the conclusion that I am being disrespectful to those families who directly suffered in the holocaust,” he wrote in his apology.
But that wasn’t enough for some parents, who have filed official complaints about Fournier.
“I hope that he loses his job, unfortunately,” said Krista Bennett, a parent of a student at Fuquay-Varina High. “I hope that they let him go, and he can go find a job at a fundamentalist Christian college or school.”
The district’s policies do include a broad provision that teachers must adhere to conduct that will protect the “integrity and/or reputation” of both themselves and the school system as a whole.
It’s unclear if Fournier’s article, which is critical of public schools, might be judged under that provision. Lisa Luten, communications director for Wake County Schools, confirmed that the district is investigating but said she couldn’t offer any other details.
A senior at the school, Lauren Foster, said she was one of the first students to find out about the article. It does not mention Fuquay-Varina High by name, though it’s not difficult to determine where Fournier teaches.
Foster promply shared it with her 1,000 Twitter followers.
“Anyone who talks so poorly of my school, compares it to a concentration camp, blames the public school system for ‘turning people lesbian’ and (says public education) makes teenagers lose their morals is outright ridiculous,” Foster said.
But Mark Youmans, who graduated from Fuquay-Varina High last year and is now at Liberty University, said he thought the article was spot-on except for the Holocaust analogies.
“There was a lot of adversity I faced, being a Christian,” Youmans said, adding that the only C he received in high school was for a paper on creationism.
‘Poison’ public education
In the original article, “From Behind Enemy Lines,” Fournier talks about a family from his church who home-schooled their children until high school.
“It was as if their daughters were placed inside a spiritual gas chamber,” he wrote of when they entered Fuquay-Varina High.
Fournier said the “poison” of public education even turned one of the girls into a lesbian.
“My heart broke each and every time I saw her walk around campus with her girlfriend,” he wrote. “I can only imagine how utterly devastated her family must feel.”
The central message of the article – which was promoting his book, “Education Reform: A Teacher’s Call For Christian Parents To Abandon The Public Schools And Return To The Word Of God” – is that parents should home-school their children.
Youmans, despite his general defense of Fournier, said he disagreed with the teacher’s thesis that responsible Christian parents must home-school.
He quoted the New Testament’s Book of James, in which the author instructs Christians to rejoice when their faith is tested because it will strengthen their belief.
“I appreciated it,” Youmans said of his time in public school. “I would not have it any other way.”
Agree with him or not, Youmans said, Fournier shouldn’t be punished for publishing his opinion.
Others said while they don’t think Fournier has to be fired, he should be held accountable for his admittedly “inflammatory” rhetoric.
Former student: ‘That’s not OK’
“I wanted someone in a position of power, which I do not occupy, to tell him that that’s not OK,” said Kyle Groetzinger, a former student of Fournier’s now at Appalachian State University.
Foster, the Fuquay-Varina High senior, said she has heard some teachers discuss the article, but that as of Monday, no teachers or administrators had acknowledged the issue with the student body.
“I think the school is trying to be very quiet about it,” she said.
The school’s new principal, Jonathan Enns, did not respond to multiple messages.A look back at the comic book references and Easter eggs from last night's episode.
Did you watch last night's episode of Arrow? Are you wondering what connections the episode has with the comics? Do you like Easter eggs (and not just the brightly colored kind?) Arrow Annotations is here to help, providing some additional notes and background info from last night’s episode. Arrow spoilers follow!
Kord Industries - The episode kicked off with a theft from Kord Industries. This isn't the first time Kord Industries has been mentioned this season. You'll recall that the centrifuge stolen by Cyrus Gold from Queen Consolidated in "The Scientist" was a Kord Industries device. In the comics, Kord Industries is run by Ted Kord, who's better known by fans as the second Blue Beetle. Ted was first mentioned in Arrow during last season's "The Undertaking".
William Tockman - This week's villain is a reimagined Clock King. His origin in the show is similar to those in the comics; Tockman learns he has a terminal illness and decides to rob a bank to provide for his invalid sister after he's gone. He's stopped by Green Arrow, and is incarcerated. While in prison, Tockman learns that his sister has died, and that his terminal disease was misdiagnosed due to his records being switched with those of another patient. Later, the Clock King went on to join the Injustice League, and later the Suicide Squad. During his first mission with the Squad, he and most of his teammates are killed. Tockman was created by France Herron (the co-creator of the Red Skull) and Lee Elias.
Tockman isn't the only Clock King in the DC Universe. The company later introduced a second Clock King with limited precognitive abilities that frequently fought against the Teen Titans. While that Clock King's history (and name) are largely unknown, he shares a costume with the Batman: The Animated Series version of the character, with clock themed glasses and a plain brown suit. Another version of the character appeared in the 1960's Batman series, where he was played by Walter Slezak.
Tockman was played by Robert Knepper in the episode. Knepper's probably best known for his role on Prison Break. He also appeared as the primary antagonist during the fourth season of Heroes, and voiced Kronos in Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, which was produced by Arrow's executive producer Marc Guggenheim.
Eddie Walczak - The goon killed by Tockman is named Eddie Walczak. Katherine Walczak is an assistant to Arrow executive producer Andrew Kreisberg on the show. She also scripted several issues of the comic tie-in to the show.
Blue Devil - There's an ad for a Blue Devil movie on the side of the bus that Ollie saves from getting hit by a train. The Blue Devil is a mystic DC superhero, who originally was a stuntman and special effects guy in Hollywood. After being cast as the lead role in a Blue Devil movie, Daniel Cassidy creates a full body devil suit with various special effects. When some of his castmates accidentally release a demon, Cassidy uses the suit to fight the demon, but discovers that the suit has been fused to his body by the demon's mystic energy. Cassidy becomes a member of the Justice League (where he is killed and resurrected twice) and eventually joins the mystical team Shadowpact. A new version of the character has appeared in the New 52, but his backstory is presently unknown.
FYI, here's the Blue Devil ad from the bus in it's full glory, courtesy of Marc Guggenheim's Twitter.
MacGregor's Syndrome - Sara and Felicity learn that Tockman is afflicted with MacGregor's Syndrome, a terminal lung disease. MacGregor's Syndrome played a major role in the 1997 movie Batman & Robin. In the movie, both Nora Fries, wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze, and Alfred both suffer from the disease. Freeze eventually gives Batman the cure to the disease.
52 Nelson Way - Tockman lives on 52 Nelson Way in East Starling City. DC has a thing for the number 52, and Diane Nelson is the president of DC Entertainment, and oversees all comics, movies and television shows involving the DC characters.
Channel 52 - Speaking of the number 52, Tockman operates out of a stolen Channel 52 newsvan. You'll recall that Channel 52 appears in the back of every current DC comic as a way to cross-promote other comics being published by the company. Channel 52 has become the primary news channel watched by Ollie (and every other resident in Starling City) this season.
Delta Charlie 52 - Since we're talking about the number of 52, Lance's call sign is Delta Charlie 52, aka DC-52. This has been mentioned in just about every episode, but if I don't bring it up, people will claim that I missed it. I have not missed it. I SEE ALL.
Tempus Fugit - Tockman utters the Latin phrase "Tempus fugit", which means "time flees". In the DC Animated Universe, the Clock King's name, Temple Fugate, is a play off that phrase. The second Clock King in the comics was named "Tem", which is a hint that he's also named Temple.
The Oblivion Bar - Sara mentions she worked as a bartender for the Oblivion in college. In the comics, the Oblivion Bar is a bar frequented by mystical characters of the DC Universe. The bar is located in a pocket dimension, and has entrances scattered throughout the world. Blue Devil served as a bouncer for the bar, and it later became the base of operations for the mystical team Shadowpact.
That's it for this week. Thank you for reading!Firstly I would like to apologies for the delayed thank you to my secret Santa; sadly UK customs thought the present was for them. When they realised the present was actually for me, they held it hostage and demanded a ransom (If my Secret Santa is reading this, don’t worry I’ll be able to appeal the charges).
My present came this morning and I couldn't be happier. My Secret Santa managed to combine my love for cooking with my love for George R R Martin’s ‘A Song for Ice and Fire’, with ‘A Feast of Ice and Fire the official companion cookbook’. My Secret Santa gave me a second present; hypnotic lights; these are fantastic! These are some of the best Christmas presents I got this Christmas.
This was my first Secret Santa and I really appreciate the thought that they put into my present. I want to say a massive thank you for their efforts and wish them the best!
Thank you so much!Scientists digitally reconstructed a model of a dinosaur chase using photos of theropod and sauropod footprints excavated 70 years ago, according to results published April 2, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Peter Falkingham from Royal Veterinary College, London, and colleagues James Farlow and Karl Bates.
As one of the most famous set of dinosaur tracks in the world, the Paluxy River tracks contain both theropod and sauropod footprints. American paleontologist Roland Bird originally excavated the extensive and well preserved footprints in 1940 in Texas, but post-excavation, paleontologists removed the tracks from their original location, divided them into blocks, and transported them to various locations around the world. Prior to their removal, Bird documented the original site with photos and maps, but since excavation portions of the tracks have been lost. A wealth of information could be gained if we were able to view the tracks in one piece again, so researchers set about making that happen.
To digitally reconstruct the site as it was pre- excavation, scientists scanned 17 photos, developed a model and compared the model to maps drawn by Bird. Despite the variation between the photos and the hand drawn maps, scientists were able to reconstruct and view the entire 45 m long sequence in 3D for the first time since excavation. The 3D digital model helped the authors corroborate the maps drawn by Bird when the tracksite was first described. The authors hope that this study will help others digitally recreate paleontological, geological, or archaeological specimens that have been lost or deteriorated over time, but for which old photographic documentation exists.
Peter Falkingham added, "In recent years technology has advanced to the point where highly accurate 3D models can be produced easily and at very little cost just from digital photos, and this has been revolutionizing many different fields. That we can apply that technology to specimens, or even entire sites, that no longer exist but were recorded photographically is extremely exciting."
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Citation: Falkingham PL, Bates KT, Farlow JO (2014) Historical Photogrammetry: Bird's Paluxy River Dinosaur Chase Sequence Digitally Reconstructed as It Was prior to Excavation 70 Years Ago. PLoS ONE 9(4): e93247. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093247
Financial Disclosure: This work was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Framework Programme awarded to PLF, and a National Geographic grant awarded to JOF. The Laser scans of the AMNH and TMM sections were collected during previous work funded by Jurassic foundation and Palaeontological Association grants awarded to KTB. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interest Statement: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Greetings Citizens,
You may have already noticed that we have added a small flair item gift to every current Star Citizen backer’s account and Hangar: an animated space globe in honor of 2015! What is a Space Globe? Space globes are a long-lived, centennial human new year’s tradition. Each year, Rosemont Imports creates a limited edition collection of Premium Space Globes ornaments to collect. Health, prosperity and plentiful bounty hunting; space globes are supposed to bring good luck in the new year!
Everyone has been given one of three globes, awarded randomly, displaying one of the most recent additions to Star Citizen’s fleet. As part of their monthly flair program, development subscribers will also receive additional Space Globes that fill out the set: one more for Centurions and two for Imperators. You can learn more about subscribing here.
2015 is going to be a huge year for Star Citizen, and we wanted to provide a small gift in honor of that fact. Enjoy your Space Globe!So I was picking up the mail a week ago as usual, and almost dropped it all when I saw my username on an envelope!!! This is my first exchange ever, so I rushed to get the camera and opened it to see the most beautiful bookmark ever! I had explained in my profile that I had just converted to Wicca, so the pentagram was a terrific choice. :D It now lives in my journal.
Just an hour ago, I came home from babysitting. I was extremely tired and a little miffed at bad behaviour but I immediately perked back up when I saw the second envelope!
Inside was a heartfelt note and a gorgeous handmade knit bookmark!!! I mentioned that I adore handmade items, so this is extremely touching. Apparently my SS knew I like the colour purple :3 I love the subtle heart/chevron design!
I love both of them so much. Thank you MotoCasey for the best first exchange ever! I hope you got something awesome.On Saturday, the newly renovated Glen Canyon Recreation Center held an open house event to unveil the city's first indoor public rock climbing wall, one of the four park openings happening in San Francisco this month.
The nearly 70-acre Glen Canyon Park has long been known for its outdoor rock climbing and bouldering, but now, an indoor experience is available for visitors.
Designed for various skill levels, the climbing wall is part of the $14 million Rec Center renovation. The opening of the center had been pushed back by months after heavy rains over the winter delayed construction at the facility, the oldest in San Francisco.
Before this latest renovation, funded by the the 2012 Clean and Safe Neighborhood Parks Bond, it had only seen minor renovations in 1977.
The project was a complete overhaul: the interior was taken down to the studs and the seismic, electric and fire alarm systems all saw upgrades. As part of the improvements, the gym also added six retractable basketball hoops and more bleachers.
Renovated gym with retractable basketball hoops.
At the June 5th opening, Mayor Ed Lee called the renovation a milestone for the neighborhood that will better serve families, seniors and those with disabilities.
“San Francisco,” he said, “is committed to investing in our parks and open space to better serve the growing needs of our community.”
Renovation in progress at the Rec Center.
Photo courtesy of SF Rec and Park
Not yet completed climbing walls during renovation. |
Photo courtesy of SF Rec and Park
The Rec Center is set to be fully open by mid-July, but a rock climbing camp for children aged 6-13 is already underway. Organized into two age groups (children 6-9 years old and 10-13 years old), the camp is currently running each week through August 11th.
Elva Reyes-Espinosa brought her daughter and friends to the open house on Saturday to test out the climbing walls. She said they had to be waitlisted for the $342 rock climbing camp due to its popularity. (There are currently 34 people on the waiting list.)
“It’s great,” she said, “I think anything they can do to attract more visitors out here … would be great.”
Attendees line up to get fitted with a harness and climb the walls.
Megan Freund, a neighborhood resident whose family had been anticipating the opening for a long time, also came down to let her son try some climbing. “[We’re] just excited that it’s finally happening,” she told us, “It’s amazing. I really appreciate that they … made it with a variety of levels.”
Starting mid-July, the gym will be open 9am-9pm Monday to Saturday. There will also be drop-in rock rock climbing. Sessions run for two hours and will be $10 per climber, which will be limited to eight |
. Smith
esmith@oregonian.com
503-294-4032; @emilyesmithAs Malik Smith opened his front door and stepped out of his home in Saint-Constant, Que., last Wednesday morning, he was met by a formation of police officers pointing guns at him.
He says he counted 12 squad cars and nine officers who had pistols pointing at him, and another officer across the street with an assault rifle pointed in his direction.
"I think about it every day … I haven't been eating right; I haven't been sleeping right," Smith says. "I just have the picture of the squad cars all there, and them telling me to freeze with their pistols pointing at me."
Smith, 20, says he was arrested and held alone in a jail cell for nine hours. He was ultimately released, but says he was left emotionally scarred and feels he was racially profiled.
Police confirm they received a call about a possible gunshot in that area and made an arrest, but released the man after determining it was an electrical problem that caused the noise.
Police laughed at racism allegation, Smith says
Around 9:45 that morning, Smith was smoking a cigarette in his car, parked a couple of blocks from his house so his parents wouldn't see. They didn't know he smoked.
He says a man taking out his garbage asked him if he was waiting for someone. Smith said he wasn't, and drove back home soon after. He played video games for an hour before heading out the door and encountering the police, who arrested him around 10:45 a.m.
Smith says his house was searched and that he was told by police that someone had called 911 to say that a man in a suspicious vehicle had fired a gun outside his home.
While Smith was being handcuffed, he told police they were being racist. He says they just laughed in his face.
Police searched the home after arresting Smith, who was on his way to school. A neighbour reported hearing a gunshot, which turned out to be an electrical problem. (Salim Valji/CBC)
"At first, they didn't tell me what I was being charged for," he said.
Later, an officer told him he was facing charges of intimidation and possession of a weapon, he says. He was released Wednesday at 8 p.m.
A spokesperson for the Roussillon police force said officers responded to a call of a possible gunshot in the area of Laforet Street, but couldn't say who reported it or what they said.
"We didn't overlook any measures," Const. Karine Bergeron said. "We sent patrol officers, identity service and the canine unit was also called."
She says the investigation was wrapped up the same day after police called Hydro-Québec and found out an electrical problem made the sound, not a gunshot.
Bergeron couldn't say how many officers were dispatched to the scene or whether their guns were drawn. She wouldn't comment on the racial profiling allegation.
No apology
Smith says he was released without an explanation or an apology.
He and his family reached out to the Montreal-based Centre for Research Action on Race Relations, according to its director Fo Niemi.
Niemi says a lot of people in those situations, especially people of colour, fear getting shot.
"It's the thought of, 'My God, if someone is gun happy, or there's an error, I could end up with a bullet in my body, and that is a very, very stressful thought to have.'"
Family considering legal action
Niemi says wrongful arrests can lead to lasting psychological affects, which can be compounded if police aren't transparent about what may have happened.
"It's a lot of shock, and the shock is, 'How could this happen to me, I haven't done anything.'"
Smith says it's not the first time he's felt racially profiled. Two years ago, a police officer pulled him over and said he seemed 'too young' to be driving the 2005 Mazda he was in. (Salim Valji/CBC)
Niemi says the family is reviewing the damage caused in the arrest, including a shed door being kicked in, and looking into any legal action they can take.
But in the meantime, Niemi says, if police reach out to the family it could "have a meaningful change in the way the family relate to the police department in the future."
For now, Smith says the sight of police officers in the area causes anxiety. "This feeling in my body... I get fuzzy, I get hot, I get stressed out."Research shows his prostheses are not an advantage
This summer, University of Colorado professors Alena Grabowski and Rodger Kram will be rooting on their fellow Americans as they watch the Olympics, but during the track and field events a South African runner will have their attention.
In 2008, Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, who had both legs amputated below the knee as a child, was barred from the Olympics after a German study concluded that his blade-like, carbon fiber leg prostheses gave him an advantage. Pistorius appealed the decision in 2008 and Grabowski and Kram -- of CU's Integrative Physiology program -- joined a team of researchers who discovered that, if anything, the prostheses were a disadvantage for the runner.
This photo from Aug. 28, 2011, shows South Africa's Oscar Pistorius competing in a heat of the men's 400-meter at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu, South Korea. ( Kevin Frayer )
The results and Kram's testimony helped to overturn the decision, allowing Pistorius to become the first amputee athlete to compete in the Olympics and opening the door for other Paralympians to compete in future games. He will compete in the 4-by-400-meter relay and the 400-meter sprint.
"He does all the running, but we made it clear with our research that he should be there," Kram said.
Kram, who has been studying the oxygen consumption of runners since1983, said the German study measured Pistorius' energy while sprinting, which provided inconsistent results. The original study assumed his prosthetic devices, known as Flex-Foot Cheetahs, decreased his energy consumption making it less work for him to run compared to non-amputee athletes.
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Using steady running cycles rather than sprints, Grabowski and Kram's team collected more consistent numbers leading to different findings.
"We measured Oscar's oxygen consumption and found that his rate of energy consumption was lower than an average person but comparable to other high-caliber athletes," Kram said.
Grabowski, who received her Ph.D. under Kram in 2008, said they also found that Pistorius' prostheses don't allow him to put as much force into the ground when he runs giving him less ability to propel himself forward, potentially a disadvantage for the amputee runner.
University of Colorado researcher Rodger Kram, left, holds a prosthetic leg similar to the one used by Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius while Alena Grabowski, a scientist with Denver s Veterans Administration, holds another type of prosthesis used for normal activities on Wednesday inside the Locomotion Lab on the CU campus in Boulder. ( JEREMY PAPASSO )
The ban was lifted in time for Pistorius to compete in the 2008 Olympics but Grabowski said the stress that the controversy put on the then-21-year-old athlete "put him off his game."
The sprinter, nicknamed The Blade Runner, was 1.5 seconds short of qualifying for the 2008 games.
Pistorius did not respond to email requests for an interview but the following statement was posted on his website, oscarpistorius.com, last week following the announcement that he would represent South Africa in the Olympics, which begin July 27:
"I have a phenomenal team behind me who have helped get me here and I, along with them, will now put everything we can into the final few weeks of preparations before the Olympic Games, where I am aiming to race well, work well through the rounds, post good times and maybe even a personal best time on the biggest stage of them all."
Pistorius will also compete in this year's Paralympics beginning on Aug. 29, defending his titles in the 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter sprints.
Grabowski and Kram work in CU's Locomotion Lab and have dedicated their research to the energetic cost of walking and running, but they agreed that analyzing Pistorius has been a highlight of their careers so far.
"I'm confident that I'll never see another stadium filled with 90,000 people cheering for one of my discoveries again," Kram said.
"To have everyone around the world understand a little bit about your research is a pretty big deal," Grabowski said.
Grabowski, who specializes in prosthetics research, is currently working with the Veterans Administration in Denver to improve the BiOM device -- a battery-powered foot that she developed with Hugh Herr, who directs the Biomechatronics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The BiOM reads the person's movement and self-adjusts to the type of motion they are performing to act more like a conforming muscle than a stagnant, metal support. The device is currently being used for walking but Grabowski said she hopes to improve the self-adapting functions and heavy structure to make it more adaptable to athletes, though she doesn't expect Pistorius to be competing on the BiOM any time soon.You all know how healing I believe dance is for the mind, body and soul, so to say that I am over the moon thrilled to be a part of the MS Dance Challenge with one of my greatest friends and heroes, Carrie Sniderman, is an understatement.
What is the #MSDanceChallenge, you ask?
To generate awareness for Multiple Sclerosis, raise funds to find a cure and have a little fun while doing so, Dana Szwec has launched an MS Dance Challenge or as I like to think of it, MS Dance Off!
To take on the challenge:
Video yourself and/or friends dancing. Give a proven fact about MS. Challenge 2 friends to do the same. Encourage anyone who is able to donate!
To find out more about multiple sclerosis, read all about this disease on the MS Canada website at https://beta.mssociety.ca/about-ms, and for those of you that are able, you can donate at https://beta.mssociety.ca/get-involved
For our MS fact, we wanted to answer, why a dance challenge?
One of the most debilitating symptoms of MS is poor coordination, causing difficulty in the simplest of daily activities, like walking, eating, pouring liquids, and personal hygiene – making the pleasures of dancing a bit of a dream. We hope that through research into a cure, that will change. That is one of the things that a donation will help with.
So we’ve shown you ours … now show us yours! The #MSDanceOff is on!RTÉ and the GAA have announced plans for a new subscription-based worldwide streaming service for the 2014 All-Ireland Championships.
The paid-for service will feature the studio programming exactly as broadcast to audiences in Ireland.
All games will be streamed in HD across ipad or android tablets, laptops, PCs, Smart TVs, and on mobile phones. Subscribers will also be able to view The Sunday Game high;lights programme.
The online service will enable users to watch the games on tablet devices, laptops, PCs, Smart TVs, or on mobile phones.
Speaking this afternoon at the announcement of the latest rights deal, GAA President Liam O'Neill said the international aspect of the latest deal was important to the GAA.
“Making our games more widely available to Irish people abroad was a critical factor in our approach to these negotiations. We felt an obligation to them not to neglect their legitimate appeals to be able to watch live TV coverage of our games.
"We are also glad that this brings the quality and excitement of our games to a wider international audience. Gaelic games are national games played in a small country, and which must compete for audience loyalty with the hugely powerful sporting and marketing resources of international sports.
"The GAA has to fight its corner, and must ensure that it maintains a strong presence across a range of media outlets so that we can continue to fund our clubs in the important sporting, cultural and social roles they perform in their communities ”
RTÉ Digital Managing Director Muirne Laffan welcomed what she described as an innovative collaboration,
“This will now enable us to deliver and showcase Gaelic games across the world and to serve a need which we know has existed for a long time.”
GAA President Liam O’Neill said: “Making our games more widely available to Irish people abroad was a critical factor in our approach to these negotiations.”
Further details on the service will be announced at a launch this month.A Brief Biography
In the spring of 1868, a young man came to Yosemite and changed the world. Muir had just turned 30 that year. His first 11 years were spent in Dunbar, Scotland. The next 11 he spent in the backwoods of Wisconsin, working through the daylight hours, clearing the forest, holding a plow to a straight furrow behind a team of oxen, digging wells through hard bedrock, and taking an adult’s part in subduing wild nature.
Years later, in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, he stressed the rigors of his childhood, but he seemed to feel that his strenuous years in Wisconsin prepared him well for his later wilderness ramblings.
He also prepared throughout his childhood for his life as a naturalist by a close attention to the wonders of nature. Everything, it seemed, drew his eye and his mind, and all creatures drew his sympathy, whether the mice that ate the grain he had wrung from the earth by the sweat of his brow or the intelligent old ox Buck, who figured out how to open pumpkins to feast on the succulent inner flesh.
As a teenager, he had no time for school and little opportunity for formal study. Yet his mind hungered for knowledge. When his father grudgingly gave permission for him to rise before the rest of the family to read, he took to rising at one in the morning. He wrote, “I had gained five hours, almost half a day! ‘Five hours to myself!’ I said. ‘Five huge, solid hours!’ I can hardly think of any other event of my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours.”
Much of this new-won time he gave over to his inventions. In fact, it seems he was an inventor of substantial gifts. He created a thermometer so sensitive that it would react to the heat radiated by the body of a person standing four or five feet away. Another creation was an alarm clock that, at the appointed time, tipped up his bed and dumped him on the floor. He called it an “early-rising machine.”
These machines and his desire to escape from his overbearing father took him to Madison, Wisconsin and brought him to the attention of several people from the University of Wisconsin. He was admitted, though he had spent only a few months in school after the age of 11. In the following two and a half years, he followed an electic course of study, heavy on Natural Science, and left in 1863.
Over the next three years he worked as a mechanic and took several short wilderness trips. Much of the Civil War he spent in Canada, perhaps to avoid the draft, though that is far from certain. What is certain is that in 1867 a momentous accident changed his life. He was adjusting some machinery with a file when his hand slipped. A point of the file pierced one eye. He lost the use of that eye. The other soon went dark in sympathy. It was the darkest moment of his life for his spirit, as well as his sight.
As his sight gradually returned, over a period of months, he felt that he had been re-born. He resolved to spend the rest of his life immersed in the sights that had been denied him in his darkened sickroom — the forests, fields, lakes and mountains of pure, unspoiled nature.
His first great wilderness adventure was a thousand mile walk from Louisville, Kentucky to Savannah, Georgia. From there, he hoped to travel to the headwaters of the Amazon and work his way to the sea. But a case of malaria laid him low in Florida and, by a wandering course, he ended up in San Francisco in March, 1868. He inquired the nearest way out of town. “‘But where do you want to go?’ asked the man to whom I had applied for this important information. ‘To any place that is wild,’ I said.”
So he went to Yosemite.
The next six years brought about another transformation. His first summer in Yosemite, he worked as a shepherd. Then he ran a sawmill near the base of Yosemite Falls. But all the time he was working, he was studying nature, the great truths that, he said, were written in “magnificent capitals” — the awesome stones of the Sierra Nevada. He became a guide for some of the most famous of Yosemite’s visitors, including one of his idols, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson tried to entice Muir away from Yosemite, telling him the world was waiting to hear him teach the lessons he had learned. But Muir chose to follow the ideal Emerson had set forth in “The American Scholar.” He stayed in his mountains, working, studying and learning.
Eventually, he did leave the Valley. First for only a few months at a time. He would live with friends in San Francisco or Oakland and write about his glorious mountains, the scenery that drew tourists and the science behind the scenery. Gradually, he spent more time in the Bay Area and less time in Yosemite. In 1880, he married and moved to Martinez, California, 35 miles from San Francisco.
He still traveled, sometimes to Yosemite, several times to Alaska. But the decade of the 1880’s saw him mostly in Martinez, applying his love of plants and fecund imagination to the task of raising Bartlett pears and Tokay grapes. He became fairly wealthy, but seemingly discontented. Each trip to the mountains presented him with more proof that, unless something were done, the glorious wilderness he had found in 1868 would soon be only a memory.
Muir’s budding re-awakening to literary and political activity was brought to fruition by Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century, one of the most prominent magazines in the country a hundred years ago. The catalyst was their famous camping trip to Tuolumne Meadows in 1889. Each seemed to have thought the trip was a way to inspire the other to do something to save the High Sierra from the sheep which Muir felt were rapidly altering the sub-alpine environment. Muir wrote two long articles on Yosemite, advocating a National Park to surround what was then the state-run Yosemite Valley. Johnson published the articles and lobbied energetically. Congress complied with this emotional and literary onslaught, creating a National Park that included almost all the present-day park plus the southeastern area down to Devil’s Postpile that was excised in 1905 when the Valley was taken from state control and added to the National Park.
Another fruit of this budding friendship was the creation, in 1892, of the Sierra Club, with Muir as President, apostle, guide, and inspiration. The purpose of the Club was to preserve and make accessible the Sierra Nevada.
The Club grew slowly and quietly for a few years, then a little faster after 1901 with the start of the High Trips. But not until the City of San Francisco began its push for a dam on the Tuolumne at the mouth of Hetch Hetchy Valley was the whole idea of preservation vs. use articulated on the front and editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers.
Muir summed up the basic arguments against the dam in some of his most elegant, most elevated prose:
“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”
The Sierra Club, and the environmental movement as a whole, have grown most rapidly in times of severe, well-publicized threats to the environment. But over the years, slow and steady growth can be traced directly to those who have followed Muir’s adivce, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” In 1900, Sierra Club Secretary Will Colby envisaged a mass outing for the Sierra Club, to introduce as many people as possible to the wonders of the mountains. The following summer, 1901, ninety-seven “Sierrans” including Muir and his two daughters assembled in The Valley and trekked to Soda Springs for a month of hiking, peak climbing, campfire entertainment and education. One woman wrote of the trip:
“Muir, the prince of mountainlovers, was guide and apostle, and his gentle, kindly face, genial blue eyes, and quaint, quiet observations on present and past Sierra conditions impressed us unforgettably with the ‘sermons in stone, books in the running brooks,’ he knows so well.”
These outings became an annual affair, and evolved into the Club’s current schedule of dozens of trips all over the world. Periodically, the Board of Directors reminds the membership that the outings were not the reason the Club was started. Will Colby himself wrote, in the January 1904 Bulletin, that membership was up to nearly 800, “mainly due to the annual Club Outing. … Our members should not, however, lose sight of the fact that this feature of the Club’s life is but a minor part … of the worthy objects for which the Club was incorporated … the preservation of the forests and the natural scenery of our mountains.”
Marion Parsons, one of the few women leaders of the early Sierra Club, answered Colby in her own article in the 1904 Bulletin: “The Sierra Club has great and noble purposes, for which we honor it, but besides these its name has come to mean an ideal for us. It means comradeship and chivalry, simplicity and joyousness, and the carefree life of the open.”
Thirty years later, twenty years after Muir’s death, another woman wrote of her own experiences on a High Trip. “Never had I really understood John Muir’s ecstasy until I wandered through this little valley.” That “ecstasy” was exactly what Muir found most lacking in California, even among his fellow “preservationists.” “The love of Nature among Californians is desperately moderate; consuming enthusiasm is almost wholly unknown.” It was this ecstasy in Nature that distinguished Muir from most other preservationists and it was this very emotionalism that made him so attractive to the women he met as well as others who weren’t embarrassed by their emotional response to Nature.
Over the years, Muir developed from a guide for select individuals to a guide for the Sierra Club to a guide for the whole nation. Not just to Yosemite or any other specific place, but to the inner regions of the emotional response to Nature, especially Wild Nature.
Muir died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital in January, 1914. It was a unexpectedly prosaic end for a man who had repeatedly faced death on rocky crags and icy glaciers, who braved Alaskan storms with a crust of bread in his pocket. In the years since, his legend has grown. In 1976, the Calfiornia Historical Society voted him “The Greatest Californian.” The U.S. Geological Survey has suggested an even greater mark of his fame. In their guidelines on naming mountains and lakes after individuals, it gives Muir as the example of someone who has had so many things named for him already that they would not be likely to approve any further such commemorations.
But perhaps the greatest tribute ever given to Muir took place in a private conversion between two great contemporary mountaineers. Galen Rowell once asked Rheinhold Messner why the greatest mountains and valleys of the Alps are so highly developed, why they have hotels, funicular railways, and veritable cities washing up against sites that, in America, are maintained relatively unencumbered by development. Messner explained the difference in three words. He said, “You had Muir.”"Actually, I wasn’t actually selected to join," Nortey says. "A friend of mine was selected, and I just happened to have the money for transportation to get to the Right To Dream. And he doesn’t have any money, so I said, 'OK, I’m just going to come with you and get some second chance.' But he wasn’t too happy about it, because if you come with me, maybe they will say, 'He will miss his chance, too.' So we both kind of risked it and we went. And I was really, really lucky, because at the time, they only had one goalkeeper. So they needed another goalkeeper to run the drills. And so I stayed, I trained, and I watched people go home every day until there was 16 of us. And they actually registered me as a Right To Dream player."
Would it sound too much like a fairytale if I were to suggest that Nortey was plucked from the street by the Right To Dream people when they recognized his potential as a soccer player and as a student? Yeah, it would. So I won’t. And neither will Nortey.
And fortunately for C. Nortey, there has been somewhere else nearby, at least since 1999. That’s when Tom Vernon, a former scout for Manchester United, started the Right To Dream Academy. Its purpose is to discover promising soccer players who are also interested in learning something about the world at large, and how they might work to grow into taking responsible places in it.
But he was a better soccer player than a lot of those other kids playing in the street. Nortey was good enough to dream that he might play somewhere else.
Nortey says lots of the people he knew woke up each day trying to figure out where they could find another dollar or two.
"I was helping my mom bring some money home and I was selling soft drinks and tomatoes and bread and stuff like that on the street," Nortey says. "I had two puppies at the time. And Labadi Beach was a place where a lot of foreigners come. And I know they love puppies, so I bring my puppies over there. They would play with them, and then I said, 'Pay some money for playing with the puppy.'"
Nortey, the oldest child in his family, had to fit in street football – or soccer – between whatever opportunities he could find to make sure everybody at home had enough to eat.
"I have four siblings: two brothers, two sisters, and my dad walked out of our life when I was very little. So I had to live with my mom," Nortey says. "I lived in the city, in Accra, and there’s a lot going on, and playing with friends, and going here and there, playing street football. It was a lot of fun growing up, but it’s also a lot of, you know, you kinda have to have a tough skin to grow up in an environment like that."
James C. Nortey, who goes by the initial “C,” grew up in Accra, the capital of Ghana. It wasn’t easy.
"You need to have some values, because you’re gonna be done with football at age 30-something, and there’s a lot of life left to live."
So, success. But making it into the program came with consequences.
"It was gonna be tough leaving home," Nortey says. "It means that money’s not coming home anymore. And at the time, my mom wasn’t happy. But I’m going to receive education, I’m going to play the football that I love and I’m going to be with people that are going to develop me as a person, as a footballer."
At first, “leaving home” didn’t mean leaving Ghana. Nortey moved to the academy, about 90 kilometers away, when he was 11. But when he was 15, “leaving home” got a lot more serious: Nortey received a scholarship to Hotchkiss, a prep school in rural Connecticut. “Culture shock” doesn’t begin to describe that transition:
"When I first got to the Hotchkiss School, I thought I was in heaven," Nortey says. "That place was special. From the food, people, how people talk, how people carry themselves around. I was doing the things that I was supposed to do and enjoying people and enjoying school and staying quiet."
Life might have gone on that way during Nortey’s first year at Hotchkiss if his mother hadn’t passed away. He returned home to Ghana as quickly as he could. He assumed that’s where he would remain.
"It was very difficult being home, because I could just see in the faces of my siblings, like, what are they going to do now? They don't say it, but I could see it," Nortey says. "There’s no way I could leave my siblings like that. What are they going to do? How are they going to feed themselves? Who is going to take care of them? So I actually wrote a letter to Hotchkiss that I can’t come back. Not now, anyway. Maybe in the future, if they will accept me to come back, then I will. But right now, I cannot. And I wrote that letter, and I show it to my uncle, and he said, 'OK, I’m not going to allow you to send this letter to Hotchkiss.' So he told me, 'You need to go back. Leave your siblings for me, and I’ll do my best to help them.' And so I think it was because of him that I came back to Hotchkiss."
And it was because he came back to Hotchkiss – and because he played soccer there – that C. Nortey caught the attention of the soccer coach from Marquette University, who’d actually come to a Hotchkiss game to check out another player. Are you beginning to see the part serendipity played in this young man’s journey?
Anyway, all he did when he got to Marquette was become the school’s sixth all-time leading scorer, earn the team’s Most Valuable Player award and score a record number of game-winning goals — all of which suggests strongly that at some point he’d stopped playing goalie.
Nortey graduated in December 2015. The following spring he began working with young players associated with FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark, a team partially owned by Tom Vernon of the Right To Dream Academy. Nortey helps teenage players learn the game and the discipline and integrity he says he acquired at Right To Dream. He’s also begun his career as a pro player at Akademisk Boldklub, known – at least locally – as AB. There, his vocabulary in Danish has expanded.
"I know simple things like, 'Hey, how are you?' and 'I’m good,'" Nortey says. "And I know football terms like, 'press,' 'left,' 'right,' 'Come on, guys!' and stuff like that."
Looking back, Nortey can appreciate becoming the first college graduate in his family. He says most people in Ghana leave school when they’re 13 or 14.
C. Nortey graduated from Marquette in December 2015 and now plays for Akademisk Boldklub in Denmark. (Courtesy C. Nortey)
"It felt really good, and it was a good example to set for my siblings and friends at home and my community," Nortey says. "You know, they’re gonna recognize that. And it’s gonna have an impact on them, especially my siblings. I know it’s gonna have an impact with them."
In fact, it already has…at least on one younger brother.
"Eben. He’s always wanted to go to school. I think he’s the smartest in the family," Nortey says. "So he applied for only two schools, and he got into one of the better schools, universities, in Ghana. And it’s a business school. And that’s what he likes to do. I was like, 'OK. I need to do something to help.'"
What C. Nortey did was raise Eben’s tuition money through GoFundMe.com. So that’s another family member on the way to a degree. And that’s only one manifestation of Nortey’s on-going determination to mentor other youngsters, having learned how significant that kind of help can be, which is why he studied social welfare and justice at Marquette.
"I want to organize something in Ghana," Nortey says. "Like a charity program, or like a volunteer program in my community, where I could get a lot of volunteers from a different part of the world to come to my community and maybe do some mission work, maybe teaching, coaching, being around these kids in my community. Just talking sometimes could even change their demeanor. And that’s what I got from Right To Dream. Like, of course I learned a lot there, but sometimes being with these volunteers from a different part of the world, hearing them talk to me, hearing their values, you know, it kind of changed me. You need to have some values, because you’re gonna be done with football at age 30-something, and there’s a lot of life left to live."
There is, at that. And it’s easy to imagine that no matter how well he performs as a soccer player, the best and most rewarding parts of C. Nortey’s life will happen after he’s moved beyond the pitch.WSIL - Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been the focus of the presidential race, but one southern Illinois group wants to shed light on a third party candidate.
The Southern Illinois Libertarian Party met Saturday to provide people with information on libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson and running mate Bill Weld.
The group described the Johnson/Weld campaign as a push to reflect freedom in as many policies as possible, in order to help individuals the most.
Similar to Butch Webber, you may have thought you only have two options when voting this fall.
"Well evidently there is a third candidate eligible to vote for, for president," Webber said. "Had never heard that until today."
Scott Schluter is the chairman of the local group. He said Johnson and Weld stand out from the other candidates because they both have executive experience.
"Him and his running mate Bill Weld are both two time governors, both republican at the time, both in heavily democrat states that won as republicans because they're able to garner support from both sides of the aisle," he said.
Schluter said Johnson's policies could favor both democrats and republicans.
"He's pro-choice, he's pro-gay marriage," he said. "The party is very pro-gun, very pro self defense."
Schluter said Johnson is also for open borders but wants to make an easier path to citizenship.
He said one of his biggest plans if elected president -- his tax plan.
"His plan is to get rid on the income tax. His plan is to abolish the income tax if possible, get rid of the IRS and replace it with what he's calling a fair tax. which is basically a consumption tax," he said.
According to polling group Real Clear Politics, Johnson is polling at 8.3 percent nation wide.
In order for a third party candidate to be on the debate stage with Trump and Clinton, they have to receive 15 percent popular vote in five different national polls, according to the commission on presidential debates.
And Johnson said himself, if he is not on the debate stage, he has no chance of winning the presidency.Allkpop readers revisiting a Nov. 10 article featuring unauthorized nude photos of the solo singer Ailee may be surprised to find the photos have been removed from the website.
"Umm, where are the photos? I saw them before. Allkpop you removed the photos," allkpop reader Haelic wrote on Tuesday.
Haelic was one of over 6,000 fans that have left overwhelmingly negative comments on the article featuring the Ailee nude photos and allkpop's follow-up piece featuring a statement from the singer's record label YMC Entertainment and an explanation from the website's editors.
"Are you scared now?" Haelic asked the allkpop editors. "Famous artists unfollowed you on Twitter....you're scared now aren't you? Remove the whole article please!"
Much of the vitriol among readers appears to be focused around the fact that Vice President of Content for allkpop and the website's parent company 6Theory Media of Edgewater, NJ, admitted he attempted to sell the Ailee nude photos to the Korean publication Dispatch, after a phone call implicating him was released.
"I just signed in to say f**k you to Daniel Lee and allkpop," reader Bokdol wrote on Monday. "That is all."
"They could have easily blurred most of the picts but they only did as minor a job as possible and lied about having them, then lied about trying to sell them," Bokdol added.
"It's because of Daniel Lee that Ailee has this problem. It was disgusting how they pretended to be innocent."
Lee, who used to date Ailee, reportedly got ahold of the photos after the 24-year-old singer had been involved in a modeling scam and asked for his advice.
Three days after allkpop published the unauthorized nude photos of Ailee, which were censored with small black boxes, the allkpop VP told the host of the South Korean program "One Night of TV Entertainment," that although he attempted to sell the photos, he did not leak them to his employer, according to eNEWS.
"I just really wanted to see if it was possible [to sell pictures] and I innocently asked. I had no other intention."
The allkpop VP, who said he hasn't spoken to Ailee since publishing the nude pictures, denied reports that he leaked the photos to the website he works for.
"All I can say is I'm sorry," Lee said.
"A misunderstanding happened and I can only say sorry about it. But what I want to say is that I did not leak the photos."
Previous requests for comment from allkpop have been ignored. Their listed phone number has been disconnected.00:47 Wildfires Rage in Virginia A wildfire in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia grows to 3,000 acres. Meteorologist Danielle Banks shares the latest information.
A wildfire at Virginia's Shenandoah National Park continues to grow in size, and Thursday evening, officials said the blaze has claimed at least 8,000 acres.
More than a dozen hiking trails have been closed due to the so-called Rocky Mount fire, and nearly 250 firefighters have been assigned to the inferno, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It has quickly become one |
themselves, completely sidelining the Industrial West). Third is the problem of energy constraints: we need fossil fuels and petroleum in particular to manufacture and distribute solar panels, wind turbines and lithium batteries. The ultimate hope would be that renewable energy can itself eventually be used to manufacture more renewable energy generators in the future – which is yet to be proven and highly doubtful. The current low price of oil hides the fact that we are fast falling down the precipice of high net energy conventional oil availability. Below the EROEI of 10:1, complex industrial activities can no longer take place and the establishment of centralised, gridbased 100% renewable energy will not occur. This dream would have been entirely feasible if it had been commenced, say, 10 years ago, but now seems almost impossible. The worst thing about the "big electricity" advocates is that they fail to adequately emphasize the importance of energy efficiency – they want consumers to continue being addicted to high consumption lifestyles which is the cornerstone of their business model and is in my view criminal.
I personally do not see any point opposing plans of "big electricity" because even though, in view of the constraints above, the prospect of centrally provided 100% renewable energy is now almost impossible, it is not absolutely impossible. I rate the chance of their future success around 0.1%. There is however a better, proven strategy with a 100% guaranteed likelihood of success which can be done right now. It is also suitable (in more modest iteration) for people in poorer countries who can technologically "leap frog"over being tied to the grid and proceed directly to electricity independence, just as they have leap frogged over the need for fixed telephone lines and proceeded directly to mobile smart phones.
For those who are willing and able, the only sensible plan at this time is to ruthlessly pursue energy efficiency and to establish your own completely off-grid domestic electrical system, which is in fact super easy to do. For some, this may involve the construction of a tiny house on wheels in the metropolitan area where you live, which in the first instance can be connected to the grid while the industrial system still functions. This house can be rapidly moved to a remote location when TSHTF and then happily switch to off grid mode. The low prices of electrical components and (semi) intact industrial economy at present mean that there is no better window of opportunity to grasp than right now.
The fact that items such as solar PV panels and LED lights can easily last more than 20 years means that you will continue to enjoy a high quality of life well after the rest of the world has descended into the stone age. Even conventional lead acid batteries can easily last 15 years if depth of discharge is kept minimal each cycle. Even if your batteries and inverter ultimately fail, with a DC system you can run your fridge directly off the solar PV panels during the day. "Eutectic" mixtures (eg concentrated brine – which has a freezing point well below zero degrees C, which is frozen during the day when the compressor is running), kept in containers in the freezer, can keep the night time unpowered fridge icy cold. Repositioning your fridge to a cool shaded location outdoors will increase its efficiency. A little bit of creativity can go a long way to maintaining a high level of comfort and convenience over a long duration.
As mentioned before the first three principles of electricity management are efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Only after that should you consider the questions of solar PV panel and battery capacities.
ELECTRICAL LAYOUT for a tiny house design (please refer to the diagrams)
This is configured for a particular design: http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/2544932-building-a-tiny-house
I initially planned to have two lead acid battery arrays indoors, which I then changed to a single lithium array located in an outdoor shed (wired to an "electrical shelf" under the stairs). However in my final iteration I am opting for a single lithium array located under the front deck, wired to an "electrical shelf" in a nearby cupboard.
Whereas these days the risk of spontaneous combustion of lithium iron phosphate batteries is extremely low, it is still more prudent to store the batteries outdoors (furthermore the batteries also function more efficiently in a cooler, shaded, well ventilated outdoor environment).
Basic design:
Ground based solar panels feed wires to MPPT regulator (located under front deck) which feed the battery array (24V Lithium Iron Phosphate) which then send thick 24V DC cables into tiny house (location of electronic shelf has been changed from under stairs to top shelf of cupboard in updated diagram).
In tiny house, 24V DC bus (with fuses) feeds 24V wiring to DC appliances (fridge/freezer, ceiling fan, kitchen exhaust fan, shower exhaust fan, water pump), as well as various DC sockets which sit beside AC sockets
24V DC bus also feeds pure sine wave inverter which then goes to 240V AC panel with circuit breakers. This panel then feeds the washing machine and the AC sockets.
Safety cut off device is also incorporated.
The 240V AC panel can also be supplied directly by a mains electricity plug-in supply (switch toggles to either mains supply or battery supply from inverter)
*MPPT regulator and battery sit on heavy duty cargo trolley (with fireproof, waterproof covering) which can easily be wheeled in and out, from under the timber dec
APPLIANCES
WM = Washing machine
FF = Fridge/Freezer
SEF = Shower exhaust fan
TEF = Composting toilet exhaust fan (12V DC fan)
REF = Rangehood exhaust fan
WP = Water pump
Ceiling fan as labeled
LED strip lights:
These are all "warm white" and of the latest type where the light output is diffuse along the strip (not able to see focal bright points, unlike the old type)
1 = On ceiling, illuminates both staircase and head of loft bedroom
2 = On ceiling, illuminates both foot of loft bedroom and West end of lounge
3 = Above windows, under shelf
4 = Above windows, under shelf
5 = Weatherproof outdoor LED striplight above panoramic door / window
6 = Above kitchen counter at junction of wall and ceiling
7 = three small strip lights on underside of cross beams
8 = At top edge of mirror cabinet
LOCATION OF SWITCHES (red letters A, B & C):
Switchpanel A is located on the wall above the kitchen counter here and has switches which control lights 1 and 7, and another switch for the water pump
Lights 6 and 8 have their switches immediately adjacent to them
Switchpanel B is located on the side of this storage cupboard around chest height and has five switches which control lights 2, 3, 4 and 5 + ceiling fan
Switchpanel C is located at loft entrance, on the side of the headboard cupboard, situated low down near the loft floor and has two switches which control lights 1 and 2
Switches for exhaust fans (in showerstall or rangehood) are next to / on those appliances.
Exhaust fan for composting toilet has no switch, it is merely unplugged
Please note: light 1 can be turned on and off from BOTH switchpanel A or C
light 2 can be turned on and off from BOTH switchpanel B or C
LOCATION OF SOCKETS:
Loft bedroom sockets are located on the wall as indicated, just above height of headboard
Kitchen sockets are above level of kitchen counter (just under cabinet)
Indoor lounge sockets are located in wall about 10cm above floor
Outdoor sockets are low and towards eastern edge, out of swing radius of opening lounge door
There is great pressure from the commercial sector these days to force you to wire your offgrid dwelling with an AC system only (whether 240V 50Hz as in Oz or 110V 60Hz as in the US). This is certainly the easiest option – it is what conventional electricians are familiar with and are comfortable with. However it means your entire electrical system will be completely dependent on the flawless performance of one single device which must be constantly kept running 24/7: the DC to AC inverter. Even though inverters are cheaper and more reliable these days and it is not difficult to purchase a spare, for many other reasons my preference is to have dual wiring (240V AC and 24V DC) and to run the frequently used appliances (LED lights, fridge, fans) on 24V DC. As such, the inverter will only need to run intermittently for devices such as the washing machine, thus vastly prolonging the inverter's lifespan. Furthermore if you lose the function of the washing machine it is not the end of the world – a toilet plunger and bucket can work just as well (the main hassle being wringing out the clothes).
Supplemental charging after many overcast days can be devised according to your particular circumstances, whether by wind microturbine, pumped water storage with microhydro, or even by diesel generator while fossil fuels are still available.
The keys to the longevity of any system are reliability, durability, simple design (minimising the number of potential points of failure) and redundancy. These principles have been illustrated in both my plumbing and electrical layouts. If the tiny houses in your community are designed to utilise standardised components (whether they be evacuated solar hot water tubes or MPPT chargers or 24V DC devices etc), if you purchase numerous spare parts a priori and if you have the expertise within your group to perform regular maintenance and repairs (ideally the folks who built those tiny houses should live within your community), you will create a robust and resilient situation which will enable your comfortable lifestyles to be maintained for two or more decades after the collapse of centralised services. Furthermore in the post collapse situation, the salvage economy will become vitally important. The restoration or repurposing or cannibalisation for spare parts from old devices (whiteware, electronic goods etc) will enable those with a practical inventive streak to breathe new life into what we nowadays regard as discarded junk. For example, the electric motor of an old washing machine can be repurposed to become an electricity generator powered by stationary bicycle, enabling supplemental charging of your batteries while simultaneously providing you with healthy exercise.
GC Feb 2016
ADDENDUM: UPDATE ON HOT WATER PLUMBING
For thermosiphoning to work properly, it is important to purchase an indirect hot water cylinder with a large calibre internal heat exchange coil which has been purpose designed for this function. One example is the AGA cylinder from www.gasapplianceguide.co.uk Copper cylinders are not prone to electrolytic corrosion, hence there will be no need for a magnesium anode. Obviously if you are not prone to frost then the way to go is with a direct cylinder which makes things simpler and cheaper.
The simplest way to deal with excessive heating of the hot water, causing overflow, is according to this diagram:
The signal that overheating is occurring will be water spilling out of the external overflow pipe from the header tank, which will be visible from both within the house (through the end window) as well as from the outside if you are working in the field. The response to this will be to simply cover the evacuated solar tube array. Regular overheating of the water in the hot water tank will in fact be desirable, to kill off any prospect of harbouring Legionella.Ten years ago, Toronto photographer Harry Enchin went to explore The Junction, a neighborhood on the city's west side. It's where his mother grew up. And after she started to suffer from dementia, Enchin began to think more about what Toronto used to look like.
He dug through the city archives to develop his most recent photography project, Toronto Time. In Toronto Time, Enchin merges archival photos, mostly taken between 1910 and 1950, with the exact same spot today, creating a unique representation of the city's evolution.
To create the images, Enchin puts a copy of the historic image in his smart phone. He then visits the exact spot where the photograph was taken, pulls out his phone to match the photo with the precise site and angle, and takes his own photograph with a digital SLR camera. He then combines the two images, creating a final result that gives viewers a curious clash of two eras.
While the results are always interesting, one image that combines today's streetcar with the men who built its tracks in 1923 stands out to Enchin. "They were building back then the infrastructure for the city," says the photographer. "Little did they know what they were building the foundation for 80 years later."A complex internet challenge for the world’s brightest brains has reportedly returned with a cryptic tweet from the anonymous group.
Cicada 3301 is the name given to a faceless organisation or person who has been setting insanely complex challenges to code-breakers on the internet since 2012.
Nobody knows for sure the identity of the group behind the puzzles but speculation about who may be behind it includes the Freemasons, the Illuminati, hacker group Anonymous, the US Government or just a troll having some fun.
How did it all begin?
The first 3301 puzzles began appearing in January 2012, they were initially posted on sites like 4Chan and Reddit. Once internet sleuths solve one puzzle they are given another puzzle [and so on].
Joel Eriksson, a computer analyst from Sweden, came across an intriguing message on an internet forum in 2012.
“We are looking for highly intelligent individuals,” it said. “To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”
Another image posted on 4Chan read: “There is a message hidden in this image.
“Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way through.
“Good Luck. 3301.”
Can anyone take part in the challenge?
via GIPHY
You can certainly try, although you probably wouldn’t get very far. You will need a strong knowledge of cryptography, programming, computer networks and much more to ever solve the puzzle.
Like a ‘Deal or no Deal’ pub quiz, knowledge of literature and numerology can also come in handy when trying to solve the series of cryptographic puzzles.
Has anyone ever solved a puzzle?
Eriksson did manage to get to the end of the puzzle set in 2012, even taking time off work in an attempt to crack it.
He just missed out however after reaching the final server to discover the winners had apparently already been chosen. Eriksson heard that those chosen had been asked to solve puzzles in private.
Read more about his incredible journey through the dark web here.
Could it all be a practical joke?
via GIPHY
Kenny Paterson, a crypto-professor at Royal Holloway University, told BBC Radio 4 it doesn’t appear to be the work of an internet troll or a PR exercise.
"There's been several such competitions in the past. Google used to post puzzles on billboards beside the highways in Silicon Valley to attract people to come and work for them. A few years ago, our own GCHQ had a set of puzzles for people to solve as a way to recruit people with bright minds
“It's unlikely to be a spoof due to the lengths [Cicada 3301] have gone to. They are really sophisticated; they have all kinds of amazing, esoteric references in there to the work of [occultist] Aleister Crowley, for example, paintings by William Blake, and Maya numerals. It takes a long, long time to set up puzzles like this. It's not something you can do in your spare time."
Has it returned?
@1231507051321 The game has begun. — Mateus Costa (@MateusFast19) January 6, 2016
An unconfirmed tweet sent on January 5 has apparently signalled the return of Cicada 3301 in 2016, although fake 3301 puzzles have circulated in the past.
The account tweeted a link to an image with the caption: “Liber Primus [a book of encrypted runes] is the way. Its words are the map, their meaning is the road, and their numbers are the direction.”
Hello @NSAGov, I found this on my way home. CICADA 3301, can you hear me? pic.twitter.com/LpjM6AL8ij —? Kevin B. Bowie? (@CrowleyTheBeast) January 4, 2016
Many believe the key to solving the puzzle is deciphering the Liber Primus although other players have cited it as a source of frustration.
More on the internet mystery that has the world baffled.
Can you solve the 50 cent maths exam question that is dividing the internet?When news broke that Michael Flynn, President Trump’s now-former national security adviser, had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador before Trump was sworn in, the Logan Act was the federal statute of the moment.
The New York Times wrote that Flynn’s resignation had “elevated interest” in the “dusty” law. NPR noted that the law had “gotten a lot of attention recently and is at the center of the scandal surrounding Flynn.” Time magazine reported that the “obscure law was suddenly on the minds of Washington observers.”
Whatever Flynn’s other transgressions may be — the White House says he lied to Vice President Pence about his conversations last year with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and the FBI could investigate whether he told federal agents the truth in interviews — he almost certainly doesn’t have to worry about the Logan Act. In the 218 years since its passage, not a single person has been convicted of violating the law. Only twice has someone even been charged with the crime.
On the books since 1799, the Logan Act prohibits Americans from corresponding with foreign governments “relating to controversies or disputes which do or shall exist” between those governments and the United States. On paper, Logan Act violations are felonies that bring prison sentences of up to three years. In reality, the act is little more than a historical curiosity that has proved to be one of the most useless laws ever contrived by Congress.
That’s not to say violations are never serious, even if no charges are brought. Richard Nixon, for example, almost certainly violated the Logan Act with his back-channel dealings with South Vietnam during the 1968 presidential campaign, which helped scuttle President Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to begin peace negotiations before he left office. A private citizen’s communications with a foreign government can still be deleterious to U.S. interests if prosecutors opt not to pursue the matter.
The Logan Act’s real use, though, has been as a weapon to brandish at political opponents.
[The U.S. doesn’t have a problem with Russia. It has a problem with Vladimir Putin.]
Flynn joins a list of Americans, including Herbert Hoover, Henry Wallace, Nixon, Jane Fonda, Jesse Jackson, Jim Wright and Ross Perot, whom adversaries have speculated may have broken the law. Wallace, a former vice president, was accused of violating the Logan Act after he toured Europe to stump against the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine in the early days of the Cold War. The Nixon White House considered charges against Fonda for her foray to North Vietnam in 1972.
Good intentions have been no protection from accusations. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration accused his immediate predecessor, Hoover, then a private citizen, of violating the act when he sought to negotiate food relief for European countries during World War II. Martin Luther King Jr. was threatened with the Logan Act when he proposed writing to both sides in the Vietnam War to mediate peace in 1965. Henry Ford had faced similar threats in 1915 for his “peace ship” to Europe during World War I. Ronald Reagan alleged violations by Jackson after his 1984 trips to Cuba, Nicaragua and Syria, which resulted in the release of a captured American pilot and a handful of Cuban political prisoners, and the president later accused Wright, then speaker of the House, for negotiating with Nicaragua’s government in a bid to bring the country’s civil war to an end. Perot was accused by some for trying to bring American POWs home from Vietnam.
More recently, Democrats accused Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) of violating the law in 2015 when he wrote a letter, signed by 46 other Republican senators, to the leaders of Iran, cautioning that Congress could overturn any deal they struck with President Barack Obama. Republicans made similar accusations against then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after a 2007 trip she took to Syria. Trump faced Logan Act allegations when he called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
Despite that long history, only two prosecutions have ever been attempted under the Logan Act, neither of which ever went to trial. The first came just four years after it passed. A Kentucky farmer named Francis Flournoy was indicted in 1803 after he wrote an article in a Frankfort newspaper calling for the Western states to secede and form a union with French territory in the continent’s heartland. Kentucky’s U.S. attorney, a lingering John Adams appointee, determined that Flournoy had conducted indirect correspondence with France and charged him under the Logan Act. The case quickly fizzled out, and Flournoy went unpunished. (The French territory in question would soon join the United States anyway in Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.)
Nearly overlooked is the 1852 case of a merchant named Jonas P. Levy. (I learned about it from Daniel B. Rice, a Washington law clerk who mentions it in an unpublished paper he wrote last month.) Contemporary accounts reported that Levy was charged under “an obsolete law of 1799” at the insistence of Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Levy wanted to build a railroad across Mexico’s Tehuantepec isthmus and wrote to Mexican President Mariano Arista, urging him to reject a proposed treaty that would have allowed a competitor to build the route instead. The government dropped its case when Arista refused to turn over the letter.
That the law keeps being used in partisan political bickering is no surprise: It has its roots there, too. The Logan Act passed as a result of acrimony between the ruling Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans during Adams’s administration. As the “Quasi-War” between the United States and France heated up and threatened to explode into full-blown hostilities, a Philadelphia doctor named George Logan traveled to France at his own expense to talk the nation’s leaders back from the brink.
The Federalists were deeply suspicious of revolutionary France and its Democratic-Republican supporters. Logan was a prominent Democratic-Republican and a friend of Jefferson, who had served as U.S. minister to France. So Congress passed a law to prevent such usurpations. Or so the Federalists thought.
Since then, the Logan Act has been no deterrent to Americans looking to engage in freelance diplomacy. Even Logan wasn’t dissuaded by the law: In 1810, he traveled Britain in an attempt to stop what would become the War of 1812. The administration of James Madison, a Democratic-Republican who had corresponded with Logan about the possibility of war and was aware of his trip, did not share the Federalists’ concerns about Logan’s unauthorized diplomacy and made no move to punish him.
Why have there been so few charges despite the countless accusations since 1803? Usually, the people making the accusations are politicians, not prosecutors, who have no authority to bring criminal charges. As a political weapon, it’s effective even without legal followup. And with no test cases, it’s not clear that the law would be found constitutional if challenged.
Even before the first attempt to enforce it, lawmakers began what would be a series of efforts to repeal the act. In 1802, Democratic-Republicans unsuccessfully targeted the Logan Act as part of a campaign to strike Federalist laws. At least two other tries have been made: Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) tried to repeal it in a larger criminal-code reform bill in 1977. But Sen. James Allen (D-Ala.) refused to allow the legislation to move forward with the Logan Act included, and the provision was removed in 1978. Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Calif.) pushed a bill to repeal the Logan Act in 1980. It died in the House Judiciary Committee without a hearing.
Beilenson called the Logan Act nothing more than a tool for “periodic calls for prosecution motivated by opposition to the cause being expressed instead of actual concern about treason.” To him, that was cause to repeal it. For others — as the chatter about Flynn this past week showed — it may be a good enough reason to keep it on the books.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Francis Flournoy was the only person ever charged under the Logan Act. In fact, though the Congressional Research Service and most news stories about the law cite Flournoy’s as the only prosecution, Jonas P. Levy’s 1852 case was also brought under the same law.
Read more:
What the heck has happened to Michael Flynn?
Why would Russia interfere in the U.S. campaign? Because it sometimes works.
Why the CIA won’t want to go public with evidence of Russian hackingMyWikiBiz, Author Your Legacy — Wednesday February 27, 2019
Every year the Wikimedia Foundation asks for financial contributions from unsuspecting donors who don't realize that 54 cents of every dollar they contribute will be wasted on ledger items that are not the program services that the Wikimedia 501(c)(3) is obligated to uphold. So, every year we publicize this list of the Top 10 Reasons Not to Donate to Wikipedia, in hopes that more people will become educated about what's really going on behind Wikipedia.
During the Wikimedia Foundation fundraising season, more than 1,000 people a day view this page. Thanks to excellent search engine rankings for the page, it is hoped that at least some of the readers who visit will be dissuaded from adding their donation to the Wikimedia Foundation's wasteful spending spree. And we're not the only voice that's critiquing the Wikimedia Foundation's waste and ineptitude:
Wikimedia Fundraising: Where Is Your Money Going? - by Eric Barbour
Wikipedia doesn't need your money - by Andrew Orlowski
Wikipedia – keeping it free. Just pay us our salaries - by Andreas Kolbe
Also, please pardon the fact that most of the content on this page was written in 2011 and 2012 and has not been substantially updated since them. The Wikimedia Foundation has a new Executive Director, for example (Lila Tretikov replaced Sue Gardner). But the wasteful spending patterns continue unabated. If anything, they have been accelerated. With hope, the contents of this page will at least inspire you to find out more about the shortcomings of the Wikimedia Foundation, before you are duped into offering them money that they don't need and (more importantly) don't deserve.
Wikimedia Foundation finances are suspect.
Budget
In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation called for a budget of approximately $20 million. However, one assessment contends that Wikipedia and all its sister projects could probably operate on a budget of $1.6 million (including salaries for several IT developers), because over 99% of the actual work being done is accomplished by unpaid volunteers. A KPMG audit reported that in 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation spent only $822,405 on Internet hosting fees, plus $1,259,161 in "operating" costs (which includes many of the unnecessary staff who had been hired in just the previous two years). Even this KPMG expense summary would dictate that $2.1 million would be sufficient for the Wikimedia Foundation, so why do they call for a budget nearly ten times what's actually needed? And look out, Wikimedia director Sue Gardner is calling for a 50%-larger budget of $29.5 million for 2012! Last year, she tallied up a 12% pay raise for herself, even amidst a severe economic downturn.
Governance
The Wikimedia Foundation has a history of unclear, tardy, and misleading financial statements. The early Form 990s filed by the Foundation stated that there was "no business relationship" between any of the Board members, even though 60% of the Board were simultaneously employed as key principals by the for-profit commercial enterprise, Wikia, Inc.
WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner and other staff drinking sparkling wine and showing off some donor money. (You didn't think it all went toward web servers, did you?)
Early on, the Wikimedia Foundation asked an attorney to design the organization as a membership body, but after his work was nearly complete, they scrapped the idea, having suddenly realized that a majority vote of citizen-members could unseat a corrupt Board of Trustees and demand line-by-line financial accountability. The Foundation's insiders didn't want that possibility to threaten them, so they insulated themselves from a voting membership by remaining a non-member organization. Multiple top staff and former officers have privately expressed concern over financial wrongdoing by certain board members. Indeed, the former Chief Operating Officer of the Foundation (Carolyn Doran) was a wanted multi-count felon. The Foundation's former executive director and head legal counsel, Brad Patrick, resigned due to problems the organization had with him. Patrick's replacement as General Counsel would also have a short term in office, disappearing under a shroud of mystery. The Foundation lacks a Board of Trustees with a wide base of civic and social stakeholders. Almost to a person, they are cronies and insiders who were incubated within Wikipedia, or who have invested money in for-profit satellite projects of Wikipedia. The Foundation is by design narrow and weak, reflecting only the interests of a dysfunctional social networking community.
Salaries
The current Executive Director, Deputy Director, and their personal assistant had a reported compensation budget and other expenses of $472,000, which was excessive for an organization of its size in 2008. At the same time as the above report, publicly-funded Earth Island Institute had revenue of about $6.5 million, 15 employees (practically the same size as the Wikimedia Foundation at the time, and headquarters in the very same city of San Francisco), but the CEO earned only $67,423. The Northern California chapter of the Arthritis Foundation had revenue of $5.1 million, but the CEO was paid only $45,050. Child Family Health International in San Francisco had revenue of $4.0 million and 11 employees, but the CEO earned only $82,000. Embarrassingly, when audited by Charity Navigator, for years the Wikimedia Foundation received only 1 star out of a possible four in the important category of Organizational Efficiency. When you get right down to it, the money that people donate to the Wikimedia Foundation is more likely to be spent on an item that doesn't address the charitable mission of the organization than to be spent on something that does.
Growth
Ask yourself, how is Wikipedia inherently different now than it was in 2005? Other than an abortive attempt by Jimmy Wales to purge the site of some images that could be construed as child pornography, there has been no major transformation at the site. Just some server volume growth -- a terribly cheap commodity to manage.
Question: Why have the gross receipts escalated from $361,000 to a requested 2012 budget of $29.5 million?
Answer: Compensation for people not really doing anything besides watch the servers, enjoy global jet-setting, and run damage control for Jimbo's dalliances.
Wikipedia has too much power.
Wikipedia smothers out more authoritative, but less-linked-to sites in Google and other search engine rankings. Microsoft closed down Encarta, mainly due to the Wikipedia effect. Wikipedia has garnered an ability to set the 'truth' in mainstream media and blogs that consult it every day, without digging deeper to verify facts from independent sources. Controversial Wikipedia pages suffer from "ownership" by content bullies who drive off independent editors, all supported by administrator cabals who follow one another around, supporting reverted edits and editor blocks and bans. Wikipedia creates a monoculture of knowledge that is little different than a farmer who would make the mistake of planting just one type of crop, year after year.
Your donation will indirectly fund Wikia, Inc., which is not a charity.
Your non-profit donation will ultimately line the for-profit pockets of Jimmy Wales, Amazon, Google, the Bessemer Partners, and other corporate beneficiaries. How? Wikipedia is a commercial traffic engine. As of October 2011, there are over 29,000 external links from Wikipedia to Wales' Wikia.com sites, which are funded by Google AdSense revenues and custom advertising deals. These links are still being added to Wikipedia at the rate of over 500 per month. Did you know that Amazon invested $10,000,000 in the for-profit Wikia venture? It's therefore rather interesting that Wikipedia tolerates over 76,000 links to Amazon's retail site from the supposedly non-profit, no-advertising, anti-spam Wikipedia site. Isn't it? Meanwhile, did you know that the popular movie site IMDB.com is owned by Amazon, and you can buy Amazon products directly from IMDB pages? Well, surprise surprise -- there are over 285,000 links to Amazon's IMDB site from Wikipedia. No wonder Amazon particularly wished to invest in Wikia, Inc. Its co-founder helps insure that the external linking environment on Wikipedia is hospitable for the Amazon link spamming!
When Wales isn't enjoying all the link traffic to his for-profit site, he's actually actively in the process of self-dealing the volunteer community's labor into an exclusive content package for his own site. How? Well, take for example the fact that there was a Klingon language wiki hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wales then ordered it to be shut down. Where did it spring up again? On his Wikia, Inc. servers, of course!
Now here is the really fascinating thing. If you go to Jimmy Wales' "talk page" on Wikipedia, and you ask him whether he feels that either this act of theft of the Klingon wiki or the extraordinary number of links to his for-profit site and those of his investors might be a conflict of interest or self-dealing, Jimbo won't even have time to respond. One or two of his loyal followers will fairly promptly dismiss or erase your message; and if you try one more time to ask this question, you're likely to get blocked from editing Wikipedia altogether. Go ahead, try it! If Jimmy answers the question and allows discussion on it, MyWikiBiz will donate $25 to the Wikimedia Foundation.
If these facts are not enough to convince you that money makes its way through the back door to Wikia, Inc., then perhaps a look at the front door is in order. The Wikimedia Foundation announced in January 2009 that it was to begin paying rent to Wikia, Inc. on a monthly basis, using tax-advantaged funds from the Ruth and Frank Stanton Fund. Did Wikia offer the lowest-priced rent solution to the Wikimedia Foundation? Not at all! After a frantic back-and-forth attempt by different agents of the Wikimedia Foundation to explain how this level of self-dealing was allowed to happen, Wikia's CEO Gil Penchina finally revealed (a year later, January 4, 2010) in a personal e-mail:
They [the Wikimedia Foundation] approached us and asked if they could rent space on a temporary basis.. and I think it ended up being 4-6 months give or take. I thought about giving it to them for free and I wasn't sure which was worse... getting accused of bribing a non-profit for giving it away, or getting accused of stealing for a non-profit for charging... so we ended up asking them to get competitng (sic) quotes from other landlords so that THEY could feel comfortable with the decision.
First there is a request to rent space from a hand-picked bidder, and only then a suggestion to get competing bids from other landlords? It sounds like someone at the Wikimedia Foundation wanted to make sure that Jimmy Wales' for-profit company had the inside track on that bid, worth many thousands of dollars. (Wikia would replace its CEO in 2011.)
Meanwhile in August 2009, Matt Halprin, Partner of the Omidyar Network, was asked to join the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. Halprin is charged with an Omidyar team that "pursues investments in Social Media", and Omidyar invested part of $4 million into Wikia, Inc. in 2006. So, his company succeeds if Wikia makes a nice return on investment. It looks very fishy to have a new Wikimedia Foundation board member who's a partner at a firm that invested some portion of $4 million into the privately-held firm of the "Emeritus Chair" of the Foundation. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to explain how this is just a "coincidence", being that there were probably more than a thousand other equally-qualified stars of social media who could have been selected, who have not a single tie back to funding Wikia, Inc. What are the odds? At the Wikimedia Foundation, the double-dealing simply defies the laws of probability.
The Wikimedia Foundation's leadership leaves much to be desired.
Jimbo Wales, Chairman Emeritus - Hired a liar using the nickname "Essjay", then told the press he "didn't really have a problem with it"; showed little fiscal economy when discussing airfares to Korea; not to mention his other transgressions. In 2012, Wales admitted to the New York Times, regarding the Wikimedia Foundation, "We're really bad at business."
, - Hired a liar using the nickname "Essjay", then told the press he "didn't really have a problem with it"; showed little fiscal economy when discussing airfares to Korea; not to mention his other transgressions. In 2012, Wales admitted to the New York Times, regarding the Wikimedia Foundation, "We're really bad at business." Sue Gardner, Executive Director - Admits to awarding sweetheart contracts, against her own policies on disbursements.
Erik Moeller (left) at a Wikimania conference
Erik Moeller, Deputy Director - Has held some extremely uncomfortable public views about child pornography and pedophilia.
, - Has held some extremely uncomfortable public views about child pornography and pedophilia. Angela Beesley, Chair of the Advisory Board - Routinely edits the Wikipedia article about Wikia, the company she co-founded with Wales, and adds external links to Wikia, all against Wikipedia community guidelines.
, - Routinely edits the Wikipedia article about Wikia, the company she co-founded with Wales, and adds external links to Wikia, all against Wikipedia community guidelines. Mike Godwin, former lead counsel - Before mysteriously disappearing from the WMF, Godwin attempted to edit Wikipedia anonymously, against community guidelines that discourage self-promotion.
Wikipedia is more a roleplaying game than an encyclopedia.
While Wikipedia is disguised as an encyclopedia, it is actually nothing more than a fluid forum where ultimate editorial control belongs to a corps of administrators, most of whom act without real-world accountability because they don't reveal their real names, locations, and potential conflicts of interest -- even though they will not |
to help it get there are this: When you’re writing, stop thinking of the breweries and their employees as your friends and have a fucking opinion. It is not sufficient simply to cheerlead. Hold brewers accountable. The good and talented beer makers in this province might be mad at first, but if you’re offering constructive, insightful, and honest feedback (and not simply trashing everything for the sake of being snarky) most breweries will (eventually) see your thoughts as constructive criticism and maybe even an opportunity to improve their product or the way they do business. This is the way critics earn respect in this industry, not by tweeting out hand jobs to the brewers who offer up the best “beer mail” or who pay for a weekend junket that includes segway tours of the Distillery District and axe throwing. Ahem.
But really brewers, this is on you.
So let’s get real. The beer industry is probably not going to be saved by a sudden change in government sympathies that sees sweeping changes to our liquor legislation. We just saw the biggest changes to liquor laws since prohibition and we barely moved the ball forward five yards. Furthermore, despite what one angry publican in the Junction might think, the job of policing the beer industry can’t fall on the shoulders of beer writers. And I’m not just saying that because most of us don’t have shoulders thanks to years hunched at our laptops.
If Ontario beer is going to get better, our breweries have some work to do.
First and foremost, please stop being so damn sleazy.
Yes, we’re going to have the “draught lines conversation” again. Ontario beer isn’t going to get better when the thing that dictates which beers are on tap in all our bars is who was willing to pay the most money for a draught line install, who threw in the most free kegs, or who was willing to shell out for chalkboards and table-toppers. It creates a race to the bottom that newer and smaller brewers can’t compete with and ultimately only hurts the craft beer scene as a whole. I won’t get into all the myriad reasons yet again but it is beyond time to get this technically illegal practice out in the open. We all kind of “wink wink nudge nudge” about it. Everyone I talk to about says something to the effect of “Well we don’t do it, but…”
And that’s bullshit.
Every sales rep I talk to is hesitant to publicly name bars for fear of losing that account. And so we all pretend to be mad about it and act as though there’s nothing that can be done about it. And we pretend we don’t know why a bar is mostly Amsterdam products, or we play dumb about why the bar with the Muskoka Brewery patio umbrellas is so excited to sell you some Detour, and we don’t wonder why there is so frequently two very similar Flying Monekys beers on tap, or why we, as an industry, accept the odd keg “thrown in” with a large purchase of Collective Arts beer. And yes–gasp!–I’m using real brewery names here for once. But the truth is, I could substitute in virtually any brewery name. Many brewers in Ontario publicly applaud me and send me private congratulatory emails when I open my big yap about our pay-to-play environment but here’s the simple, hypocritical truth: ALL BREWERIES DO THIS.
When the AGCO clearly has no interest in enforcing rules that are clearly stated in our liquor legislation and when bars feel free to literally solicit breweries with emails seeking the highest bidder to put on tap, this practice is only going to stop if breweries take a stand together and decide to end this practice. If bars want to serve beer from the highest bidder, let them serve Labatt products. That’s their loss. Ontario’s brewers have to hold themselves to higher standards than fucking Budweiser. This is not going to change unless someone (paging the OCB!) makes an actual stand on this issue and puts it into writing: Our members will not influence bar owners with cash or incentives in exchange for exclusivity, and if they do, there will be consequences.
Just do it already. My arms are getting tired from beating this dead horse.
Lastly, and most importantly, Ontario’s brewers need to put the beer first.
You can have the best marketing, the coolest location, the flashiest branding, and you can flood the beer bloggers homes with free swag, but If your beer is shit, nothing else matters.
So perfect your beer, then name it and come up with a label. Not the other way around. Do quality control. Don’t settle for mediocre beer. Get a fucking lab. Remember that the brewers are your rock stars, not your sales team. It’s easy to forget when the loudest marketing team gets the attention or the biggest offer for payola gets the draft line, but the people making your beer are really important. Brewing isn’t glamourous work. There are guys and girls behind the logos and t-shirts who are shovelling spent grain and toiling with caustic. They’re mostly not on twitter and they’re not reading blogs. They’re busy making beer and cleaning. So much cleaning. These are the people who can help lead your company. They make beer because they’re passionate about it. So give them a seat at the table when you make decisions that affect your company. If the person making your beer is the last to know about your vision for the company, you’re doing it wrong.
It starts with good beer, so build your company on that. The state of Ontario’s beer industry is really good. And if those who are interested in improving it try a little harder, it can easily be great.
(Also, enough with the crystal-malt-heavy pale ales, please.)
EDIT: In the section of this post addressing “keg deals” I originally included an insinuation that “the price of a keg of Beau’s Lug Tread sometimes isn’t the same for two bars that are side by side.” I will admit that this part of the post was based only on information I received second-hand. Since posting this, I have been contacted by Beau’s owner, Steve Beauchesne whose email to me included the following:
A keg of Beau’s is always the same price, no matter what the venue. We go even further in that regard and try to keep it as close to the same price per litre for smaller keg sizes, to encourage smaller bars to order the size that keeps beer fresh, instead of buying a keg size that will sit longer but give the bar a discount. We aren’t perfect, and if someone wants to really dig into it, I’m sure they would find many reasons to criticize us, but this one is just way off base.
Given Steve’s willingness to state publicly that the price is always the same, I am more than happy to remove that part of the post and I sincerely apologize for spreading a rumour. If any other breweries I mentioned here feel comfortable putting in writing that their keg prices are always the same, I would be happy to print that addendum as well.Sky Santa Morty, Ruben, and Rick front and center
Explosion in the center on the backside
Bring a little bit of Ruben with you wherever you celebrate the holidays
Rick and Morty Happy Human Holiday Knit Sweater
Officially-licensed Rick and Morty merchandise
Morty, Ruben, and Rick front and center
Happy human holiday above
Explosion in the center on the backside
"Giant naked sky Santa has exploded" beneath
Materials: 60% cotton, 40% acrylic
Care Instructions: Turn inside out. Machine wash cold with like colors. Lay flat to dry.
Imported
Rick isn't a stranger to weird ideas. Some people think twice about making a theme park inside of another human being, but not Rick, he goes all in - literally and figuratively. To be fair, Rick did say it best when he mentioned that "You don't agree to have a theme park built inside of you if your life is going well." Poor Ruben. He was a star that burned too bright for this world. And so he exploded all over North America. Never forget.The Rick and Morty Happy Human Holiday Knit Sweater features Morty, Rick, and Ruben from the episode "Anatomy Park" in an ugly holiday sweater theme. Back features an explosion and the words "giant naked sky Santa has exploded". Faces of Rick and Morty with a white christmas tree on each sleeve. Celebrate the holidays the way Ruben would want you to. In style.
Sizing TableNEW YORK – Chicago Blackhawks right wing Patrick Kane, Washington Capitals goaltender Braden Holtby and Colorado Avalanche center Matt Duchene have been named the NHL's "Three Stars" for the month of November.
FIRST STAR – PATRICK KANE, RW, CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS
Kane led the NHL with 15 assists and 23 points, registering at least one point in all 13 November games to guide the Blackhawks (13-8-3, 29 points) to a 7-3-3 month and third place in the Central Division. In doing so, Kane extended his point streak to 19 games dating to Oct. 17 (11-20-31), the longest such streak by a U.S.-born player in NHL history and the longest such streak by any player since 2010-11 (Sidney Crosby: 26-24-50 in 25 GP). Kane also established a career high with a seven-game goal streak Nov. 2-15 (7-9-16), the longest such run by any player since 2013-14. Overall, he recorded eight multi-point performances, highlighted by 1-3-4 Nov. 8 vs. EDM. The 27-year-old Buffalo native paces the NHL with 23 assists and 37 points and also shares second with 14 goals in 24 games this season.
SECOND STAR – BRADEN HOLTBY, G, WASHINGTON CAPITALS
Holtby went 9-2-0 with a 1.99 goals-against average,.927 save percentage and one shutout to pace the NHL in wins and backstop the Capitals (17-5-1, 35 points) to a 9-3-1 month and second place in the Metropolitan Division. He allowed two or fewer goals in eight of 11 appearances, including a 33-save shutout Nov. 23 vs. EDM. Holtby also recorded a career-high seven consecutive wins to close November, capped by a pair of 32-save victories over the final weekend of the month (Nov. 27 vs. TBL and Nov. 28 at TOR). The 26-year-old Lloydminster, Sask., native owns a 15-4-0 record with a 1.95 goals-against average,.926 save percentage and one shutout in 19 appearances this season, leading the NHL in both wins and goals-against average.
THIRD STAR – MATT DUCHENE, C, COLORADO AVALANCHE
Duchene paced the NHL with 11 goals and ranked second with 20 points in 14 games to power the Avalanche (9-14-1, 19 points) to a 6-8-0 November. In doing so, he became the first Avalanche player to score 11 or more goals in one calendar month since February 2003 (Milan Hejduk: 12). Duchene collected at least one point in 11 of 14 outings, highlighted by six multi-point performances and three multi-goal games. He also registered a trio of three-point performances: Nov. 10 at PHI (2-1-3), Nov. 14 at MTL (1-2-3) and Nov. 28 vs. WPG (1-2-3). The 24-year-old Haliburton, Ont., native shares fifth in the NHL with 12 goals and has 22 points in 24 contests this season.Leon is a developer at IDRsolutions and product manager for BuildVu. He is responsible for managing the BuildVu product strategy and roadmap, and also spends a lot of his time writing code to build new features, improve functionality, fix bugs, and improve the testing for BuildVu.
Ever since we began writing our PDF to HTML5 converter a little over 2 years ago, we have chosen the HTML5 canvas as the way to present a PDF file as HTML5. It allows us to output PDF vector graphics and images as JavaScript commands to draw onto the canvas when the file is loaded. We can then add selectable text and form components on top too. At the time this made sense – the canvas is well supported and works on nearly all mobile devices giving us good compatibility.
But since then, we have discovered many ‘features’ of the canvas that have caused us to get creative with how we convert PDF files into HTML5. For example, currently the HTML5 Canvas does not support filling shapes with the EvenOdd rule, or specifying settings for dashed lines. To solve these issues, we have had to instead output those shapes as images. Unfortunately this can lead to bloat in the output of some pages having many images.
There are also other interesting issues – for example using Save and Restore on Chrome on Android will result in a shape being incorrectly repeated, and using a scale CSS transform in Safari on Mac rasterizes text when you scale rather than redrawing at the correct size. These are all things I will go into more detail about in coming weeks.
But perhaps the biggest flaw with the canvas is that it’s a raster format. If you draw shapes to canvas, they get rasterized and do not scale well. In many cases, we could actually get a better result if we just provide an image of the page, and we do already offer this as an option in our converter.
There are several advantages to providing an image instead:
1. Lower file size – The file size of the image representation of the page can actually be smaller than the draw commands.
2. Visual feedback when loading – Browsers display images as they are loading – when using the canvas you don’t see anything till everything has loaded.
3. Faster load times – As the page is pre-rasterized there is no longer the overhead of having to rasterize the page to canvas each time it is loaded.
4. Everything is simplified – Currently we have some not so nice JavaScript to load and draw the page, we can replace all of this with a simple HTML image tag. It also greatly tidies up our conversion code.
5. Better IE support for older versions of IE (even IE6).
Outputting content as an image is a very nice compromise if you want fast loading files at the cost of not so nice zoom, and we will continue to offer this as an output option.
But we think we can do better than this.
The PDF file format is a vector file format, and rasterizing the output is a very poor way to convert – it doesn’t make full use of HTML5 features and it does not scale well. We are planning to replace Canvas with inline SVG to produce vector HTML5 representations of PDF pages. SVG support in all mainstream browsers has improved vastly over the last 3 years. It is now a viable (even superior) alternative to Canvas.
This means that if you choose the SVG conversion option, instead of an image tag, you will in fact get an object tag that will displaying the content of an SVG file. This has a significant advantage in that it offers flawless zooming, as you would expect from a PDF file. Like images, SVG also displays the content as it is loaded, making for improved user experience.
In fact, what we will actually output is both an image and SVG representation of the page. If SVG is supported, the SVG will be used, otherwise the image will be used. This means that even when using the SVG mode, the output can use the fallback image and will even work on Internet Explorer 6!
We see this as a huge improvement over our current modes, a significant advantage over other available conversion tools, and very deserving of being announced as part of our version 5 release, inline with version 5 of the Java PDF Library that we also produce.
As this is quite a major change, we would like to take the opportunity to request your feedback. Do you think we are wrong to drop the canvas? Please let us know!
If you are curious about how our output may look in the future, a preliminary example has been created to preview. Please do zoom in to the map in the bottom left!
This post is part of our “HTML5 Article index” in these articles, we aim to help you understand the world of HTML5.Inner-west residents are outraged they have been given just 30 working days to respond to a 10,000-page environmental effects statement for the West Gate Tunnel project.
The EES document for the project – previously known as the Western Distributor – was released on Monday.
The project is a proposed five-kilometre tollway that will link the West Gate Freeway at Yarraville with CityLink at Docklands.
The $5.5 billion tollway will have at least two city off-ramps, one in the west and one in the north.
The Spotswood South Kingsville Residents Group says the government got the consultation period wrong.
In a letter to the government, the group is calling for an extension from 30 to 90 days.
“There are fears that the formal submission process and panel hearings will be beyond the expertise and resources of our community, and similarly affected communities along the corridor, or the general public,” the letter states.
“We don’t trust that a government can be a partner in the project, a proponent, and simultaneously be the assessor protecting public interest of the project’s merits especially when consultations to date have been so manifestly inadequate.” The group is also asking for community resources “to ensure they (residents) can participate in the process” and “get appropriate technical advice to represent their interests”.
Maribyrnong infrastructure services director Sunil Bhalla said the council had hired specialists in areas including traffic to assist the council in responding to the document.
Greens MP Colleen Hartland labelled the response timeframe “disgusting”.
“This is 10,000 pages,” she said. “How can the community be expected to respond in 30 days? We had asked the government for an extension, which they have refused.
“There had been enough consultation about various things, but not about this, the finished product. If they were serious about community consultation they would give at least 60 days.”
At a press conference in Yarraville on Monday, Roads Minister Luke Donnellan said there had been years of consultation.
“No one would suggest we have hidden this project under a bushel,” Mr Donnellan said.
“We have been out there for many years consulting with the community, ensuring we get it right.”
The EES can be viewed at westgatetunnelproject.vic.gov.au/ees. It is open for comment until Monday, July 10.VATICAN CITY—Bringing to a close a scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church and upset millions of its followers, trusted Sistine Chapel janitor Giuseppe Falduto, 78, was convicted Thursday of sexually abusing four popes between 1965 and 2011.
The widely publicized trial revealed that Falduto, well regarded and affectionately referred to as "Beppe" by Vatican City residents, had over a period of six decades frequently exploited his position to compel Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI to engage in unwanted sexual activity.
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"The crimes committed by Mr. Falduto are of course shocking and deplorable," said Dean of the College of Cardinals Angelo Sodano, adding that he had never previously suspected "kindly old Beppe" of any wrongdoing. "But perhaps most upsetting is the fact that this man gained the trust of high-ranking church authorities and then betrayed that trust by secretly defiling innocent popes."
"These appalling acts caused tremendous psychological trauma for his victims, and we are currently reexamining our internal policies to safeguard the current and future papacy," Sodano continued. "Even one pope molested is one too many."
In June 2011, after receiving a tip about suspected pontiff abuse from a Vatican groundskeeper, police raided the Sistine Chapel and discovered hundreds of sexually explicit Polaroid images of popes in a shoe box Falduto kept under his cot in the basement.
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Investigators confirmed the incriminating materials included distressing photographs of Pope John Paul II in his underwear lifting up his robe, Pope Paul VI engaged in sodomy, Pope John Paul I wearing sunglasses and posing nude in a beach chair, and a crying Pope Benedict XVI covered in semen.
Police also reportedly seized a garbage bag full of old miters apparently collected by the elderly janitor and kept hidden in a broom closet.
Richard Blevins, a psychologist and consultant to the International Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the decades-long cycle of sexual abuse likely would have continued if no one had reported the misconduct, because in most pope abuse cases it is often difficult for the Vicar of Christ and Successor to St. Peter to speak up about what has happened to him at the hands of a trusted adult.
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"Many popes feel deeply ashamed and are afraid that if they try to talk about the abuse, no one will believe them," Blevins said. "It's important to keep an eye out for the common signs of papal molestation, such as the Holy Father avoiding direct eye contact while saying mass or becoming shy and withdrawn during an audience with foreign dignitaries."
Added Blevins, "I've talked to cardinals who say that in hindsight, there did always seem to be something wrong with each of the last four Popes whenever the janitor was mopping up nearby."
Despite physical evidence collected from the boiler room of the papal residence, the prosecution's case against Falduto hinged on Pope Benedict XVI's emotional testimony, during which he told the jury the custodian had on numerous occasions lured him downstairs with the promise of gifts such as original manuscripts of the Gospel of St. John or Mars candy bars.
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Benedict described in graphic detail the molestations that occurred behind the Sistine Chapel altar, as well as Falduto urging His Holiness to touch and kiss his penis. The pontiff also said that he felt powerless, claiming the janitor threatened to tell everyone in the Catholic Church about what he had done.
Longtime coworker Salvatore Bianchi, 63, told reporters he never would have guessed Falduto was engaging in inappropriate acts.
"Old Beppe was a hardworking, reliable employee who put in long hours and appeared to really love his job," Bianchi said. "He usually stayed late enough that he'd still be there poking his head in the door whenever I was trying to give the pope his nightly bath."The United Belgian States ( Dutch : Verenigde Nederlandse Staten or Verenigde Belgische Staten, French : États-Belgiques-Unis, Latin : Foederati belgii ), also known as the United States of Belgium, was a confederal republic in the Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium ) which was established after the Brabant Revolution. It existed from January to December 1790 as part of the unsuccessful revolt against the Habsburg Emperor, Joseph II.
Characteristically, the well-intentioned but autocratic Emperor abruptly imposed his reforms without even a semblance of consultation with the population, which actually included an influential urban intelligentsia and other segments of the ruling classes who were highly receptive to such innovations. The Emperor's edict of tolerance of 1781 established religious freedom. Another edict in 1784 removed from the Catholic clergy responsibility for the civil registry, and civil marriage was introduced. Under the Edict on Idle Institutions (1780), contemplative religious orders, deemed useless, were dissolved and diocesan seminaries were abolished and replaced by general seminaries in Leuven and Luxembourg. Feudal and trade corporation regulations and jurisdictions were modified or abolished and, to the stupefaction of all segments of the population, the authorities abolished the ancient provinces of Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut, Namur, and Luxembourg, replacing them with 9 circles ( German : Kreise ), subdivided in 64 districts. Seigneurial jurisdictions and rights, including the corvée, were abolished. [1] As in Hungary, Joseph II attempted to introduce German as the language of administration for the sake of efficiency.
Influenced by the Enlightenment, Emperor Joseph II, who became sole ruler of the Habsburg lands after Maria Theresa's death in 1780, decreed a series of large-scale reforms in the Austrian Netherlands designed to radically modernize and centralize the political, judicial and administrative systems.
The United Belgian States was a confederal republic of eight provinces which had their own governments, were sovereign and independent, and were governed directly by the Sovereign Congress ( French : Congrès souverain ; Dutch : Soevereine Congres ), the confederal government. The Sovereign Congress was seated in Brussels and consisted of representatives of each of the eight provinces. The provinces of the republic were divided into 11 smaller separate territories, each with their own regional identities: [2]
Battle of Ghent, 13 November 1789.
Surrender of Brussels, 2 December 1790.
In 1789, a church-inspired popular revolt broke out in reaction to the emperor's centralizing and anticlerical policies. Two factions appeared: the Statists who opposed the reforms, and the Vonckists named for Jan Frans Vonck who initially supported the reforms but then joined the opposition, due to the clumsy way in which the reforms were carried out.
The uprising started in Brabant, which in January 1789 declared that it no longer recognized the emperor's rule. The leader of the Statisten faction, Hendrik Van der Noot, crossed the border into the Dutch Republic and raised a small army in Breda in Staats-Brabant, the northern (Dutch Republic) part of Brabant.
In October, he invaded Brabant and captured Turnhout, defeating the Austrians in the Battle of Turnhout on 27 October. Ghent was taken on 13 November, and on 17 November the governors Albert Casimir and Maria Christina fled Brussels. The remains of the imperial forces withdrew behind the citadel walls of Luxembourg and Antwerp.
Van der Noot now declared Brabant independent, and all the other provinces of the Austrian Netherlands (except Luxembourg) soon followed suit. On 11 January 1790 they signed a pact, establishing a confederation under the name Verenigde Nederlandse Staten / États-Belgiques-Unis (United Belgian States) and a governing body known as the Sovereign Congress. The Dutch Act of Abjuration in 1581 and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 served as models for the Declaration of Independence of Flanders and some of the other provinces between November 1789 and early 1790. Shortly afterwards, the Articles of Confederation served as a model for the Treaty of the United Belgian States of 11 January 1790.
Independently, in 1789, a revolution had broken out in Liège. The revolutionaries established a republic which joined the United Belgian States in a semblance of an alliance.
Realizing the fragility of the new state, Van der Noot approached foreign states for support and suggested a unification with the Dutch Republic, with little success. Furthermore, the Statist and Vonckist factions were in constant conflict, bordering on civil war.
Suppression of the Revolt Edit
On 27 February 1790 Joseph II died and his brother Leopold II succeeded him as emperor. Leopold II quickly moved to recapture the Austrian Netherlands. On 24 October 1790 imperial troops took the city of Namur, forcing the province of Namur to recognize the authority of the emperor. Two days later, the province of West Flanders followed suit, and by December the entire territory was again in imperial hands.
The Austrian restoration and hegemony was short-lived, however, as the region was overrun by French armies in 1794 during the French Revolutionary Wars, and was annexed by France on 1 October 1795.Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blasted fellow GOP Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday, saying the two “think the whole world is a battlefield.”
Paul criticized the hawkish senators for thinking the laws of war should take precedence over the Bill of Rights. The two had criticized Paul’s statements about drone policy during the Kentucky Republican’s nearly 13-hour filibuster on Thursday.
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“They think the whole world is a battlefield, including America, and that the laws of war should apply,” Paul said in an interview on Fox News about McCain and Graham, who had described Paul’s comments about drones as “ridiculous.”
“The laws of war don't involve due process, so when they ask you for an attorney you tell them to shut up. That's not my understanding of the way America works,” Paul told Fox. “I don't think the laws of war apply to America, I think the Bill of Rights do and I think it's a disservice to our soldiers that our senators up there arguing that the Bill of Rights aren't important."
Paul said whether drones can be used against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil is a “very serious question” and was at the root of Wednesday’s filibuster, which delayed a final confirmation vote on John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to lead the CIA.
“This was a very serious question. It was a question that took a month and a half to get an answer to and so I would argue — and I think a lot of the public would agree with me, both on the right and the left — that what we ask was a very serious question and it's a question that we finally got an answer to,” Paul said.
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Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday responded to Paul in a letter that said the U.S. does not have the authority to conduct a drone attack against a U.S. citizen on American soil.
“Hooray, for 13 hours yesterday we asked them that question. And so there is a result and a victory,” Paul said after the letter was read to him during the Fox interview. “Under duress and under public humiliation the White House will respond and do the right thing.”
The answer just took a filibuster that lasted almost half a day, Paul added.
“So now, after 13 hours of filibuster, we're proud to announce that the president is not going to kill unarmed Americans on American soil,” Paul continued. “My next question is why did it take so long, why is it so hard and why would a president so jealously guard power that they were afraid to say this, but I am glad and I think that the answer does answer my question.”SEATTLE — In a showdown between two of the hottest teams in MLS, the drama was extinguished early. The Seattle Sounders opened the scoring in the 6th minute and all but ended it with a pair of goals 10 minutes apart early in the second half to coast to a 4-0 win over the LA Galaxy in front of 60,908 fans at CenturyLink Field on Sunday.
The Sounders got goals from Eddie Johnson, Fredy Montero, Alex Caskey and Andy Rose and a pair of assists from Mauro Rosales as they basically had their way with a team that came into the game riding a five-match unbeaten streak.
OPTA CHALKBOARD: Sounders run riot in the attack
The Sounders opened the scoring in the sixth minute with Johnson’s 10th goal of the year, which moved him into a tie for fifth place on the MLS leaderboard. As has become the norm, Rosales was the one providing service, sending in a cross from about 30 yards that allowed Johnson to hit a glancing header that went just inside the far post.
HIGHLIGHTS: SEA vs LA
The Galaxy nearly tied it a minute later when Robbie Keane’s shot from about 20 yards went through the fingers of Sounders goalkeeper Michael Gspurning. But the ball ended up going several feet wide.
Although the Sounders nearly beat the Galaxy’s high line on several occasions, it was LA who went into halftime feeling as though they missed some good opportunities.
Their best chance came in the 31st minute when Landon Donovan was able to get free inside the Sounders penalty area. But he took one too many touches on the ball, allowing a Sounders defender to poke the ball away from behind. Although Keane was there to pick up the loose ball, his shot from about 10 yards out was blocked to defuse the scoring chance.
The Galaxy also appeared to have a good case for a penalty when A.J. DeLaGarza was taken down in the box in the 15th minute, but Patrick Ianni’s tackle was judged to have been clean.
Their finishing didn’t improve in the second half, leaving the door wide open for the hosts.
Montero was happy to oblige, doubling the Sounders’ lead in the 51st minute with a side-footed volley off a rebound from Caskey’s shot.
Caskey then got one of his own when he was able to catch Saunders way off his line from about 35 yards out. The chance was created by Johnson applying heavy pressure on Saunders, which forced the goalkeeper to play the ball near the edge of the penalty area. It was Caskey’s first career MLS goal.
FULL LINEUPS AND BOXSCORE
Rose, who happens to be Caskey’s roommate, also got his first career goal. In the 88th minute, he took a pass from Marc Burch and slotted it inside the near post. Rosales was given a secondary assist on the play.
The Galaxy (10-11-3, 33 points) lost for the first time since July 4 but still sit fifth in the Western Conference. They return home to host Chivas USA next Sunday night in a crucial six-pointer.
The Sounders have now gone unbeaten in six (3-0-3) and moved all alone into third place in the Western Conference. They’re in action Wednesday night at Sporting KC in the US Open Cup final.
MLSsoccer.com Men of the MatchSays investigators should look at the the role of John Dugan, Comptroller of the Currency, in the sale of National City to PNC
Updated at 7 p.m.
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING What Ohio members of Congress had to say about the National City sale: "Friday was a sad day for Cleveland. Even though National City supported the rescue bill passed by Congress, management's decision to invest in the risky subprime market, coupled with Bush administration deregulation, put the bank in such a weak position it could not qualify for funds. If another bank had not purchased National City, I am afraid the job loss would have been even more severe." Sen. Sherrod Brown, Avon Democrat "I have been warning for weeks that the congressionally approved bailout, which I vigorously opposed, would give the Treasury Department the power to pick winners and losers. By helping PNC and denying help to National City, the Treasury Department has proven my point." Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Cleveland Democrat "It is horrifying to me that [the Treasury] Department and Comptroller John Dugan now control the fate of banks throughout the nation, and that federal'rescue' money is being used to prop up some banks so they can purchase other banks that have been denied funding. This decision will effectively kill a Civil War-era bank from Cleveland, costing thousands of jobs." Rep. Steven LaTourette, Bainbridge Township Republican "The Treasury Department and Bush administration are doing something very nefarious with their buddies on Wall Street. They are harming our good banks. They are rewarding the wrongdoers." Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Toledo Democrat "We are all very concerned about what is happening with National City. The Treasury should not be able to wield its authority to benefit one bank at the expense of another and there should be an immediate investigation into whether this was the case with PNC and National City. It is also critical that Congress remain vigilant in its oversight over the Treasury Department during every step of this process. Most immediately, we must do all that we can to ensure that the jobs at National City are secure." Rep. Betty Sutton, Copley Township Democrat "Obviously, the decision was made that they didn't meet the needs of the financial community in their present shape. That was the reason for the takeover." Rep. Ralph Regula, Navarre Republican
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Steven LaTourette wants the Treasury Department and Congress to investigate whether Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan steered $7.7 billion of taxpayer bailout money to his former client PNC so it could buy National City Bank.
LaTourette noted that before being sworn in as the nation's primary banking regulator in August 2005, Dugan represented Pittsburgh-based PNC as an attorney in the Washington law firm Covington and Burling.
"I am very concerned that the comptroller first deprived bailout money to National City Bank and then orchestrated its sale to his former client PNC," LaTourette said in a news statement. "The officials at PNC have made it very clear that they were only able to buy National City because they got a $7.7 billion handout from the federal government."
A Treasury Department spokeswoman did not respond on Monday to requests for comment on Dugan's ties to PNC, or to LaTourette's request for an investigation.
LaTourette, a Bainbridge Township Republican, and other Ohio members of Congress who opposed the $700 billion financial industry bailout package that Congress approved earlier this month are raising questions about the use of tax dollars for PNC's fire-sale purchase of National City.
Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who represents half of Lorain County, described the move as "nefarious," and says she believes that the Bush administration is using the bailout program to "concentrate banking power with their friends on Wall Street" and create cartels.
"By Washington and Wall Street cooperating to drive down the book value on banks across this country at the same time as they use taxpayer money to subsidize the wrongdoers, they are concentrating our financial system to an unheard-of level and destroying good banks in the process," said Kaptur.
Cleveland Democrat Dennis Kucinich also called for Congress to investigate the deal, noting the sale "is being consummated under duress, and it was precipitated and facilitated by a collusion of forces and entities that must be investigated, exposed, and if appropriate, prosecuted."
Rep. Betty Sutton, a Copley Township Democrat who supported the bailout, said she was "very concerned" about the National City bank deal, and called for congressional oversight of the Treasury |
they should talk in a bedroom upstairs. She said the deputy then grabbed her hands and put them on his crotch. Rodriguez said the deputy told her if she resisted he would take her to jail.
Rodriguez reported the incident, and the deputy resigned on Wednesday.
“Rather than face answering questions from investigators with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office Internal Affairs Division relating to allegations of sexual misconduct made on Tuesday by a citizen, an HCSO employee has resigned,” the Sheriff’s Office told KHOU 11 News.
Despite his resignation, the incident is still under investigation.
Watch video, courtesy of KHOU 11 News, below:Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerBrady gun control group gets rebranding Brennan fires back at'selfish' Trump over Harry Reid criticism Trump rips Harry Reid for 'failed career' after ex-Dem leader slams him in interview MORE (D-N.Y.) said Sunday he would support blocking the nomination of a new FBI director until a special prosecutor is appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“We will have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move because who the FBI director is, is related to who the special prosecutor is,” Schumer told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Yes, I think there are a lot of Democrats who feel that way,” he added.
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Schumer said the special prosecutor would report to Congress instead of the Department of Justice or the White House to prevent the administration from trying to influence the probe’s findings.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have advocated for an independent counsel to investigate whether Trump campaign aides colluded with Russian officials to sway the election, an allegation Trump and his administration have repeatedly denied.
“Remember, the criteria for a special prosecutor, independent in making day-to-day decisions from the hierarchy in the Justice Department and the White House, can only be fired for cause, has to report to Congress, and, very importantly, can look into any attempts to thwart the investigation, are all really important criteria,” Schumer told Tapper on Sunday.
“And to have that special prosecutor, people would breathe a sigh of relief, because then there would be a real independent person overlooking the FBI director,” the Democratic senator added.
Schumer expressed hope that more Republicans would join their push for a special prosecutor.
“The key here, of course, is getting some of our Republican colleagues to join us. We're hoping. We're waiting. We understand it's difficult, but I think patriotism and the needs of this country demand it,” Schumer said.The trio departed for the city: Stjarngarde. It roughly means Star City. It only took a few minutes to get there via the light-stream travel systems set up throughout the local region. On the light-stream, every pulse of light could be hundreds of people or huge crates of goods being transported. At each end of each stream there are dozens of terminals the Dyr wait at, with a corrosponding location on the other side of the stream.
As Njorunn, Embla, and Stolgron arrived Embla informed them that their first order of business was to get registered at a local information guild. It wouldn’t matter which one, since they all share between each other anyway but Embla still has a specific one in mind. This way the guilds can search for mortal minions with experience to help them on their conquests. They’re kind of like mercenaries.
Before they got to the guild, Njorunn turned to Embla and asked…
Njorunn: “Why are there stars spelling out the name of the city in the sky? Can I do things like that with my realm?”
Embla: “Ahh, yea this is a demiplane made by the coordination of hundreds of thousands of demons. It’s different than their soul realms of course, otherwise only one demon could enter. It was just a design choice that was universally agreed on. Spelling out STAR city in stars? Awesome!”
“Oh and I guess you could try something similar in your realm. But that kind of cosmetic change takes a lot of Ichor, so you gotta wait till you’re older to make such big things silly!”
Anonymous said: >Ask Embla and Stol about their realms. Do they have one? Is it shared? What about their minions, are they cute? Or are they weird and lumpy like yours? Bond over your cool cloaks with Stolgrove while you’re at it, you both have a good taste!
Njorunn: “Also what are your guys minions like? Are they all lumpy in places?”
Embla: “Uh… no? They have the normal amount of lumps? I’m not sure what you mean.”
Stolgron: “I only have the one so far. He is a bit lumpy I think. Maybe? He’s also huge, like 15 feet tall or something. What do you mean by lumps?”
sprocketholevandal said: Oh pshaw, an ungulate daemon in charge of plant growth can get away with wearing the minimum. It’s all about the fertility motif! Munin’s show is his guilty pleasure, a weight-loss reality show set in a genteel manor house of the 1910s, called “DownTon Flabby”
Njorunn: “Ahh okay. Oh, also! What did Muninn mean about putting on more?”
Embla: “Oh! When you go out in public after you’ve hit maturity you’re supposed to wear an ichor mask. It’s pretty much like walking around naked without one on. Some teens wear fake ones, which is what he wants me to do. But bleh, if it’s not made of my ichor then I don’t want it on my face!”
The girls eventually found their way to the guild as they chatted. A deer welcomed them reluctantly at the entrance. He informed them that part of having their information registered with the guild required them to have their raw potential examined. In order to do this, they had to grasp an ancient mystical device, channel their power though it, and chant words of power. The entire time the man explained this, Embla had the weirdest grin.
Njorunn was first. She went to the stand where the device was kept, slowly reaching up to it before taking it in her hand and proceeding to the testing location.
Once at the testing location a bright light focused on her, making it hard to see. Before her she saw three silhouettes: a grumpy looking simian of some kind, an overly enthusiastic fox woman, and a happy yet lackadaisical bear.
Simian: “Hello, you can begin. We’re only here to judge you in a way which may determine everything about your future.”
Fox: “Don’t be so cold! Don’t worry sweetie, go ahead.”
Bear: “Let’s see what you got.”
Shortly after Njorunn finished, Stolgron went. Njorunn wasn’t allowed to be in the room when Stolgron had her turn. The bird slowly slinked from the testing room and met up with Njorunn and Embla. The trio then headed back to the front desk to get the results.
NJORUNN STATS
STOLGRON STATS
The deer looks at the girls and tells them that they can leave and the minions will be selected for them. Their full test results will be sent in the mail within four to six business years.
The deer continues to explain that he’s annoyed that he had to work with a broken child regardless of how high her growth stats are in addition to a child with such low growth stats that she’ll be useless to everyone forever. Both of which are a waste of his time and they can get out now.
Stolgron protests raising her paper in the air, saying that she is too majestic to have low stats! However, the deer just points to the door. Embla pats the two on the head and tells them not to worry about ‘that guy’ as they leave.
Just one door down Njorunn stops: something in the window caught her eye! She puts her hand on the glass, tapping gently as she asks her sisters to take a look at the store they were walking by.
Stolgron turns her head and gasps as she stares into the window. Both Stolgron and Njorunn ask for permission to go inside from Embla. Embla responds, saying “Well of course! We’re here for you two to explore after all!”
NOTE:
I have now created a PATREON! Please support my adventure if you enjoy it! The link is below.Well here's a truly unfortunate ad placement. Right above the headline "Malaysia Says Jet Went Down in Ocean" on today's New York Times homepage, readers saw a large animated ad with divers using the Apple iPad Air underwater.
"See the unique ways people are using iPad around the world," notes the ad's closing headline, which lingered onscreen for several minutes above the update on missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The ad was up for about two hours this afternoon before appearing to be removed around 3:30 p.m. Eastern.
Click here to see a full-sized version of the ad placement.
Well, this is an unfortunate ad placement on @nytimes.com right now: pic.twitter.com/PfsTBOcc2w— J. Carleo-Evangelist (@JCEvangelist_TU) March 24, 2014
Rather unfortunate ad placement on the @nytimes homepage… pic.twitter.com/PbEhn9RcKo— Rosa Golijan (@rosa) March 24, 2014A Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt are parked side by side next to a charging station during the Nevada Electric Highway announcement in Carson City on June 16, 2015. (Photo: Jason Hidalgo)
Make room information superhighway. There's another new kind of highway that's joining the mix.
Gov. Brian Sandoval and NV Energy unveiled the Nevada Electric Highway on Tuesday, a network of charging stations planned along U.S. Route 95 that would finally make it possible to drive between Reno and Las Vegas with an electric vehicle (EV).
"We've all driven this road before and have anxiety (even) with getting gas," said Sandoval, eliciting chuckles from the crowd. "Now we can have confidence to charge our electric vehicles and drive them from place to place (in Nevada)."
The state has 150 charging stations installed so far and the Nevada Electric Highway initiative will kick off by adding five more by November. What makes those five stations especially crucial is where they'll be located. In addition to connecting the northern and southern parts of the state for electric vehicle owners, the Electric Highway is also expected to link rural areas and bring business to those communities from EV owners who make the stop to charge their cars.
"It's wonderful for rural tourism," Sandoval said. "It's the future (and) this is just the beginning."
So far, the state says it is looking for community partners in rural areas such as Fallon, Hawthorne, Tonopah, Beatty and Indian Springs. Potential sites include businesses near U.S. Route 95 that are willing to host the charging stations, which will be installed for free by NV Energy. Host sites must agree to let consumers use the stations at no charge for at least five years and make them available for 24 hours. Interested parties have until July 10 to apply. Each charging station will come with two Level 2 chargers that can charge vehicles in several hours plus one Direct Current or DC Fast Charger that can juice up compatible vehicles in less than an hour.
The charging stations can be expensive, costing $6,000 for a basic version and even more for those that feature fast charging, according to NV Energy. The Nevada Electric Highway is a public-private partnership program that is funded jointly by the state and NV Energy and does not tap into the state's general fund. The program also shows how far Nevada's efforts with EVs has come since it installed its first public charging station in 2011, said NV Energy president and CEO Paul Caudill.
"(Since 2013) we've doubled the charging capacity of the state," Caudill said.
Gov. Brian Sandoval announces the Nevada Electric Highway, a network of charging stations across U.S. Route 95 that will make it possible to drive between Reno and Las Vegas with an electric car. (Photo: Jason Hidalgo)
There are currently about 1,400 electric vehicles registered in Nevada, according to NV Energy. This latest public-private initiative in the state will hopefully encourage more Nevadans to buy electric vehicles and help reduce emissions for the state as a whole in the future, Caudill added. An estimated 90 percent of the petroleum imported into Nevada is used for transportation, said Paul Thomsen, director of the Governor's Office of Energy.
The creation of the Nevada Electric Highway is just another step in the goal of reducing the state's dependence on fossil fuels while helping further diversify its economy by becoming a player in the new energy economy, Thomsen said. Solar and geothermal, two green energy sources Nevada is rich in, are now able to compete with traditional fossil fuels in the utility market, for example, Caudill said. The state is also working with Tesla Motors to help increase the number of Tesla fast chargers in the state as well. Tesla chose Northern Nevada last year as the site of its $5 billion gigafactory.
Meanwhile, being able to link Northern Nevada with Las Vegas through a charging station network is a big deal for the state not just from an economic perspective but in terms of cultivating an environmentally friendly image as well, Caudill added.
"It's close to a 7 1/2-hour drive and one day, you'll be able to do it with an electric vehicle," Caudill said.
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To learn more about the Nevada Electric Highway, including how to apply, visit: https://nvenergy.com/EV
Read or Share this story: http://on.rgj.com/1J3mKI0Biden: Scare tactics shouldn't block gun reforms Biden: Scare tactics shouldn't block gun-control reforms
DANBURY -- Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday headlined a political pep rally designed to persuade the nation that the tragic Newtown school shootings must be met with sweeping gun-control reforms.
"We know we can't save every single life," Biden told a conference on gun violence. "But it's simply unacceptable to not act.
"We have to speak for those 20 beautiful children who died 69 days ago, 12 miles from here," said Biden, speaking at Western Connecticut State University and referring to the children and six adults gunned down Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
Although the conference was billed as an academic discussion on gun violence and protecting kids, the focus was clearly on pushing gun-control legislation now on the table in Washington and Hartford.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy used the event to announce his own set of gun-control measures weeks ahead of three task forces -- including one he formed -- currently studying gun violence and school safety issues at the state Capitol.
"We have changed," Malloy said, referring to the effects of the Newtown tragedy. "And I believe it is now time for our laws to change."
After the Newtown shootings, Biden chaired a task force that developed a series of gun-control proposals now before Congress, including reinstating a federal assault-weapon ban, mandating universal background checks, banning high capacity magazines and cracking down on so-called "straw" purchases.
The gun violence conference was by invitation only. Gun makers and lobbyists were not invited, which didn't surprise Robert Crook, executive director of the Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen.
"We haven't been invited to virtually anything," Crook said. "I would think it would be appropriate to have someone there to represent the gun owners."
"It's par for the course," added Scott Wilson, president of Connecticut Citizens Defense Fund. "The focus of the people with the institutions of power is clearly against being able to own guns. They are silencing the gun lobby.
"It steps in a direction they want to go. They don't want certain things. What about future generations? My son may not have the same choices I have," Wilson said.
Vice President Joe Biden spoke at a conference on gun violence at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Conn., Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013. Vice President Joe Biden spoke at a conference on gun violence at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Conn., Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013. Photo: Carol Kaliff Buy photo Photo: Carol Kaliff Image 1 of / 48 Caption Close Biden: Scare tactics shouldn't block gun reforms 1 / 48 Back to Gallery
During a 30-minute speech at Western, a school briefly attended by Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, Biden laid down a challenge for those who he said unduly fear the powerful national gun lobby.
"If you are concerned about your political survival, you should be concerned about the survival of our children," Biden said. "I can't imagine how we will be judged if we do nothing. There is a moral price to be paid for inaction.
"The opposition throws up question after question because they are looking for roadblocks," Biden said. "They say all you want to do is deny their rights under the Second Amendment. Not true.
"They say it's not about guns. They are wrong. No law-abiding person should fear that their constitutional rights will be infringed in any way," Biden said.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., agreed.
"Newtown changed us all. What I saw was through the eyes of a parent," Blumenthal said. "The world is different today, and Newtown has changed America."
Newtown First Selectwoman Patricia Llodra urged lawmakers to take action. "Don't let the tragedy in Sandy Hook be just another event in which no meaningful legislation was put in place," she said.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recalled his time as head of the Chicago school system. He saw up close the steady flow of death on the city's streets beause of gun violence.
"I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I saw role models and mentors dying. It had a huge impact on me," Duncan said. "Sometimes you pick the time, and sometimes the time picks you. This is the time."Ex-All Blacks coach says Americans ‘have an opportunity’ to beat first tier-one team but counsels caution over impact of Super and PRO Rugby players
The US Eagles play their first summer Test on Saturday, looking for a first win against a country from the first tier of world rugby union.
England claim first series win in Australia courtesy of brilliant defence Read more
The game against Italy – tier-two Russia follow next week – is head coach John Mitchell’s first on American soil. Italy, holders of the Six Nations wooden spoon, will be playing their second game under Conor O’Shea. The Irishman, who oversaw a 30-24 defeat in Argentina last weekend, has left the hugely experienced forwards Sergio Parisse, Martin Castrogiovanni and Alessandro Zanni at home.
“Definitely we have an opportunity,” said Mitchell on Friday, having travelled with his team to the Avaya Stadium in San Jose. “Whether we can do enough to win will depend on what we’ve done in camp, on the impact of the bench. It’s about putting on the jersey, creating consistency and creating winning performances.”
Mitchell is a former All Blacks head coach who has worked in England, Australia and South Africa. His first five games in charge of the USA came in the first Americas Rugby Championship, in February and March. The Eagles started with a 35-35 draw with an Argentina XV, followed up with wins over Canada and Chile, then suffered surprise defeats in Brazil and Uruguay.
The ARC teams varied widely, and the men who await the Azurri are far removed from those beaten in Barueri and Montevideo. They will be captained by the big Newcastle back-rower Todd Clever, who will become the joint-most-capped Eagle, and guided from fly-half by AJ MacGinty, fresh from winning the Pro12 with Connacht.
There is also Super Rugby experience: hooker James Hilterbrand of the Waratahs and two flankers, Andrew Durutalo of the Sunwolves and, on the bench, Tony Lamborn of the Hurricanes. Mitchell welcomes such strength, though he also sounds an interesting note of caution.
“Our biggest challenge,” he says, “is that a lot of our overseas players, many of them” – including Hilterbrand and Lamborn – “are only reserves in those cultures. So … they are yet to learn how to sustain durable performances week in, week out.
“You do notice that sometimes in their concentration levels when preparing, so that’s a challenge for us too, trying to keep those players on task. It’s certainly their intention to do so, but because they are bench players it creates a different psychology.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thretton Palamo takes on the Samoa defence at the World Cup, with AJ MacGinty in support. Photograph: Charlie Crowhurst/Getty Images
He has built it – will they come? Doug Schoninger and the US pro rugby dream Read more
Mitchell’s arrival in the US was delayed by family matters, and he did not select the ARC squad. Accordingly, he sees the Italy game as “the first real challenge in which I’ve had an influence on selection in collaboration with my staff, though at the end of the day I’m the convener and I’ve had a big influence on it”.
While some key players are with the Eagles sevens squad, preparing for the Rio Olympics, a large Eagles Elite Training Squad has been progressively whittled down, subjected to exacting standards of fitness. Thanks in part to the advent of PRO Rugby, only two of the match-day 23 – New York Athletic Club lock Nate Brakeley and reserve back-rower Harry Higgins, from Old Blue in the same city – do not presently earn a full-time living from rugby. This is unprecedented for a US squad, but Mitchell makes an interesting point.
“One thing that has been a little disappointing and noticeable,” he says, “is some of the PRO Rugby players in the team that were on the ARC tour have actually come [into camp] in worse condition than they were in ARC, which alarms me.
“It may be [they are not used to] the week in, week out schedule, [but] I think PRO Rugby has to look going forward at how they support the athlete around strength and conditioning. And also education around nutrition. It’s one thing having a professional contract, but are those environments catering for all facets of professionalism?”
There are those in US rugby who will happily say – off the record – that Italy can certainly be beaten. On the record, Mitchell’s realism is understandable, not least because he was formed in the toughest rugby nation on earth. A midweek All Black as a player, he launched a coaching career in which the toughest blow, a World Cup semi-final defeat by Australia, is now 13 years in the past. Since then he has gone through downs as well as ups.
So have the Eagles. They have pushed the Maori, attracted 61,500 to watch the All Blacks and led Scotland at half-time. There have been disappointments too. In 2012, Italy left Houston with a 30-10 win. In 2013 and 2014, Ireland and Scotland also won in Texas. The 2015 World Cup began with hope of progress, only for Japan to shine instead.
Also, in most recent years there have been three or more summer Tests in which to blood players and work towards the next World Cup. This year, after Scotland chose to go to Japan, there are only two. After Russia, the Eagles must wait to face the Maori in Chicago in November, on the undercard to the All Blacks versus Ireland.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mitchell in 2003. Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
But nothing is ever easy in international rugby and it will not be so against an Italian team also looking to impress a new coach. In May, after selecting his first touring party, O’Shea had words for his new players that could equally apply to those now answering to Mitchell.
“I don’t think it’s about winning mentality,” he said. “It’s about not accepting defeat. The best players are the people who can cope with adversity, who’ve come back from adversity, who are never willing to accept second. It’s about how you react when things are tough.”
In particular, things will be tough without Parisse, a mighty No8 who has won 119 caps in 14 years. Asked about ways to exploit any Italian weaknesses that may result, Mitchell admits that he and his coaches have “studied them in Six Nations thoroughly” and “thought they might manage their players”. Again, though, he adds a qualification.
“We’re in a similar situation in a way with some players in the Olympic sevens squad and with Samu Manoa staying with Toulon. In such situations, you look to develop depth. So the focus will be very much on ourselves.”
USA: Holder; Ngwenya, Palamo, S Suniula, Scully; MacGinty, Augspurger; Lamositele, Hilterbrand, Baumann, Brakeley, Peterson, Duratalo, Clever (capt), Dolan. Replacements: Taufete’e, Tarr, MacLellan, Higgins, Lamborn, Tomasin, London, Te’o.
Italy: McLean; Sarto, Campagnaro, Castello, Odiete; Canna, Gori (capt), Lovotti, Gega, Cittadini, Geldenhuys, Fuser, Barbieri, Favaro, Van Schalkwyk. Replacements: Fabiani, Panico, Ceccarelli, Bernabo, Mbanda, Palazzani, Allan, Venditti.
Referee: M van der Westhuizen (South Africa).
TV: The Rugby Channel, 9pm ET; Replay: CBS Sports Network, Sunday, 9pm ETOil extended its advance above $US60 a barrel on signs the US supply glut is easing.
Futures gained as much as 1 per cent in New York, rising from the highest close since December. Crude inventories fell by 1.5 million barrels through May 1, the first drop in industry data in eight weeks, the American Petroleum Institute was said to have reported Tuesday.
An increase of 1.5 million barrels is forecast in a Bloomberg survey before a government report Wednesday.
Oil is recovering from a six-year low in March as US companies reduce their number of active rigs. Reuters
Oil is recovering from a six-year low in March as US companies reduced the number of active rigs to the fewest since September 2010, bolstering speculation that output will slow. The rally may still falter, with crude stockpiles at the highest level in 85 years and shale-oil producers including EOG Resources preparing to boost drilling as prices rebound.
"Producers are starting to respond in terms of supply and we're seeing that with the shale rigs," Jonathan Barratt, the chief investment officer at Ayers Alliance Securities in Sydney, said by phone.If Russia wants to force Europe’s attention away from Ukraine, it could make trouble in the Balkans.
The Balkans are vulnerable to Russian meddling if President Vladimir Putin wants to put pressure on the European Union, a top Bulgarian foreign-policy expert warns.
Writing in the Financial Times, Ivan Krastev, who chairs the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria and is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argues that if Putin seeks to regain the initiative in his standoff with the West, the Balkans would be a “likely hotspot.”
As well as being the EU’s backyard, the Balkans are the underbelly of Brussels’ diplomacy. Their banking systems are fragile. If businesses with large deposits and Russian connections were suddenly to pull their money out, the result could be widespread insolvency and with it civil strife. Pro-Western governments would teeter. This is the place to apply pressure, if Moscow wants to make Europeans feel uncomfortable.
Russia certainly does not “fantasize” about bringing countries like Albania and Bosnia into its sphere of influence, writes Krastev. The Balkan states trade far more with Europe than they do with Russia and those that aren’t in the European Union yet still hope to join the bloc.
But Russia does have influence, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Serbia, to the point that German Foreign Ministry experts said last year they feared Putin could try to prevent the European Union from expanding in the region.
Russia has historically looked upon the Orthodox Christian and Slavic Serbs as a brotherly nation. Famously, it entered World War I in 1914 to defend Serbia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its German ally.
Like many countries in Eastern Europe, Serbia is completely dependent for natural gas on Russia. It was also a partner in Russia’s South Stream pipeline until Putin canceled the project late last year, citing European opposition.
During a visit to Belgrade in October, where he attended Serbia’s Liberation Day ceremonies, Putin reiterated his country’s opposition to Kosovo’s independence. All but five European Union member states have recognized the largely ethnic Albanian Republic of Kosovo. Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić, in turn, pledged not to bow to European pressure and join sanctions against Russia for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Bosnia might be more vulnerable to Russian machinations, given the country’s ethnic divisions. The German Foreign Ministry warned Russia was engaging in “public diplomacy with clear pan-Slavic rhetoric” there.
German agriculture minister Christian Schmidt told Der Spiegel in November, “One gets the impression that Russia is trying to gain influence over all of Bosnia-Herzegovina via the Serbian partial republic Srpska.”
Elmar Brok, a German conservative who chairs the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, told the same magazine, “Putin’s goal is to exert so much pressure on Balkan states that they either back away from EU membership or that, once they become members, influence EU resolutions in a pro-Russian manner.”
Perhaps seeking to stave off such a prospect, German chancellor Angela Merkel convened a meeting of Balkan leaders in Berlin last August and called for “speedy progress” in their countries’ accession to the European Union. “Slovenia and Croatia are already EU members,” she said, “and others have made quite considerable progress.”
Corruption and the risk of political instability nevertheless remain high in some Balkan states and nearly all have unresolved ethnic conflicts stemming from the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, making their admission to the European Union problematic.
Those same factors could make it easier for Russia to instigate a “controlled crisis” in the region, according to Krastev — which would force the West’s attention away from Ukraine and possibly divide Europe between countries that have little desire to expand the union further into the Balkans anyway and those that fret about where Russia’s aggression will end.[TSL] Jinro, MorroW, White-Ra, Loner Interviews Text by Heyoka
TSL3 Pre-Round of 32 Interviews
Part 4 of 8
We are happy to bring you the last round of TSL Pre-Round of 32 Interviews before the TSL begins. The last players you will see this weekend are: Liquid`Jinro, mouz.MorroW, Duckload.White-Ra, and LonerPrime.WE.
TLAF-Liquid`Jinro
Terran
Q: You experienced two TSLs as a moderator on Teamliquid. Now you are finally playing in one. Does this tournament mean anything special to you? What are your goals for the TSL3?
I was "retired" from gaming at that time, just pokering, so I never felt the kind of "watching from the sidelines" feeling I would have, had I still been a competitive player. So its not with the feeling of finally making it in that I will play this, it will just be the first TSL for me.
Q: Your opponent is fellow Swede Morrow. Are you confident you can beat him? How will you go about preparing for the TSL?
I respect MorroW, I don't know who will win. Watched a bunch of MorroWs games and practiced myself, nothing out of the ordinary.
Q: You recently were eliminated in the GSL Ro16 by Hongun. How would you describe the difference between the Korean and international competitive scenes?
I'm not sure how these two parts of the question are related! Ive only been exposed to the Korean scene firsthand so I dont really know, but everything being more centralized is definitely one big difference.
Q: You won MLG Nationals last year. Are you planning on traveling to more events outside Korea in 2011? Do you feel that SC2 will take off in Europe and America?
If they don't conflict with GOM or other Korean events. I think its pretty obvious already that its taking off.
Q: You've grown from a relatively unknown player to a top foreigner in less than a year. Describe the journey, and what you will do to stay on top.
It doesn't feel like a journey yet, I think its still happening. Maybe it will feel like one when I look back at it in a bunch of years, retired with a mansion and hoard of gold?
Q: How is the oGs-Liquid house? How happy are you there? Are you, Huk, and Haypro enjoying yourselves?
Its great, and getting better every day really. Korean SC2 is actually happening now.
Q: If you had to introduce yourself to our fans who never met you, how would you describe yourself? Write a few sentences about your personality.
Hi I'm Jinro, I can trace my ancestry right back to the natives of the Easter Island (pictorial evidence:
Q: What do you think are your greatest strengths and weaknesses as a player?
Uhm, probably preparation. Biggest Weakness is TvP in general but I'm working on it.
Q: Which matches (other than your own) are you interested in? Who do you believe will win?
Lots of good ones, Fruitdealer vs Thorzain will be interesting, Ret vs Nani, TLO vs NaDa.... so many. MC wins it all I think.
Q: Do you have anything to say to your fans and supporters before the Round of 32?
As always, thanks for watching and I hope the games will be good, win or lose =o!
I was "retired" from gaming at that time, just pokering, so I never felt the kind of "watching from the sidelines" feeling I would have, had I still been a competitive player. So its not with the feeling of finally making it in that I will play this, it will just be the first TSL for me.I respect MorroW, I don't know who will win. Watched a bunch of MorroWs games and practiced myself, nothing out of the ordinary.I'm not sure how these two parts of the question are related! Ive only been exposed to the Korean scene firsthand so I dont really know, but everything being more centralized is definitely one big difference.If they don't conflict with GOM or other Korean events. I think its pretty obvious already that its taking off.It doesn't feel like a journey yet, I think its still happening. Maybe it will feel like one when I look back at it in a bunch of years, retired with a mansion and hoard of gold?Its great, and getting better every day really. Korean SC2 is actually happening now.Hi I'm Jinro, I can trace my ancestry right back to the natives of the Easter Island (pictorial evidence: http://imgur.com/0ijfn.jpg) Uhm, probably preparation. Biggest Weakness is TvP in general but I'm working on it.Lots of good ones, Fruitdealer vs Thorzain will be interesting, Ret vs Nani, TLO vs NaDa.... so many. MC wins it all I think.As always, thanks for watching and I hope the games will be good, win or lose =o!
mouz.MorroW
Zerg
Q: You qualified on points. How happy are you to qualify? Describe your thoughts when you realized you were in. Who would you like to play in the TSL3?
Yes I'm very happy to qualify for TSL 3. I don't really think about who I would like to play, however my game vs Terran is probably my strongest so I'm sort of happy to face Jinro first round.
Q: You participated in the TSL2 as well for Brood War. Does this tournament mean anything special to you? What are your goals for the TSL3?
My goals are to get the opportunity to show my level of play and to prove myself as one of the best outside Korea. I definitely hope I go far in the tournament but usually I don't mind losing as much as other players as long as I get the chance to try my best and get real games.
Q: Your Ro32 opponent is Liquid`Jinro. Many consider him one of the best Terrans in the world. Are you confident you can beat him?
I think the odds are definitely in my favor. My Zerg is strong vs Terran and these maps are pretty good for Zerg as well. However, the latency does hurt Zerg quite a lot and I have no real clue how good Jinro exactly is in TvZ, besides from a few matches I've seen online.
Q: Many of your teammates are playing Liquid` players as well. How do you think they will do?
I don't know how well they will do to be honest. I definitely hope they will do very well but then again, Team Liquid is such a strong team so its not so easy to expect wins out of everyone in the team^^. To even predict a win vs Jinro the vast majority probably considers it to be a very bold move. Good luck and they have my best wishes ofcourse xD.
Q: You made a controversial switch from Terran to Zerg. If you played yourself, which race would win?
I don't know how good my Terran is to be honest vs Zerg now. If I had some time to get back into shape I still have probably some of best mechanics in the world (when I was massgaming and was in shape) and from watching so much GSL vods and playing vs Terran learning the builds and coming back should have been no problem really. But then again my Zerg vs Terran is very confident right now. some parts of me thinks it's imbalanced as well on these bigger macro maps too xD. Will be epic games that's for sure ^^.
Q: You recently made the finals of Assembly and have been invited to the GSL International Tournament. Are you planning on attending MLGs in the future? What are your thoughts on the international interest in Starcraft 2?
I won't go to this MLG of course (GSL WC) but in the future I hope to take part |
relative to what they were getting before. The other is that one club, Manchester United, went on an enormous (and uncharacteristic) spending spree, with a net spend of around $200 million. United don't usually operate in this way -- there are plenty of good reasons they did -- but in any case, it skews the figures.
What it boils down to is that there's another $800 million to go around and a club spending enormous amounts for the first time in years and still, there is no increase in net spend. And that suggests that, if anything, the days of wild spending -- I'm talking across the board, as there are notable exceptions -- are coming to an end.
Man United spent a small fortune this summer, but given years of austerity, it doesn't upset their net spend.
It's a trend that is even more marked when you look at the net spend of Europe's other top leagues. The Bundesliga had the second highest net spend after the Premier League -- $116.3 million -- but those are numbers are skewed somewhat when you consider that Borussia Dortmund, whose net spend amounts to $67.6 million, accounts for more than half of it. And Dortmund spent big this summer precisely because in recent years they were incredibly thrifty: in the three previous seasons, they actually took in more than they paid out in transfers.
Serie A is next with a net outlay of $58 million, while the other two in the big five, Spain and France, didn't have a net spend at all. Liga clubs sold for $3.7 million more than they bought, while Ligue 1 made a whopping cumulative $110.5 million profit on transfers.
If anything, while it may not seem that way, for most clubs this has been a summer of restraint.
Why?
Financial fair play undoubtedly plays some part. Indeed, UEFA General Secretary Gianni Infantino was positively glowing last week as he announced some figures from UEFA's benchmarking survey of some 500 clubs. He said that for financial 2013 -- which, depending on the accounting method the club uses, means either the 2012-13 season or the calendar year 2013 -- the cumulative losses by European clubs were just over a billion dollars. Which sounds enormous until you consider that two years previously they had lost a whopping $2.23 billion.
What's more, around Europe, for the first time since they started tracking these figures five years ago, revenue was growing at a faster rate (5.7 percent) than wages (3.7 percent).
Sheikh Mansour and Man City were busy, but with more restraint than in seasons past, fitting the general trend.
Obviously we don't know the 2014 numbers yet, but the net spend figures -- transfer spending is usually a club's biggest expense -- suggest that the trend is going to continue. Folks are cutting back.
To what degree FFP is responsible can be debated, but it obviously plays a part. For example, last season, as part of their settlement with UEFA for breaching FFP rules, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain agreed to limit net spending to a maximum of $78 million this summer. (In exchange, part of the massive fine levied on the clubs was suspended.) Both were well within the limit after huge net spends in previous seasons: around half a billion dollars for PSG in the previous three seasons and roughly $300 million for City over the same time frame. (City also reportedly ended their interest in Falcao given how much it would impact their net spend.)
But even those clubs who were not sanctioned last season know full well what awaits them if they do, particularly since UEFA's FFP break-even requirement will stiffen this year. Last time it was $60 million over two seasons -- bear in mind that this isn't net spending; it's profit and loss adjusted for "allowable expenses" that UEFA considers "virtuous," like youth development and stadium infrastructure -- this time it's still $60 million but over three seasons. Next year it will be $40 million over three years.
The list of clubs with the largest net spend this past summer is also indicative. The top two -- Manchester United ($200 million) and Arsenal ($113 million) -- are clubs who have been profitable for years and can easily absorb this. Barcelona (third at $100.6 million) also has decent numbers and, as it stands, are barred from transfer activity in the next two windows.
Of the top 25 clubs by net spend, 11 are from the Premier League, but of those teams, seven -- West Bromwich Albion ($17.9 million), Leicester City ($18.3 million), Crystal Palace ($18.4 million), Newcastle ($22.1 million), Hull City ($29.8 million), Queens Park Rangers ($36.1 million) and West Ham ($36.7 million) -- are unlikely to have to worry about FFP any time soon. (Hull were, of course, in the Europa League briefly this year but as this is their first season, they are not subject to it, unless they return next year.)
In fact, from their perspective, avoiding relegation is financially more of an imperative than one day needing to fulfill UEFA's FFP rules. (Further evidence of this is the fact that Burnley's net spend of $11.7 million is higher than Real Madrid's, who clock in at $11.3 million.)
The overall sense is that for all the hype and hyperbole, the game across Europe is slowly moving towards some sense of "normality" whereby clubs don't spend far more than they take in (with obvious exceptions, some of them structural). And net spending reflects this, which is what most clubs -- and, crucially, their owners -- wanted all along.
Gabriele Marcotti is a senior writer for ESPN FC. Follow him on Twitter @Marcotti.Like any major company after a PR disaster, Samsung is in full-on goodwill tour mode right now, setting up counters at airports around the world to offer immediate loaners phones for Note 7 owners about to fly and reportedly compensating Note 7 parts suppliers for lost revenue. Heck, even Samsung Hong Kong -- which I called out last week for having a meager Note 7 refund/exchange program -- has upped its game, and are now accepting all Note 7s in Hong Kong regardless of region.
But none of these things will matter if two things don't happen:
1: Samsung figures out exactly what caused some Note 7s to catch fire, and release a detailed report to the public, along with a clear plan on how they will avoid that mistake again
2: Samsung releases a new flagship phone that wows reviewers and consumers
The second one will likely happen, since Samsung's been on a roll lately in terms of putting out products that are beloved by fans and tech media, and as Forbes' Ewan Spence reported, the Galaxy S8 is rumored to pack plenty of jaw-dropping features, like a 4K display and fingerprint sensor that is part of the screen.
The problem is, if Samsung doesn't figure out the first problem, number two may not happen. According to South Korean news media Chosun Ilbo, Samsung employees are hard at work now to determine the exact cause of the Note 7 fires, and if they can't, the report states that staffers "fear the release of the Galaxy S8 smartphone scheduled for early 2017 may have to be aborted."
It may sound extreme, but it definitely makes sense. Consumers would not accept a new Samsung phone unless the company can explain in detail what went wrong with the last phone. Even if consumers don't care -- Samsung mobile chief DJ Koh surely wouldn't want a repeat of what happened. After the Note 7 nightmare, we can safely bet that Samsung will do everything it can to avoid any more overheating phones.The news of controversial journalist turned AAP leader Aashish Khetan threatening journalists online is still fresh in our minds. When some journalists tweeted a link to a very damning report of the corrupt practices being followed by AAP the party and also its Government, Khetan lost his cool and admonished them and even went as far as threatening them. Perhaps the realisation that this information will open a pandora’s box was what led to the outburst.
One of the allegations made in the report was that AAP had appointed as many as 25 journalists on the governing bodies of 28 colleges funded by the government affiliated to the Delhi University. They achieved this by dissolving the governing bodies despite opposition from the university and hundreds of non-permanent teachers. Apparently, most of them were working journalists, many of whom report and write about AAP. The list of these journalists got leaked online and can be verified from here (some of them have rejected the appointments):
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As columnist Anand Ranganathan noted on twitter, most of the names of journalists are mentioned as “recommendations” but it seemed that the recommendations were accepted in totality. Two very prominent names on the list were those of journalists M K Venu, founding editor of thewire.in, a leftist site, and that of Saba Naqvi, a journalist and TV panelist. While Mr M K Venu rejected the appointment, Saba Naqvi happily chose to accept AAP’s gift to her.
What might have been the reason to give Saba Naqvi this honour? Surely it had nothing to do with her hagiography of the messiah of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal? The other ex-journalist who wrote on AAP, Ashutosh is already in AAP.
After the leak that Saba Naqvi had indeed been appointed on a Governing council, old media followed the code of Omerta, with no one reporting this news, while social media began asking tough questions of this journalist. She had remained silent when she was appointed, but now, the justification given by her on twitter, after she was questioned, was this:
Has a journalist, who is supposed to be an independent, unbiased reporter, openly accepted that her single-minded goal is to thwart the RSS? Is this the role of a journalist? Can the bogey of RSS be raised to justify the acceptance of a political handout? The appointments were recommended as early as July 2015. It is almost a year now. Did we see any disclosure or announcement from Naqvi for so long, before this leaked out?
It is not illegal for anyone to accept political handouts and largesses. Many parties do it and have done it in the past and so also journalists have also accepted the same. But once journalists openly admit that their agenda is not reporting, but is rather to keep a section of the society at bay, for which they have a visceral hatred, then the so-called journalism of such journalists must be placed under scrutiny.
Take for example this flowery “tribute” to Arvind Kejriwal and AAP offered by his co-opted political appointee, Saba Naqvi. This was written long after the appointment to the Governing Council.
Is this a fair, unbiased, honest assessment of AAP then? Or is this a piece which is written out of gratitude to dear leader who rewarded a hack? The entire article only speaks of the glories of AAP rule, some maybe genuine, some maybe over-hyped. A rally in Punjab means AAP gets entry into “new terrain”. The odd-even scheme which failed in reducing pollution is hailed for reducing traffic and “the special ability of Kejriwal and his young party to do unconventional things“. The piece is littered with praise and adulation for the great leader.
Naqvi signs off the piece as “Delhi-based author and journalist”, no disclosure about her being appointed by Arvind Kejriwal, the person who she is deifying, on the governing council of a college. This is how journalism works in India.
Or take the time when AAP’s nationwide ad frenzy had created a furore. For days on end, Delhi based AAP advertised in virtually every part of the country, with double-page “advertisements”. The ads, were designed to give the effect that they were news reports, whereas they were actually advertisements. Eventually it was revealed that the Delhi Government had splurged over Rs 15 crores in 3 months on this blitzkreig. And Saba Naqvi came to the defense of her benefactor AAP:
Really ironic to see those who are fine with BJP and Modi ads get into a state about AAP ads. 2014 most expensive media campaign!!! — Saba Naqvi (@_sabanaqvi) May 1, 2016
The tweet is stunningly idiotic.
Firstly, the use of whataboutery as the only means to defend her benefactor Kejriwal.
Secondly, comparing the advertisement expense of a national party, to that of a regional party which has electoral presence in only 2 small Northern Indian states.
Thirdly, the ad expense during a national election campaign being compared to the ad expense when there are no state elections coming up in which AAP is contesting.
Fourth, the AAP ads were paid for by the Delhi Government, i.e. by Delhi’s common taxpayer, whereas BJP’s 2014 ad campaign was paid for by the party, not from taxes collected for the welfare of the state.
To a layman, the argument put forth by Naqvi may seem illogical, but when you consider she has been benefited by AAP, it all makes sense.
There seems to be a growing conflict of interest situation. Naqvi praises Kejriwal in her book, gets a plum posts, goes on to further praise Kejriwal. All fine, but until you consider she is supposed to be a journalist. Ironically, this is what she wrote on “Augusta Patrakars” (she spells Agusta as Augusta):
We can question the accepted practice in the media of accepting hospitality from anyone, but just the act of going on a sponsored trip does not make a journalist corrupt. Personally, no one ever offered me such trips as I am unlikely to accept a corporate sponsored trip. But that’s me and my personal code.
Seems she broke her personal code for AAP? Or are only foreign trips included in her code? As this secret is now out, that she is one of the journalists who were rewarded by AAP, we must now wait and watch how many media houses drop her from their shows, their columns, or at least educate the reader about her background. And we must also wait for Naqvi, to claim that she is being attacked by Hindutva misogynistic bigots for being a free-thinking muslim woman, and not for her gross impropriety as a journalist.
Share This Post and Support:Going Rogue: Green-White Humans
Hello and welcome back to Going Rogue, where winning isn’t the goal, but it often happens anyway.
A few weeks back, we took a look at Craig Wescoe’s Mardu Humans list, and tried to make some improvements by integrating Aether Vial as a way to be able to cast creatures and spells swiftly in parallel. That went well, and I’ve played the deck quite a bit since then, and it continues to perform well.
However, I’ve since experimented further with the archetype and come to a more aggressive version that is an absolute steamroller against any other fair deck. Allow me to present to you: Green-White Humans.
But First, a Word from Mardu
Before getting into the new build, let me just take a moment to describe the motivation to move on from Mardu:
Go away, Abbot of Keral Keep. Go away and never come back.
So basically I found myself asking what could be done with a gentler mana base, if there was something I could do with excess mana, and what was the best way to apply faster pressure.
The Answer? Green-White.
This hits all three nails on the head. First of all, allied colours have terrific mana options, so by focusing primarily in this area, I can cut my early game life loss from six to two or less. Second of all, not only are there some great green Human mana sinks like Duskwatch Recruiter and Tireless Tracker, but Noble Hierarch contributes to every angle this deck could want to explore. And finally, if it’s a swarm we’re after, I’ve heard Collected Company is a good card.
The result has been powerful and fun to play so far, and I’m going to walk you through the deck in roughly the same order than my opponents have been discovering it in.
Turn One:
What a breath of fresh air. With only two colours to care about, the only time I need to give up more than one life point on turn one is if I only have one land in hand, and I need to make sure it can produce either green or white.
Now, you might look at these three and see them all in rabid competition with each other for who gets to go first, and there are certainly situations where aggression is so important that you want to lead with the Champion. But in at least 75% of situations, I’ve found the right play is to lead with the Vial, as what you lose on turn two is immediately made up for starting just one turn later. This isn’t the sort of deck that would rather rush to its three-drops than dump out smaller guys, so a T1 Noble isn’t crucial, and leading with the Vial allows you to end turn two with a 2/2 Champion and a Noble ready to start making mana on turn three anyways. Perfect.
Turn Two:
Thanks to the Vial, your second turn will just as often involve a combination of 1-drops as it will an actual two-drop. But because of the creature selection in the list, this is a good thing. None of our three drops are particularly valuable when cast a turn early, and we would rather take advantage of value-laden sequencing with Human triggers. Just like in the Mardu version, Thalia’s Lieutenant is a key card and doesn’t usually come down this early, but certainly can as part of an aggressive start in the right matchup.
Turn Three:
Okay, I lied, there’s a light splash of black, and Anafenza, the Foremost is strong enough as an aggressively-costed big-body Human that can interfere with certain strategies while also continuing our growth theme. She’s fine to play here, and will usually be the biggest body on the board.
The best two plays though are either:
To Vial in a Duskwatch Recruiter and pass. Wait for its transform ability to trigger on your opponent’s upkeep (Vialing it in doesn’t count as casting a spell), then activate its ability before it resolves for some sweet CA and possibly ramp next turn (or if you’re playing a control opponent, flash it in on their turn instead, since they’re unlikely to play spells on their own turn, and you can force them to use removal before you untap.) Cast a Tireless Tracker off a Noble Hierarch, then make your land drop for a Clue, ideally with a fetch land that you leave up until they try to kill the Tracker, if you can manage it. This deck generates a lot of clues, if played right.
These two plays are the backbone of the deck’s value engine, and you will repeat them throughout the game. Once these extra draws are rolling, the deck becomes incredibly difficult to deal with.
Turn Four Onwards:
Once your Vial is at three, you are in truly excellent shape. It becomes that much easier to extract value out of Tireless Tracker; your Eternal Witnesses recur your previously-foiled plans; and odds are good that you’ve got many +1/+1 counters floating around now, so a well-timed Abzan Falconer will often just end the game – sometimes as early as this turn if you’ve had a generous combination of Champions and Lieutenants.
Generally though, you aim for a medium-to-long game, as your growing Humans and card advantage engines continue to improve your position as the game goes on. With clues and Duskwatch Recruiter keeping your hand full, an active Vial, and Collected Company at your disposal, even a Supreme Verdict is merely just a speed bump at this point. This is really the key advantage to the deck – because our card advantage engines pair us up so favourably against more controlling decks, we don’t need to overextend like a traditional aggro deck and risk getting blown out by a sweeper. Just keep drawing cards and the win will come.
Didn’t Make the Cut:
It took a little while to refine the main deck, and a few interesting cards came and went along the way. It turns out that Humans are a challenging tribe to choose among, given that there are three times as many of them as any other creature type in Modern.
Warden of the First Tree was initially included as another high-payoff mana sink that could either be a late-game bomb, or be part of an early game assault, but it turns out it just costs too much before it’s out of Lightning Bolt range. Meanwhile Knight of the Reliquary gets huge in a deck that’s already fetch-heavy to complement Tireless Tracker, and can also tutor Gavony Township – one of the deck’s most efficient mana sinks, but it turns out that an otherwise vanilla body isn’t particularly well-suited to the deck’s overall strategy. And finally Kytheon, Hero of Akros was a short-lived experiment that was meant to convert Human triggers into a no-mana-required value engine, but it turns out that his Planeswalker mode doesn’t really generate value the way others do. The card is good, but clearly suited for a more all-in aggressive, probably-mono-white strategy.
Interaction in the Deck:
Rounding out the cards that did make the final list, the deck does sport some interaction, but is somewhat lacking in it overall, leaving it weak to certain opponents such as Infect and Affinity. Four Path to Exiles aren’t enough to reliably have an answer for Blighted Agent, and a Gitaxian Probe will often reveal our helplessness. Meanwhile Affinity’s flyers can generally end the game faster than we can.
Naturally, we have a sideboard prepared to help alleviate these challenges. But before we dissect the choices I’ve made so far (the sideboard can probably be more accurately described as in-construction, though), let’s take a look at the complete package.
The Deck:
Alex’s GW Humans
The mainboard is powerful, so the sideboard was designed with somewhat-specific matchups in mind:
The main deck has been nicely tuned to consistently perform, and although the sideboard helps a lot of challenging matchups, it’s bound to develop further over time. I would love to hear your feedback on crucial pieces that may improve matters.
Wrapping Up
Actually, before signing off, it’s worth noting that there are a few new humans in the upcoming Eldritch Moon release that look potentially interesting for this deck.
The new Thalia is pretty sweet. As a 3/2 first striker, she ambushes very nicely with either Vial or CoCo, and her static ability is absolutely oppressive. The main strike against her is that she dies to a Lightning Bolt, obviously, however she fares well against decks without them, and can completely cripple an opponent unable to answer her. Ramp her out turn 2 and watch how bad your opponents’ fetch lands become.
In a very different category, Heron’s Grace Champion is a respectable curve topper that gives our board a temporary Crusade-effect while adding some often-needed life gain – and a ton of it all at once. He probably doesn’t wind up making the 75 as a result of pairing poorly with both Vial and CoCo, but I could see a 1, or even 2-of being correct in certain meta environments.
Anyways – that’s all we’ve got this week. Sorry the article was so long – this is a deck I’m very excited about and I hope some of you enjoy it as well.
As always, until next time, may the force be with brew.NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — As the dollar appears to once again be racing to new heights against the euro, Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at German insurance giant Allianz, says investors should try to benefit from its surge higher.
El-Erian recommends keeping bets small — and having plenty of cash on hand to take advantage of massive dips.
The strong dollar DXY, -0.04% will likely create headwinds for U.S. and emerging-market companies, El-Erian said Monday in a column in the Financial Times, a phenomenon he refers to as “financial breakage.”
U.S. companies will find it harder to compete with rivals in Europe and Asia, while the U.S. economy remains too weak to stomach such setbacks.
Companies based in emerging-market economies that are overexposed to dollar-denominated debt are likely headed for a rough patch -- but, as El-Erian notes, central banks can use their balance sheets to protect these companies from default.
Positioning should be balanced, El-Erian argues, “combining exposures that favour the dollar versus other major currencies (particularly the euro_ with hedged European versus U.S. equities positioning and, on the government bond side, U.S. bonds versus German bonds.”
And bets on emerging-market assets should be reconfigured to focus on countries with large amounts of foreign currency reserves and limited dollar-denominated debt.
In a time of such intense foreign-exchange volatility, keeping a substantial amount of cash on hand would be a smart move.
“After all,” El-Erian said, “we should never forget the growing phenomenon of limited liquidity provision during periods of greater market volatility. And volatility is what awaits markets.”
Providing critical information for the U.S. trading day. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Need to Know newsletter. Sign up here.The New York Times describes 18-year-old Bebe Zeva as a “fashion blogger, journalist, and model.” She is based in Las Vegas, and has been referred to as a potential “new Tavi” by sites like Elle.com. She may be a “new Tavi” in the sense that she’s a teenager and writes a blog and gets attention from mainstream news outlets for her style and manner of existing in the world, but her image isn’t so much Tavi as it is Bedford Avenue–dwelling NYU freshman with a taste for hats that come pre-worn-in, and … attention (Zeva will enroll at the University of Nevada this upcoming fall with plans to transfer to a New York school, like NYU). Zeva is unique in the sense that while most hipsters refuse to admit they’re trying very, very hard to be hipsters, she flat-out says so. Around her second semester of freshman year in high school, she tells the Times, “I made the conscious decision to pursue the hipster lifestyle.” And so, after “relentlessly” Googling “hipster,” she’s become pretty decent at being one. Some of the quintessential hipster habits she’s forced herself to adopt include:
Proclaiming one’s absurd personal-style philosophy of the moment in order to sound like a unique individual, ideally in the company of people who are trying just as hard to come up with such ideas of their own.
“Don’t leave the house unless you look like you’re going to a funeral,” was Ms. Zeva’s style rule for the weekend, which she was spending in the company of Leigh Alexander, a video-gaming journalist. Ms. Zeva calls this style Cyber Goth.
Becoming One of the ‘Relevant’ [NYT]About
In 2012 I created BBQ KICK SAUCE, a spicy BBQ flavoured sauce. The sauce is unique, delivering a triple flavour hit; sweet, BBQ and then the kick.
We are registered with Birmingham City Council Food Safety Team and have been successfully inspected. The sauce has undertaken shelf-life testing in a laboratory. The labels and packaging have been developed. We are now at the point that we are ready to launch.
We are in the process of securing a unit and aim to register with the British Retail Consortium in order to reach major retailers. The sauce is currently with the buyers for Spar and we are in negotiations with retailers, farm shops and markets throughout Birmingham. We are in the process of revamping the website and online sales will be delivered through Amazon.
Money secured through Kick Starter will be used to help equip the new unit, help us to achieve British Retail Consortium accreditation and help us to market the sauce.
As a business, were at the point that BBQ KICK SAUCE is ready for the market. However, securing and equipping the unit will allow this individual and special sauce the opportunity to reach the supermarkets.
We need you're help to get this great sauce out there..As the Republicans celebrate their victory in passing the American Health Care Act in the House of Representatives, today, many Americans are now at a greater risk of losing their health insurance. The Republican health care bill to replace Obamacare has had a rough journey, initially failing its first time around. However, in an attempt to please more hard-line conservatives, the GOP's latest version of the AHCA has increased measures that could harm millions of Americans. Specifically, Americans who aren't straight, white men. So, just how does the AHCA hurt transgender kids? The answer is complicated, and also troubling.
While the bill still has to pass in the Senate, the repercussions of its potential passage still deserve to be analyzed. For starters, the AHCA seeks to defund Planned Parenthood, a clinic that serves the needs of many trans people across the United States. In fact, "65 Planned Parenthood locations now offer transition-related medical care," according to The Daily Beast, and that's just the start of how the AHCA impacts trans Americans, especially trans children.
While Obamacare restricted insurance providers from denying coverage to trans Americans and children, the AHCA does no such thing, meaning thousands of Americans could potentially lose coverage, just for being themselves.
As the AHCA strips away protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions, it also does away with many mandates that require states to cover conditions. Unfortunately, even under Obamacare, many transgender Americans were not able to receive coverage. According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey Complete Report,
One-third (33%) of those who saw a health care provider had at least one negative experience related to being transgender, such as being verbally harassed or refused treatment because of their gender identity.
And while this information is horrible, it's only worse for transgender kids. The Trump administration has already taken away rights from the youngest in the trans community, revoking an Obama-era mandate that allowed them to use the bathroom that matched their gender identity at school.
Basically, under the AHCA, anyone with a pre-existing condition — such as being trans, being a sexual assault victim, having a C-section, and more — is in danger of losing their coverage. While Republicans claim to want to protect all Americans, their new bill will do more harm than good. Not only does it target women, but it targets all trans Americans, including children.
Fortunately, it still has to pass in the Senate for it to become law. But it could still happen, and that means millions of Americans would be at risk.The state House on Wednesday backed a much broader expansion of Georgia’s medical marijuana law, a statement vote after the Senate backed a similar measure that left many advocates unhappy.
House Bill 65, sponsored by state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, would among other changes double the list of illnesses and conditions eligible for treatment with medical marijuana in Georgia to include AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, autoimmune disease, epidermolysis bullosa, HIV, peripheral neuropathy and Tourette’s syndrome.
It removes a one-year residency requirement.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will again have Georgia’s largest team covering the Legislature. Get complete daily coverage during the legislative session at myAJC.com/georgialegislature.
Additionally, the bill would let people who have registration cards from other states with similar low-THC cannabis oil laws also possess the oil here.
Under Georgia’s 2015 law, patients and, in the case of children, families who register with the state are allowed to possess up to 20 ounces of cannabis oil to treat severe forms of eight specific illnesses, including cancer, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
The oil can have no more than 5 percent THC, the component in the drug that makes people high.
The House vote comes two weeks after the state Senate passed a medical marijuana measure that would add autism to the list of eligible conditions, but also reduce the allowable maximum THC level in the oil to 3 percent — a mandate unpopular with many of the law’s advocates.
Senators wanting to reduce the maximum THC level say the move would bring the state more in line with others that also allow limited forms of the oil. Federal officials continue to classify the oil as an illegal drug.As promised a little over two months ago, here is our regular price check in Icelandic convenient stores and supermarkets. We are quite shocked about how many products have gone up in price during the last two months.
As in our previous price check, we visited 11 supermarkets and convenient stores in the capital area and price checked 11 products which are stables in any kitchen. The products we checked are also good to bring on the road when traveling.
The price check execution
We visited 11 supermarkets and convenient stores in the capital area and checked the shelf price of 11 different products. We did not buy any products and solely checked the shelf price of each product. The products that we checked were not on offer in any store. If that would’ve been the case, we of course would have taken that into account.
The only change between this price check and our last one is that we did not visit Samkaup Strax at Hófgerði in Kópavogur since that has closed. Instead we visited Samkaup Strax in Stigahlíð in Reykjavík.
We chose products that are likely to be sold in most stores and that will be sold for many months to come, so we can price check them again every two months or so. We performed the price check on Tuesday November 7th and Wednesday November 8th 2017. During the price check we visited the following Icelandic supermarkets:
Kostur, Dalvegur 10, Kópavogur
Nóatún, Háaleitisbraut 68, Reykjavík
Fjarðarkaup, Hólshraun 1b, Hafnarfjörður
Krónan, Flatahraun 13, Hafnarfjörður
Bónus, Holtagarðar, Reykjavík
Samkaup Strax, Stigahlíð 45-47, Kópavogur
Nettó, Mjódd, Reykjavík
Víðir, Skeifan 11d, Reykjavík
10-11, Lágmúli 7, Reykjavík
Iceland, Engihjalli 8, Kópavogur
Hagkaup, Skeifan 15, Reykjavík
The price check products
We of course price checked the same products as in our previous price check. Those products were:
MS Butter 400g
KEA Vanilla Skyr 200g
MS Whole Milk 1L
Oreo Original 154g
Bananas
Can of Pepsi 0,5L
10 SS Hot Dogs
Knorr Cup a Soup Thai Curry Chicken 3 pack
Lífskorn Bread from Myllan 450g
Bag of Þristur Candy 250g
Cheerios Cereal 340g
So, let’s get to the good part – the results! Below you will see a table with all prices, and a summary of our findings.
Kostur and Bónus the cheapest
As in our previous check, 10-11 reigns supreme when it comes to high prices. They have the highest price in 9 categories, tying in 1 with Samkaup Strax. In addition to that, Samkaup has the highest price in 2 other categories. This is a bit of a change since our last check, when 10-11 had the highest price in 10 out of 11 categories.
We also see a change in the lower price ranges with Kostur and Bónus tying in first place, having the most products with the cheapest price, or 4 in total. In our last price check it was Bónus that had the most of the lowest priced products with Kostur in second place. Now, Víðir has 2 of the lowest priced products and Iceland and Fjarðarkaup each have 1.
40% price raise of butter
If we start our run down with the Icelandic butter, Smjör, both Samkaup and Nettó have raised the price of their 400g box. Samkaup takes the cake with a 40% raise of price of butter, going from 501 ISK to 757 ISK. The price of butter at Nettó was 379 ISK in our last price check, but is now 383 ISK. That’s a price raise of a little over 1%. The most expensive butter is in fact at Samkaup, with the cheapest one being found at Víðir for 338 ISK. That’s a whopping 76,5% price difference.
We also price checked vanilla flavored Skyr and found that Nettó had also raised the price of that from 189 ISK to 199 ISK, or 5,15%. However, Skyr price had dropped at Krónan by 2 ISK and at Iceland by 15 ISK. The best bargain for Skyr is at Kostur, with a 200g box costing 178 ISK. The most expensive one is at 10-11, costing 279 ISK. The price difference between the highest and lowest price is 44%.
The price of milk has also gone up in some stores. It was 145 ISK at Nettó for 1 liter of whole milk, but is now 148 ISK. Víðir also raised the price of their milk, from 149 to 159 ISK. Kostur however lowered their milk prices significantly, or from 142 ISK in our previous price check, down to 115 ISK. That’s a 21% price cut. So, Kostur takes the cake when it comes to the cheapest liter of milk. The most expensive one is found at 10-11, costing 269 ISK. That’s almost 62% price difference on a liter of milk!
Bananas go up a whopping 70%
Which brings us to Oreo original biscuits, which are not found in every store in the quantity we price checked. The only store that has changed the price of Oreos is Hagkaup, raising the price from 159 ISK to 169 ISK, or 6%. The cheapest 154g pack of Oreo can be found at Bónus for 139 ISK, with 10-11 and Samkaup tying in the race for the most expensive Oreos with 249 ISK. The difference: 57%.
Bananas are found in every store and are a great food item to |
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The combination of computer graphics, geometry, and rapid prototyping technology has created a wide range of exciting opportunities for using the computer as a medium for creative expression. In this talk, I will describe the most popular technologies for computer-aided manufacturing, discuss applications of these devices in art and design, and survey the work of contemporary artists working in the area (with a focus on mathematical art). The talk will be primarily non-technical, but I will mention some of the mathematical and computational techniques that come into play. The slides for this talk can be found here as a pdf.
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Sen. Rand Paul is poised to make his return to the main-stage Republican presidential debate on Thursday.
The cutoff for the polls that will be used to decide which candidates qualify for the main stage and which are bumped down to the undercard debate is 5 p.m. Tuesday. The Paul campaign earlier in the day announced a conference call “with political reporters this evening to discuss the 2016 election cycle, Iowa caucus, and upcoming RNC/Fox News debate.”
Story Continued Below
Fox News has set the same criteria for qualification as last week’s Fox Business News debate: the top six candidates in national polls, plus any other candidates in the top five in either Iowa or New Hampshire. Those rankings are determined by averages of the five most recent national polls conducted by live telephone interviewers.
According to POLITICO’s calculations, while Paul is outside the top six nationally, the Kentucky senator is currently tied for fifth place in Iowa with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at an average of 4 percent. Moreover, if another Iowa survey is released prior to Fox’s 5 p.m. deadline, the oldest poll that would drop out of the average is a Loras College poll that has Bush at 6 percent and Paul at 3 percent — making it even easier for Paul stay tied with Bush or leap-frog him.
The rest of the main debate stage is expected to include the seven candidates who also made it last time: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich.
Top Paul officials were optimistic Tuesday morning that he would also make the main-stage debate. “Looking good,” Paul campaign manager Chip Englander told POLITICO. “Our belief is that the next poll to be dropped would actually be Jeb’s best. So the last few polls we were in a bit of a precarious situation because we were losing polls that were good for us. But they were being replaced with polls that were equally good, so that was fine.”
Paul did not participate at all in the last debate after he fell short of qualifying for the main stage. Paul refused to participate in the undercard event, saying he had a “top-tier” campaign that deserved to be only on the main stage.Texas Tall Tale?: VA Lays To Rest Religious Right Distortions About Cemetery Censorship Rob Boston print page Fri Jul 22, 2011 at 12:40:48 PM EST Religious Right activists love to spread tales of outrage about alleged attempts by government officials to censor religion. These stories are great for fund-raising and stirring up the faithful, but over the years I've learned to be skeptical of them. Consider a case under way in Houston. According to the Religious Right, an official with the Department of Veterans Affairs named Arleen Ocasio has ordered volunteers with an organization called the National Memorial Ladies to stop saying "God bless you" to families at funerals and sending them religious sympathy cards. Furthermore, Ocasio is accused of closing a chapel at the Houston National Cemetery and even stripping it of Christian material. The Liberty Institute, a Texas-based Religious Right outfit, has filed a lawsuit. Local veterans have held rallies to express their outrage. Emotions are running high, and some are calling for Ocasio to be fired. That's the Religious Right's version of events. What's really going on? As the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) noted recently, the VA has issued a 21-page legal reply to these charges. As the BJC put it, the reply "emphasizes VA policy that all burial ceremonies are to respect the family's wishes with respect to the inclusion or exclusion of religious text. Volunteers are trained not to insert their own religious beliefs in lieu of the family's request." Here are some highlights from the legal filing: The VA's guidelines "seek to ensure that the religious preferences, if any, of families of deceased Veterans are fully respected, and they specifically say that the honor guards may read scripture or a brief prayer if the family makes such a request to the honor guard team and the family does not provide its own clergy...."
Guidelines "reflect that committal services are private in nature and VA volunteer honor guards must respect the wishes and religious preferences of the families of deceased Veterans. If a family decides that it only wants to have clergy provide the service, which includes a reading of scripture and prayer, the family's preference should be respected."
Specifically at the Houston National Cemetery, guidelines permit the use of "religious recitations at private committal services if the family of a deceased Veteran so chooses. Defendants believe that it should be the family's choice and decision what to have read in accordance with their faith tradition, if any, because it would be improper for others to impose their own religious preferences on a Veteran's family, especially during this meaningful event." Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, took some time recently to look into this matter. Jason made a few phone calls and Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, took some time recently to look into this matter. Jason made a few phone calls and learned some facts that have been conveniently omitted from the Religious Right's version of events. Mainly, that families have the right to have whatever kind of religious or non-religious service they want for their fallen loved ones. It's up to the families to request religious content for memorial services. Torpy, a former Army captain, also notes that the members of the National Memorial Ladies are volunteers. As such, they have no right to officiate at services or use them to promote their religious beliefs. As Torpy points out, some of the families who received religious sympathy cards or heard religious language might not have wanted that. What about the claims that Ocasio closed the chapel? The VA legal document responds to that as well. The answer turns out to be just a bit mundane: The chapel was open until September 2010, at which point "the Cemetery began a major construction project on the premises that involved the renovation of several buildings and the construction of new buildings. Due to the construction project, the chapel was closed because of fumes and noise." Even after it was closed for construction, "arrangements were made to allow the chapel to reopen on July 5, 2011, and to remain open for use as a non-denominational place of prayer and contemplation, and as a location in which to hold committal services." Finally, the chapel was not stripped of Christian symbols. Christian and Jewish symbols are kept in storage there and are brought out when appropriate. They are not permanently displayed. This is an inter-faith chapel, after all. The military includes men and women of many different faiths, as well as some people who have no specific beliefs. We honor the service of fallen service personnel by respecting the wishes of their loved ones. We do not respect fallen warriors by assuming that a grieving family wants religious language or religiously themed condolences when they may not. There's a lesson we can learn from this: Don't believe everything you read - especially if the source is a Religious Right group.
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Texas Tall Tale?: VA Lays To Rest Religious Right Distortions About Cemetery Censorship | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 hidden) comments (3 topical, 0 hidden)
Texas Tall Tale?: VA Lays To Rest Religious Right Distortions About Cemetery Censorship | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 hidden) comments (3 topical, 0 hidden)China’s most powerful Internet company is headquartered in a bland, glassy tower in southern Shenzhen. Unlike Silicon Valley’s funky campuses, there is nothing to reveal that this might be a hub of creativity. An insurance company, perhaps? In the middle of its nondescript, corporate lobby, an information desk stands next to the only sign of personality: a pair of giant plush penguins, the Tencent mascot times two. Nearby, an iPad displays stats on the company’s messaging services. But when I pull out a notebook and start jotting down the numbers, the receptionist waves her hand. “Oh no, that’s not updated!” she says. “It’s just for show.”
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I’m here for a “tour” of the company, but am only allowed entrance to a museum-like exhibit of Tencent products. The experience feels like a throwback to the tightly controlled Communist Party–sponsored trips reporters went on back in the 1980s, before the country really started opening up to the outside world. An attractive, young, fluent English speaker shuffles me from one screen to another. The three other public relations officers with me offer no analysis of the firm, saying they will get back to me on any questions I have. I ask about the management style of the somewhat mysterious CEO, Pony Ma, and there is an awkward pause. Then the guide brightly tells me: “It’s very equal here. We all call him Pony!” And that’s the tour. How Tencent Stacks Up Click to expand This is all still fairly common in China, a country where public relations is often equivalent to stonewalling. But China’s Internet industry doesn’t need feel-good stories in order to be noticed: It is becoming increasingly competitive with the rest of the world–and Tencent, which was recently valued at more than $139 billion on the Hong Kong stock exchange, is about to become its breakout star. “Chinese companies are much more innovative [than U.S. companies] in integrating social media, gaming, and e-commerce to make an amazing user experience,” says Sun Baohong, associate dean of global programs at Beijing-based Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. It’s very equal here. We all call him Pony! True, Chinese Internet companies have some inherent advantages: Facebook is banned in the country, and Google retreated from it. But Tencent’s success can’t be pinned on that handicap. The company embraced mobile years before Facebook, and has built a platform, used by 355 million active users, that functionally offers every popular service that Americans are familiar with–including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Zynga, all wrapped up in one app. It keeps adding new functions at a fast clip, such as a new Uber-like taxi finder that was used 21 million times in the first few weeks. And now it’s expanding beyond China. Tencent has already started exploring international markets beyond China’s borders, with notable success in Southeast Asia and India. It has funded a number of small American startups and acquired or taken stakes in big gaming companies, while recasting its popular app for an international audience. “Will Tencent join the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter?” says Aditya Rathnam, cofounder of Kamcord, a San Francisco startup that Tencent invested in. “They already are in that league. The rest of the world just doesn’t know it.” But to truly make it in the West, Tencent will have to overcome a hurdle no other global tech giant faces: It has to act, at least in public, as two essentially separate companies. Inside China, Tencent is everything it must be: historically aggressive, unhesitant to copy others’ work, and very close to the government and its attendant propagandists. But outside China, Tencent will have to simultaneously engage with a world that doesn’t take kindly to any of that. For now, its coping strategy may explain why Ma and Tencent’s other top executives generally refuse to talk to the press: Their answers to difficult political questions could either enrage Beijing or turn off American readers. Better to keep silent.
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Wealth Disparity Inequality shared across hemispheres Source: Payscale.com 1. For every $1 the average Chinese senior software engineer earns, Pony Ma has $360,959 in wealth.
2. For every $1 the average American senior software engineer earns, Mark Zuckerberg has $302,975 in wealth. If Tencent nails this balancing act, it could become the East’s breakaway tech giant, changing the entire global dynamic of Internet players and how they compete. But none of this is up for discussion during my tour at Tencent. No bosses will be seen. I am not even allowed to glimpse inside the rooms where Tencent coders produce their hit products. On my way out of the building, I point out a book on a table in the lobby that profiles some of the company’s young creative people, and suggest these would be interesting types for me to interview. My PR host snaps, as if I have been looking through some top-secret documents: “That is only for internal consumption!” Business Competition and Government Cooperation Tencent founder Pony Ma is the richest man in China, worth some $13 billion, but he may be the least known multibillionaire in the tech world. The one attribute seemingly sanctioned for public consumption–and therefore, the one heard over and over–is that he is a “computer geek.” His personal life is a mystery. Even Tencent analysts in Hong Kong aren’t able to say whether he lives there or across the border in Shenzhen, where his company is based–or both. That’s why it was a big moment when, in November, he took to the stage at his Shenzhen headquarters for his annual WE (“We Evolve”) summit. It’s a conclave of business leaders and IT experts convened to discuss technology and the future, and he appeared as a clean-cut guy in a shiny gray suit. “When I was little,” he told the crowd in a message captured on video, “I wanted to be an astronomer, but that didn’t happen.” This trope–tech billionaire as aspiring space cadet–is a recurring one: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk share a similar passion. At the event, Ma described how he and a few fellow enthusiasts once dreamed of setting up an Internet-connected observatory, so that they could study the stars remotely even on the most polluted, gray-sky days. A few years later, a colleague actually pulled it off: The man bought a house on a mountaintop in southern China, built the station, and enabled anyone to plug in. “I thought, that is magical,” Ma said, with a long pause for effect. “At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.” Ma “Pony” Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent Photo by Lam Yik Fei, Bloomberg, Getty Images Pony’s birth name is Ma Huateng; his Chinese surname, Ma, means horse, and like many people in the country, he’s adopted an English name. He was born in southern China, in the middle of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, and grew up to become very much a product of the modern Chinese evolution. He entered Shenzhen University just a few months after the crackdown on a student movement that swept across the country in 1989. But change was coming. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had unleashed the country–not to pursue political ideals, but to chase capitalist-style profits. It was a time of pragmatism and capitalist drive, and China’s best and brightest were going into business, or, as the local saying went, “jumping into the sea.” Ma chose computer science. After graduation, Ma worked at a telecom company. But he saw opportunity in China’s new economic landscape, so he and a few university buddies founded Tencent in 1998 with a desktop-computer instant messaging product called OICQ. The technology was almost identical to one by an Israeli company called ICQ, and when that seemed problematic, Tencent changed the name to QQ. It became a huge hit with young Chinese who eagerly wanted to communicate with each other. “Long before Facebook came along, Tencent basically created the whole social networking thing,” says one investment banker who has worked closely with the company.
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Tencent originally made money through advertising and monthly fees for premium QQ users. In 2004, the year Tencent went public in Hong Kong, it launched an online gaming platform and started selling virtual goods, weapons, and gaming power, as well as emoticons, extra storage space, and ringtones. “Tencent is great at monetizing eyeballs,” says Jeff Walters, partner and managing director in the Boston Consulting Group’s Beijing office. “That’s their core competency. They are making tons of money by scraping together pennies, from tiny transactions.” Even as its QQ messaging app and a spinoff QQ email continued to grow, Tencent became the biggest gaming company in China, leading a surge in mass, interactive games. Tencent key talents 1. Pony Ma Tencent CEO
42 years old. Richest man in China. 2. Martin Lau President
Previously a Goldman Sachs executive director. He has computer, engineering, and management degrees from the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Northwestern. 3. Genie Lin Product manager in Guangzhou. Her team developed Weixin; it was in competition against a team in Shenzhen. “We gave our app to Pony and Martin, and they said, ‘Hey, that’s cool!'” 4. David Wallerstein Oversees International Business. Wallerstein, who opened Tencent’s U.S. office, is “quite reticent to speak to the media,” a company spokesman wrote. As Tencent rose, so did China’s Internet industry. Much like the American scene–with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google moving on each other’s turf–China has its own jockeying big four: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Sina. Each has enjoyed hits in search, social, and gaming, and regularly launch products that directly overlap. Tencent has had many victories against its rivals, though its greatest failure came against Alibaba, a sort of eBay and Amazon fusion, which controls some 45% of all Chinese e-commerce. Tencent tried to win away customers with a service called PaiPai, but it never attracted more than 10% of the market. But no matter. Ma’s coup was his bet on mobile. When Chinese downloads of mass interactive games on PCs flagged, and sales of mobile smartphones started taking off a couple of years ago, Tencent began shifting a bulk of its engineers onto mobile development. “Though we all had smartphones, there were no instant messaging apps,” says Genie Lin, a 30-year-old mobile product manager at Tencent in Guangzhou, who the company made available for an interview after months of discussions. She says most of the company’s developers are several years younger than her. “We are users ourselves, we are our own customers, and we decided we needed that.” To develop new products, Ma created two teams of engineers: one in Shenzhen (drawing from the group that originally created QQ), and a second in Guangzhou. Unbeknownst to them, both were given the same instructions and pitted against each other–much like Microsoft had been famous for doing in the Bill Gates era. After two months, Lin says, the Guangzhou team emerged from a “little black room” with an app for text messaging and group chat. “We gave our app to Pony and Martin [Lau, Tencent’s president], and they said, ‘Hey, that’s cool!'” The app became Weixin, which launched in January 2011. The company has added functions to the app practically on a monthly basis ever since, from the ability to shake your phone and see who is nearby–often used as a digital booty call, which spurred a sharp uptick in users–to a walkie-talkie function and a voice-to-message service, which allows you to essentially talk for free. Building on Tencent’s enormous monthly QQ user base of 810 million, Weixin now has more than 355 million active users, more than tripling its user base from 2012. Its new e-finance function was used 40 million times during Chinese New Year to exchange “red packets,” traditional gifts of cash-stuffed envelopes. And it’s now even rolling out a Chinese version of Candy Crush Saga on both Weixin and QQ. “They have as close to a stranglehold over the Chinese market as is possible, and their leverage is only increasing,” says one Silicon Valley tech investor. “No one else has that kind of power.” Internet products like these–offering news, freedom, community, and transparency–have huge social implications in China. Dai Mai, a taxi driver that I hail using Tencent, tells me that Weixin has changed his life. He says he has met half his friends on the service. “I’ll shake my phone and find a neighbor and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing? I’m cooking dinner, come on over!'” says Dai. “Normally his door would be closed, and you would have no idea who he is or what he’s doing.”
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Such connections are potentially threatening to the Communist Party, which has been scrambling to control the Internet and keep people from discussing taboo topics or, worse, gathering together to take on a cause. News that’s embarrassing to the government, such as a 2011 train crash that killed dozens of people, now spreads across China in a way never known before. To counter this, according to the official press, Beijing has enlisted some 2 million people across China to monitor the Internet and search for banned words. Chinese Internet companies, Tencent included, employ hundreds if not thousands of their own censors, whose job is to block illegal, anti-government posts. The government last summer issued tough new regulations: Internet users who make defamatory comments that are visited by 5,000 users or reposted more than 500 times can face up to three years in prison. The new rules have been devastating to Twitter-like microblogging sites (for which Sina had been the dominant player); users dropped by 9% last year. But this appears to have helped boost Tencent’s Weixin, which is based on private conversations among closed circles of friends, and is thus seen as a safer space. But is it? Probably not. “Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see,” says Rebecca MacKinnon, a Chinese Internet expert and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. And companies like Tencent do fall in line; they have no real choice. In late 2011, the government convened a meeting of China’s top 39 tech companies, which all signed a joint statement saying “Internet companies must strengthen their self-management, self-restraint, and strict self-discipline.” Ma is a savvy businessman who knows he must play the political game as much as his government demands. When a reporter asked him about censorship at a tech conference in Singapore, he gave a reply that would have pleased China’s most conservative of censors: “Lots of people think they can speak out and that they can be irresponsible. I think that’s wrong,” Ma said. “There should be order if the development of the cyberworld is to be sustainable.” Last year, Ma was appointed a deputy to the National People’s Congress, China’s obedient parliament. This kind of coziness isn’t news in China, but outside the country, any whiff of it causes trouble–and Tencent’s self-censorship problems bubble up with semi-regularity. In January, when international Weixin users typed the words “Southern Weekend,” they received an error message saying those words were “restricted.” (Southern Weekend is a Chinese newspaper that has been fighting censorship.) Users complained loudly, and Tencent called the problem a “technical glitch” and promised to “improve the product features and technological support to provide better user experience.” Will such political considerations inhibit Tencent’s international ambitions? No high-tech Chinese company has fully broken into the U.S. before. But Tencent is forging ahead, steadily and silently, preparing to be the test case.
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Tencent Goes Global With one word in 2012, Tencent announced its philosophy of global expansion–and that word was “WeChat,” the friendly English name it gave its international version of Weixin. WeChat, an app with many of Weixin’s most popular chat functions, was marketed aggressively across Southeast Asia, and results were strong: It gained more than 100 million users outside China by last summer, and it was the second-most-downloaded app in India in 2013. But despite WeChat not being so explicitly Chinese, the shadow of the Chinese government has followed it. India’s government has expressed concern that the app poses a “security threat.” Tibetan activists outside China tell their community to switch to other messaging services. Hu Jia, a Chinese dissident, who has claimed that Chinese officials knew about things that he had communicated only on WeChat, has called it “a monitoring weapon in your pocket.” In the U.S., for now, WeChat has mostly been adopted by Chinese expats who use it to talk to friends back home. And following the scandal over the U.S. National Security Agency spying on emails–in which American tech companies played a role, but can at least oppose such efforts publicly–American users may be a hard sell on an app with this much government contact. “The difference is that here in the U.S., at least there are some legal controls,” says Internet expert Mackinnon. “In China, if the State Security people ask for something, they just get access.” Tencent’s U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto used to be a church Photo by Carolyn George, Past It’s not clear how much all this will stymie Tencent’s efforts in the U.S., largely because it isn’t clear what Tencent’s U.S. plan is. David Wallerstein, a Chinese-speaking tech entrepreneur, opened the Tencent office in a converted church in Palo Alto in 2007. A Tencent spokesman said he is “quite reticent to speak to any media,” which is certainly true: After months of requests from Fast Company, he finally agreed to speak–though the publicist said he would limit the discussion to topics such as “why we are unique.” After many delays, though, he backed out entirely. The publicist explained that, in the process of preparing for the interview, he’d written down thoughts that he ultimately decided should become a memo sent out to his own staff instead. For now, Tencent’s public moves in the U.S. tell a cautious tale of small-time acquisitions and investments. Mostly, the company seems interested in startups whose technologies might be useful to Tencent back home. It participated in a $22 million funding last fall for Plain Vanilla Games, which had just launched QuizUp, a super successful multi-user mobile quiz game. “Tencent has been less focused than other investors on strategies of prevaluation and growth multipliers and profit,” says Thor Fridriksson, Plain Vanilla’s founder. “They say, ‘Don’t worry about revenue right now; just focus on the user experience.'”
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Tencent’s larger investments, a $330 million stake in Epic Games and the purchase, for $400 million, of Riot Games, which produces the incredibly popular League of Legends, also seem aimed at expanding access to killer content for its Chinese users. “Having the most popular e-sport title is such a huge marketing advantage,” says Piers Harding-Rolls, who leads a team of gaming industry analysts at London-based IHS Technology. “They are building their capabilities to provide an end-to-end entertainment experience.” Tencent’s investments have a more ethereal role as well: Local partners become Tencent advocates, and help its stateside image. “Tencent really understands engagement, how to push the emotional factor to our users,” says Chase Adam, whose philanthropic website, Watsi, received a Tencent investment. Vibhu Norby, whose social networking company Origami got early Tencent funding, says he’s learned a lot from the company about how to scale up a user base and its storage architecture. “You can’t support all those millions of users without incredible backend technology and creativity,” he says. How Tencent spends its money in America Bought Riot Games,maker of the popular League of Legends, for $400 million.
Joined in a $22 million funding round for Plain Vanilla Games, maker of QuizUp.
Reportedly involved in the third round of funding for Whisper, the secret-sharing app. If Tencent does decide to aggressively push its own products in America, its sheer size will make it an instant competitor. For example, Tencent recently offered 10 TB of free cloud storage to users–an offering 100 times larger than what Dropbox, Box, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, and even Mega (run by Kim DotCom) offer combined. If you want 10 TB of storage from Google, it will run you $100 a month. But Silicon Valley’s big shots are no doubt watching–and preparing. It’s hard to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg purchased WhatsApp for as much as $19 billion without having the similar WeChat in his rear-view mirror. Bonus for Zuckerberg: Facebook is blocked in China, but WhatsApp isn’t. Penguins Don’t Play Nice Not every new relationship with Tencent is a happy one. Zynga, for example, partnered with Tencent to launch its popular CityVille game in China in 2011, but the deal went south. Years later, those involved disagree over what ultimately ruined it–whether it simply didn’t lead to enough revenue, or if it just hit at the wrong time–but one memory of Tencent lingers strongest: “Negotiations go on for months and months, and then by the time you get to the redline stage in the contract, all of a sudden at the last minute, they change everything,” says an ex-Zynga employee with knowledge of the talks. “It’s a business tactic they use to wear down their partner.” The actual 2010 China ComputerWorld Cover Tencent has been collecting critics from the day it launched a QQ messaging app that seemed almost identical to the existing ICQ. “Tencent’s reputation in the market is well known,” says the former Zynga employee. “They offer terrible terms, and they pretty much screw you over.” A tech investor who knows the China market adds: “People joke they’re called Tencent because you get ten cents on the dollar.” In 2010, before Weixin was launched, the magazine China ComputerWorld published a cover story with the headline “Dog-fucking Tencent” that criticized the company for copying and bullying competitors. (It later apologized for causing “any adverse effects.”) “Tencent is never the first to ‘eat crab,'” it wrote, using a colloquialism for trying out new things. “It looks for space in a mature market to shove its way in.”
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Tencent quickly responded to the magazine’s attack: “Tencent is a meticulous and responsible company. QQ is a nationally recognized trademark. For many years, we have striven to provide superior Internet services to the general public and to make the lives of our users richer and more convenient.” (It declined to respond on this topic to Fast Company.) But accusations have kept coming. The Hong Kong-based company TalkBox tells a typical story. In 2011, it created a hit app that enables voice messaging–little bursts of recorded audio sent like text messages. “Our Chinese contacts told us that Tencent saw our function as the Holy Grail,” says Jacqueline Chong, TalkBox’s chief marketing officer. Tencent started talking to TalkBox about a possible acquisition, but at the same time, Tencent added the same voice-to-message function to its Weixin app. TalkBox lost trust in Tencent, and the talks broke down. “We were victimized,” Chong says. But Tencent denies it stole anything. “TalkBox gave us some inspiration, but voice messaging was a basic function of every chat app, including WeChat,” says Tencent product manager Lin. “And besides, the feature that really differentiated us from competitors was ‘People Nearby.’ After that, our numbers really began to grow, and we began to exceed other apps.” This kind of action fits a well-worn narrative: Piracy, from knock-off luxury handbags to computer software, has infamously helped drive China’s economic miracle over the last several decades. Ma doesn’t deny that, even as he promises better. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said at a 2011 Beijing tech conference. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China–execution is.” It’s misguided to blame the Chinese business culture, though. American tech firms are guilty of similar brute force. Microsoft famously bullied smaller companies it saw as competitors. Facebook has been routinely accused of the same tactics. Amazon’s assault against diaper e-retailer Quidsi was especially rough, as reported in the book The Everything Store: The company first warned Quidsi that it was moving in on its turf, then steeply discounted diapers and baby products–and when Quidsi’s founders finally agreed to talk about a sale, and showed up to talk details, Amazon launched a new service called Amazon Mom during their meeting. (Quidsi ultimately sold in 2010.) If this is what’s awaiting Tencent across the Pacific, it has no choice but to play rough. China’s Tech War Rages On Before Tencent can truly devote its efforts to global expansion, there’s still a big battle back home that it needs to win–and this coming year is a crucial one for the company. The Chinese Internet giants are moving aggressively into each others’ turfs. “There’s going to be one hell of a dog fight,” says one Alibaba employee. And each punch comes with big numbers.
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Why Tencent’s Weixin Is So Popular It’s a mega-service, offering all the attributes of these services in one app When Tencent enters a field, it goes big. Like this: Free Cloud Storage Offers *After dropping its price by 80% in March, Google now sells 10 TB of storage–what Tencent gives for free–for $100 a month. | Click to Expand Alibaba, for example, bought an 18% stake in search company Sina for $586 million, and it has launched a chat app that competes directly with Tencent’s Weixin. Alibaba has also been courting app developers to create games for its own platform, and letting developers 70% of the revenue–a shot at Tencent, which sells more than 850,000 apps made by outside developers, but the company has historically been the one keeping 70%. (In response, Tencent significantly adjusted its deal with developers.) Tencent, meanwhile, is trying once again to enter e-commerce and steal customers from Alibaba. It has already bought the logistics company China South City (for $195 million), a stake in e-commerce company Jingdong ($214 million), and a 20% stake in China’s Yelp, Dianping (reportedly more than $500 million). Many analysts are betting on Tencent’s shrewd, professional management team. An analyst estimates that the company has more than 500 different product groups, each of which is essentially independent, keeping the business nimble. Ma and his team are extremely product-driven. He offers product tweaks and suggestions on Weixin discussion groups on a daily basis, says Lin. Developers scroll over user comments several times a day to see what needs to be fixed. “I think Alibaba is very nervous right now,” says Bill Fan, a Hong Kong-based analyst with Guosen Securities: “Pony Ma is like a scorpion. He doesn’t talk much but is always thinking about strategy. He hides in the back and is very focused, and then he strikes.” What to do on WeChat Many functions for fun!
Talk with friends! Text, voice, and video chat lets you keep in touch with individuals or groups, in any way. A Facebook-like Moments function enables public sharing of photos and status updates.
Meet strangers! Look Around shows you nearby WeChat users; Shake directly connects you with them. With Drift Bottle, users send notes out into the digital sea of strangers–or you can pick one up and respond. Ma is also tapping some top-notch international talent. Martin Lau, its president, who has computer, engineering and management degrees from the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, joined Tencent in 2005 from Goldman Sachs. James Mitchell, Tencent’s top strategy officer, who has a degree from Oxford, was Goldman’s top tech analyst in New York–and doesn’t even speak Chinese. (For what it’s worth, Ma’s English is not fluent.) And Stephen Wang, the American-born entrepreneur who founded Rotten Tomatoes, is now running engagement for WeChat in Guangzhou. “Tencent is going to be a huge force in the global digital economy,” says Walter Driver, CEO of Scopely, a mobile entertainment network and game developer, who keeps a close eye on the Chinese tech market. “They are already a juggernaut in China. The fascinating thing to watch will be how aggressive they decide to be in asserting themselves in North America and Europe.” It isn’t unfathomable that Tencent could soon arm itself with one of America’s big-name services. Tencent considered acquiring Snapchat and met with CEO Evan Spiegel when he was in Asia (“he was very inspired,” says a friend), but didn’t bid. “Who’s going to write the multibillion dollar checks for the best companies in the U.S.?” says one U.S.-based tech investor. “Tencent may become so liquid in China that they can buy anything they want in the world.” That action would do all the talking. [Editors’ Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Tencent flew Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel to China for a meeting.]The Only Winner in the Mt Gox Trial is Mark Karpeles
The net worth of Mark Karpeles could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to a 200,000 stash of bitcoins. Those coins are the subject of ongoing legal proceedings in Japan which could see claimants receive less than $500 per coin for their losses. With over $1.4 billion worth of bitcoins on the line, the beleaguered Mt Gox boss has been the subject of fresh vitriol.
Also read: Mark Karpeles Open Letter to Coinlab Looks to Settle Lawsuit for $5M
850,000 Bitcoins Stolen
Mt Gox: two words that many early bitcoin adopters still shudder to hear. One of bitcoin’s most notorious bête noires, Mark Karpeles has been persona non grata ever since the exchange collapsed in 2014. Since then, customers who lost their holdings in what was the world’s largest bitcoin exchange have been pursuing Karpeles and his failed company through the courts. Mt Gox famously shut down after conceding that 850,000 bitcoins had been stolen |
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Multi-touch Capacitive Touch Screen
Connectivity capabilities:
+ 2G Quad Band: 900/1800/ 850/1900 GSM, GPRS, EDGE
+ 3G Mono band: 2 versions:
you will be able to indicate which version in the Survey Form
at the end of the Project)
2100 (Europe) or 1900 (US)
UMTS, HSDPA,HSUPA, HSPA, HSPA+
+ WiFi: IEEE 802.11b/g/n
+ Bluetooth 4.0
+ 2G Quad Band: 900/1800/ 850/1900 GSM, GPRS, EDGE + 3G Mono band: 2 versions: you will be able to indicate which version in the Survey Form at the end of the Project) 2100 (Europe) or 1900 (US) UMTS, HSDPA,HSUPA, HSPA, HSPA+ + WiFi: IEEE 802.11b/g/n + Bluetooth 4.0 GPS
Embedded 5Mpixel camera
Audio Speaker & Microphone
Memory: 512MB + 4GB + (expandable by microSD 8/16/32GB)
+ Optional upgrade from 512MB to 1GB memory (If you increase your pledge, whichever pledge it is, by $20, we would gladly thank you with the memory upgrade)
Micro SIM card
600 mAh battery: up to 100 hours standby time
Messaging Hub: SMS/MMS/Email/SNS
G-sensor (Accelerometer), E-Compass, Gyroscope, IP67
Vibration alert
Full set of pre-qualified Android applications
Over-the-Air (OTA) system firmware update
DESIGN PROCESS
Omate began designing and developing smartwatches more than a year ago, many designs were drawn and discarded, mock-ups made to select that best fit on the wrist. We wanted a design that is foremost a wrist watch, a wrist watch that would look like a wrist watch, and feel like a wrist watch.
Original sketches of Omate and the birth of the Omate logo, now hangs in our office
A wrist watch must foremost be water-resistant, for daily use or going with you to wherever. You might be washing your hands or doing the dishes dipping your hands into a pool of water - simple tasks that you don't think much about - unlike a smartphone, a wrist watch has to be with you. A wrist watch has to also be able to withstand daily wear. We started with a metal casing and a silicone belt, protective and durable. In the final product, these two elements stood the test of time and remain unchanged.
Black Metal Casing with Silicone strap - protective and durable, encases the entire smartwatch phone in a watertight seal according to IP67 water-resistant & dustproof standards. Even the charging connectors are special water-resistant connectors
Buttons were added to the side for simple interaction (such as acknowledging a notification, or snapping a photo), a detail that some other smartwatches forgot : touchscreen does not work when there is water on it, be it splash from the rain or in the swimming pool. We want your Omate TrueSmart to be more than just a fancy gadget, we designed your Omate TrueSmart to be effective in your daily life!!
With design as the mindset, the watch comes to live! And only then from there our technology experts worked on what can pack into the watch - voila! a small little PCB that packs a full power dual core 1.3GHz processor, 2G/3G voice/text/data function, Wifi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, 600mAH battery, microSIM slot, microSD slot - the smallest we have seen!
Creating technology to fit design, rather wrapping design around technology - Omate TrueSmart's internal board, a full fledge smartwatch smartphone in a tiny footprint
This is the Prototype that our software team is using to develop and test software & apps.
LEFT: Engineering prototype with Android 4.2.2 (before skinning), used in the labs for software development, not the final product. RIGHT: Filming our Laurent (Omate CEO) going through the Android 4.2.2 on the engineering prototype for the video.
Running a full version of Android 4.2.2, we then proceed to customise for user-interaction on the wrist - a 4 icon screen, swipe left to go back instead of a back button (you can see Laurent perform the "swipe left to go back" in the video as he exits Facebook), larger buttons etc
Photos taken with a camera of actual screens running on prototype (not screen captures)
Next we proceeded with the UI screen designs. In addition, our design partner VireLabs in Finland is also working hard on a Home Launcher that takes wearable into a new era. Remember, the Omate TrueSmart is a full version Android 4.2.2 powered by a dual core processor, totally customisable, totally moddable, totally hackable.All apps, skins, launchers run fast and smoothly for that instant feel. It is not a proprietary system, it is an open platform based on an Android community that's larger than any other. So you can expect more mods, more skins, more launchers than any other!
User Interaction screen designs
The Omate OS is an extension that adds some additional functions specific to ease of use as a wearable technology. Developers are fully welcome, pledge with our developer's package including SDK, full support and forum.
AT WHAT STAGE ARE WE...
All photos you see here and in the video are real photos, real videos. No renderings has been used. We wanted to show and bring a watch that is real, ready for production and not yet another concept drawing - concept drawing for us was so last year. You can see even the PCB Board is of production quality. Hardware is real and ready, software is in development.
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Here we have a few videos from one of our labs with an engineering prototype (not the final product).
What did you do when you first got your first new smartphone? Try ringtones!!! :) Just to see if it works! That's what we did too in the labs when we first got the engineering prototype. Audio working, checked!
This video shows Voice Command using Google Voice Search within Android (the Android version used here is 4.2.2 without skinning). Internet via Wifi working, checked (Google Voice Search works only on internet), Microphone working, checked! We'll be developing, testing. tweaking and customizing different voice command technology, voice-to-text, text-to-voice in addition to the ones native in Android 4.2.2. Watch our updates!
Here's us trying out the photo camera for the first time, snapping two photos and viewing them in the gallery. Things we all do when we get our hands on a new toy!
The watch shown is the engineering prototypes we are using in tests. You can see the final design TrueSmart worn on the wrist (right bottom corner of pic).
A glimpse of the TrueSmart default clockface. A subtle classical high contrast black and white clockface design (fyi clockface can be in color), designed to match the premium distinguished understated feel of the TrueSmart look.
Clockface can be personalised. Like it, don't like it... think you can do better, think you can win a Clockface design contest showdown? We'll be running a Clockface Design Contest, we'll turn your winning ideas into real clockface. Watch out for the contest in our updates. Everybody loves Clockfaces! :-)
Here you see a video showing typing a message with the standard Android Keyboard is a breeze. TrueSmart's ultra-sensitive touchscreen makes every touch super accurate. Of course you can also install your favorite keyboards such as Fleksy offered in our stretch goal and switch between keyboards. Not designed to write novels on :-), your TrueSmart is indeed perfect for messaging on the go.
BREAKING NEWS: TrueSmart is Born! The First TrueSmart Final Design Working Prototype has been assembled. Check out the Video
Remember to follow our updates here in Update / Comments as well as on Social Media (Facebook, Google+, Twitter).
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Many (not just one) concept designs are done, the few early prototypes are made (not just one), the testing of different key components (like selecting TFT instead of OLED/AMOLED for readability outdoors), final design is done, tooling costs is invested. Yes, we are more ready than other crowd-funding projects you have seen. What this means is that we can deliver almost immediately once the project goals are reached and the project ends, one of the faster deliveries and assurance in crowd-funding. We are committing to a production schedule and delivering to you in 2 batches October and November, an early Christmas present!
So, we need you Kickstarters because...
We need cash to have material delivered to us for production. We also want to create even more and better apps, support even more Android developers and create a vibrant developer community for the Omate TrueSmart. Part of the funds will be committed to community developers support so it benefits the community directly and benefits every user too with great apps and even better new app ideas for wearables.
Various funding options have been considered, including banks and venture capitalists, eventually we decided on Kickstarter. Key reason being this is one connected lifestyle product that needs to connect with the community, and made for the users - you / us.
And our appeal to you is also to get involved - interact with us, we will interact too. Here on Kickstarter Updates / Comments and on Social Media. Join us as we complete this amazing Generation 2.0 Smartwatch together - live on crowd-funding and social media.
PLAN FOR SHIPMENT
August 2013 :
Prototype and Tooling ready
Complete Audio & Microphone software tweaking
Complete Camera software and tweak image quality
September 2013 :
Pilot run sample production
Purchase of reserved components
Certification
Complete User Interface Skinning & Home Launcher Software
Complete Key Apps Development & Testing
Complete all software and firmware quality assurance
October 2013 :
First Volume Production and Shipping
Complete SDK
Supporting Open Developer community
November 2013 : Second Volume Production and Shipping, Supporting Users
An early Merry Christmas!
With the planned Retail Price of US$299 for Christmas, we have created attractive Pledge packages starting from US$179 to thank our supporters and developers for supporting us in bringing the Omate TrueSmart to market and creating a vibrant community of users / superuser / modders / hackers / developers. The first two batches of deliveries in October & November are reserved as rewards for you!
Support us and click on a pledge package on the righ now! Thank you!There are two schools of thought when considering the Oilers’ defensive group that took to the fresh ice at Edmonton’s New Downtown Arena on Friday. One is that the group has barely changed since last year, the other is that a lot of progress has been made and it’s a lot closer to NHL-calibre than it was 12 months ago.
My colleague Kurt Leavins wrote about lines and pairings earlier, but here we will focus on just the defence corps.
On Defence, a similar pattern seems to emerge: Oscar Klefbom pairing with newcomer Adam Larsson. Darnell Nurse lined up alongside Brandon Davidson (with Davidson on the right hand side, by the way). And Mark Fayne was on his familiar right side with Dillon Simpson. Again here, Simpson (99% sure to be headed to Bakersfield) is likely just holding the spot of Andrej Sekera, who is still with Team Europe. That Professional-Tryout man Eric Gryba was paired with bubble-boy Griffin Reinhart also seems to indicate that Gryba has a real shot at a 6-7D position. Otherwise, he would surely be paired with someone who is less of an immediate prospect than Reinhart, who I am told looks a half-step faster than last year.
I agree with Kurt’s take about placeholders. It may be a bit dicey to figure out where the three centres who are/were at the World Cup of Hockey might fit, it’s a lot simpler to figure out where the one absent blueliner fits. Has to be Sekera-Fayne.
I’ll grant you that pairings from the first day of camp are not particularly meaningful going forward, but in the here and now they establish a kind of pecking order, what Todd McLellan called a “starting point”. Which translates to very near last season’s starting point; when the season actually opened on October 8, the squad had eight defenders on the roster, with a ninth waiting in the wings for the first call-up when the inevitable injuries began to hit:
The pairings from that game in St. Louis are listed in order of combined ice time, while Ference and Davidson started the season in the press box. Ference didn’t last too long, playing just 6 games before landing on injured reserve; the other seven guys plus Nurse, the first call-up, each played 29+ games for the Oilers while no other player had more than 20.
Lo and behold, seven of those eight defenders are still here, with the one (massive) change occurring at 1RD where Justin Schultz departed at the trade deadline in one trade, then Adam Larsson was acquired four months later in another. Friday’s preliminary pairings saw Larsson as Klefbom’s new partner in Schultz’s old spot, while the Sekera-Fayne and Reinhart-Gryba duos remain intact from last year’s opening night. Nurse-Davidson is a new(-ish) pairing forged out of last year’s extras. Objectively they likely should be listed as the third pairing with Reinhart-Gryba the fourth; I’ve just lined them up as above to show the similarities in actual personnel from last year to this.
Adam Larsson is the one new face in the mix, the return in the controversial one-for-one trade for Taylor Hall. Some make the leap of logic that the effective trade was Larsson and then-imminent free agent signing Milan Lucic for Hall; while I recognize there are flaws in that approach, for argument’s sake let’s double down on the blended transaction idea and say it was Lucic and Larsson for Hall and Schultz. Which is either an odd way of interpreting two trades and a free agent signing, or it’s a short-cut for interpreting two major changes on the roster. Lucic in Hall’s old spot, Larsson in Schultz’s. Just with those two switches, Peter Chiarelli ensured that the Edmonton Oilers will have a very different look in 2016-17.
Many would argue the Oilers lost the exchange up front, but surely few would contend that the defence corps came out of those moves in worse shape than they were before. Two very different players, with Larsson’s forté being defensive play and penalty-killing, Schultz’s at the other end of the rink as an attacking rearguard and powerplay specialist. At least that was the theory. In practice Schultz’s production numbers dwindled while he got chewed up at even strength for the fourth year in a row, clearly out of his depth as a top-four NHL defender. Larsson on the other hand, has at minimum established himself as a very good top-four and arguably a top-two defender. From this distance this one change will result in a marked improvement in the Oilers defence corps, even as Larsson might not be the man to fill every aspect of the role formerly filled by Schultz. The 23-year-old newcomer has five years to run at $4.167 MM, marginally more than the $3.9 MM the Oil had been paying the departee. A few dollars difference, but a sea change in the defensive zone. This isn’t the place for math, but I will make room for an (in)equation: defensively, Larsson >n Schultz.
So why am I optimistic that the rest of the group will be vastly improved on the defence corps that bled 242 goals-against last season, fourth worst in the NHL? One magic word: “experience”. Of the seven healthy returnees, all are a year older, each with dozens more NHL games under their belts. Let’s go through them one-by-one
Oscar Klefbom had a star-crossed campaign. The bad news is that he played only 30 games before going down to a hand injury which somehow transmogrified into a season-ending, possibly even career-threatening ankle infection. So the best possible news is that he’s back with a smile and reports of good health. Now 23, he kicks off his new 7-year contract in 2016-17 (AAV = $4.167 MM) as a core member of the blueline and team.
Andrej Sekera was Peter Chiarelli’s first high-profile free agent signing and largely delivered the goods in 2015-16. His 81 games were a dozen more than any other defender, while his 30 points and 15 powerplay points led the group by a ridiculously large margin. Now 30, Sekera remains in his prime and should be expected to deliver at least an equivalent performance, (dangerously) assuming continued good health.
Mark Fayne visibly struggled early in the season to the point that he was waived through the league and sent to Bakersfield for a couple of weeks. He showed some improvement after his return and provided stable if unexciting hockey when paired with Sekera. He had some history of succeeding in a top-four role in Jersey but it’s harder to make the case in Edmonton. Halfway through the four-year, $14.5 MM pact he signed as a free agent in 2014, he’s not covering the bet fully; that said he does bring some value to the blueline. I suspect he’s the kind of guy who will be more valuable, and valued, on a better team than this one was his first two years here.
Darnell Nurse had the briefest of apprenticeships in the AHL in his rookie pro season before getting the call in late October and playing every game but four the rest of the way (one healthy scratch, a 3-game suspension and, significantly, no injuries). Even his staunchest fans, of which he has many, would admit it was something of a baptism by fire. Too much (ice time) too soon, many concluded. The good news is that he doesn’t enter the upcoming season as a raw rookie with 2 games of NHL experience but as a one-seasoned vet of 71 contests. Which is still well shy of the 200 or so games many d-men need to fully blossom as NHL defenders, but an important if painful step in that direction.
Brandon Davidson was an afterthought last October, but credit to the Oilers’ brass that he wasn’t exposed to waivers at any time and gradually given his chance to work his way into the line-up due to both injuries and his own good play. While he started out as #8 on the depth chart, by February he was 1 and 1A with Sekera, which not too many people saw coming. Kept up the great play until he himself was injured in early March, just days after signing a 2-year extension that many saw as a bargain pact even as it featured a gross raise (144%) over his first bridge deal. Davy is no afterthought now: many fans have pencilled the immensely likeable defender into the top four or as a move-the-needle type on the third pairing, and his name is oft-mentioned on imaginary protected lists for the upcoming expansion draft. He too was a rookie last year with just 12 big league games under his belt; now he has 63.
Griffin Reinhart was yet another rookie with just 8 NHL games to his credit at this time last season. He split his time almost equally between Edmonton (29 games) and Bakersfield (30), playing his 100th professional game along the way. His game took a clear turn to the north during an extended run of games down the stretch. This year he remains burdened by his own bonus-laden contract that has created far more headaches for Chairelli than it will dollars for Reinhart. That may again/still cost him playing time in the bigs, even as he is likely to be an early recall.
Eric Gryba is the last healthy player listed due to his PTO status and because he is likely #8 on merit. He’s not going to run the powerplay, but he does provide some attributes that help balance the 8-man group. He’s a third righty, a third guy who’s older than 25, a fourth guy with 200+ NHL games.
Andrew Ference will wind down his four-year contract having delivered much more to the community than he has on the ice. He played just 6 games a year ago and struggled mightily, and recent comments suggest he will play none at all in 2016-17. I show him greyed out in the below table; while in theory he delivered experience to the blueline, in practice he was unable to deliver it.
That group on the left is oh, so Oilers. One guy with 900 games, three with a dozen or less — averages over 200 a man, eh. That’s how this club has rolled for too long. Too small? Let’s get a few behemoths on the fourth line. Too many kids? Let’s bring on a 35-year-old to show ’em how it’s done. Meantime there is a serious lack of mid-career players near their peak performance.
That is changing for the better. Even though “the group” is mostly the same, the wheel is turning to churn out more of those mid-career guys. No need to factor Ference and his no-move contract into any equation except some early-season salary cap dancing. He’s done. The veteran of the group is 30 years old and just played his 500th game. There are no rookies. The average age of the group has crept north of 25; the average experience, >200 NHL games. These are good things. The young ‘uns won’t go from rookies to battle-tested veterans overnight, but they are immensely more experienced than they were one year ago.
Better yet, the players don’t have to cope with yet another coaching change this year; all but Larsson have had that year to get used to Todd McLellan and his systems, to defensive coaches Jim Johnson and Ian Herbers, to each other. With that stability in coaching and personnel, it’s reasonable to expect a much more cohesive group in 2016-17.
(The “one more year of experience” also extends into the minor league system. Guys like Jordan Oesterle, David Musil, Dillon Simpson, Joey LaLeggia all are a little bit more mature, closer to being ready when the call comes. Oesterle for one showed a dramatic improvement in his second pro season and represents a far less scary recall option this time around. Even as the others have performed below the waterline in the AHL the verbals have been generally encouraging.)
One last, important point: this more experienced, better balanced group of defenders will actually be cheaper than last season! A table tells a thousand words:
See that guy on the bottom? He may have been in the minors for most of the season, but his massive cap hit wasn’t. Today his onerous contract is gone, gone, gone, and its absence is enough to cover major raises to Klefbom and Davidson, plus the small upgrade cost from Schultz to Larsson. (I have forecast that a) Gryba will sign (b) for a slight decrease in pay, guesstimated $1 MM.)
Note that the table shows full cap hit including bonuses (some of them mythical), and there are a bunch of adjustments for time in the minors or LTIR that I haven’t bothered with because we only have those kinds of figures for one of the two years. We do know that more of Ference’s cap hit will get disappeared this upcoming season than last, and that his contract itself will disappear in one year’s time.
Indeed it’s interesting to look forward to 2017-18 when the top six current Oilers as listed are all slated to be back. Reinhart’s ELC will be history, and barring a breakthrough campaign his next bridge deal projects more in the Davidson range. The Ference pact will be out of the picture altogether, lowering the overall cap hit to somewhere below $25 MM for a group with a further year of seasoning. Highly unlikely that Chiarelli would keep all eight guys of course, this is just spitballing. But that bottom line suggests he might have room to be flexible and bring on a big-ticket defender, perhaps after the expansion draft. In the meantime, there are encouraging signs that the existing group is at least trending in the right direction.
Recently at the Cult of Hockey:
Staples: Failed Brad Hunt experiment leaves Oilers with inexperienced prospects when it comes to power play
Staples: Taylor Hall still resentful towards Oilers
Leavins: 9 things to watch at Oilers training camp
McCurdy: Caggiula, Puljujarvi and Betker shine as Oilers rookies roll
Follow Bruce McCurdy on TwitterThis is a picture of a doctrine that is about to die and tries to stay alive through cheap tricks
Neoliberalism has a human face with France's Emmanuel Macron and Canada's Justin Trudeau. The pair has been presented as young innovators, saviors from the evils of populism.
But what about the substance which is their policies. Are their policies progressive or innovative?
Trudeau talks about climate change, but has pushed for new pipelines carrying oil from Alberta's tar sands and supported Trump's approval for Keystone.
The Canadian leader said Canada would welcome Muslims, but affected by Trump's travel ban and refused to raise country's refugee intake.
Macron has just been elected president, yet as France's economy minister he pushed the pro-business labor reform that caused outrage among unions and workers in the country.
The former Rothschild investment banker's campaign was funded by France's wealthiest, including those who moved to Belgium in order to pay less taxes.
Both leaders have come under fire for their racist comments.
While media heap praise Trudeau and Macron for their looks, what these leaders actually doing, is neither new, nor attractive.
This is the new face of neoliberalism that struggles to survive by promoting itself as the only'solution' against right and left populism. The establishment apparatus presents leftist leaders as something equally bad with the far right threat. It doesn't seem to work if we look Sanders' popularity in the US, the rise of Corbyn and Melenchon in the UK and France, despite the fierce attacks by the mainstream media.
Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau are examples of another attempt of neoliberalism to trick the masses by disguising itself as the 'new'. In reality this is the old, bankrupt doctrine which has far more similarities with the far right than with the real left. Besides, this is the reason for which the leftist leaders are treated with such a hostility by the establishment press. It's because they are the real threat against what neoliberalism stands for.
But people won't be tricked so easily this time by these cheap and obsolete tactics.A disturbing image allegedly showing a worker manipulating App Store rankings has gone viral, giving us a rare glimpse into the world of fake app ratings and downloads.
The photo, which was originally uploaded to social media site Weibo with the caption “Hardworking App Store ranking manipulation employee,” depicts a Chinese woman sitting in front of a panel of close to a hundred iPhones.
The woman is wearing a heavy coat and hiding a hand inside of a blanket while she works on the dozens of iPhones in front of her, suggesting cold working conditions.
If the woman in the photo is, as the caption suggests, manipulating the rankings of app on Apple’s App Store, she is likely using uninstalling and re-installing apps on each of the devices to bolster their download rank. While only Apple knows exactly what factors into an app’s ranking on the App Store, the higher the number of overall downloads, the higher the app’s ranking.
The photo offers a rare glimpse into the clandestine world of App Store manipulation, an issue which Apple has struggled to eradicate in the past. App developers looking to give their app a boost in ratings or ranking can turn to the internet to find services claiming to offer a guaranteed five-star ratings or even a week in the App Store’s Top 10 for around $US65,000 per week, according to Cult of Mac.
Cult of Mac Image reportedly showing the prices for a Top 10 spot in Apple’s App Store.
App developers looking to legally boost their rankings in the App Store have expressed frustration with rigged rankings in the past, and if the above images are indeed real, it looks like Apple will need to continue its efforts to detect and prevent these illegal services from being possible.
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Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Abstract Sleep deprivation induces pain hypersensitivity that can be reversed by increasing alertness.
Chronic, insufficient sleep, fueled in part by work and family obligations, plus TV, cell phones, and computers during the evening hours, is emerging as a major epidemic. Recent studies suggest that sleep deprivation worsens pain. However, due to external factors, such as stress, heritable traits and environment, the relationship between sleep deprivation and pain sensitivity is not completely understood. Bringing fresh perspective to this question, Alexandre et al. have discovered that sleep deprivation per se increases pain hypersensitivity in mice and that this phenomenon can be reversed by increasing alertness with caffeine and modafinil.
In order to isolate sleep deprivation from stress-related effects, the team developed new strategies for inducing “nonstressful” sleep deprivation in rodents, confirmed by stable plasma corticosteroid concentrations throughout the experimental protocol. Electroencephalographic (EEG) and electromyographic (EMG) activities were monitored, and, at the first signs of attempted non–rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep, a novel object was introduced into the cage to stimulate wakefulness. This acute sleep deprivation could be maintained for up to 12 hours. The team also extended this approach to moderate chronic sleep deprivation, entailing 6 hours of acute sleep deprivation per day over the course of 5 consecutive days. In both paradigms, mice became hypersensitive to pain, and analgesic treatments, such as ibuprofen and morphine, did not ease the pain hypersensitivity. Moreover, the absence of an increase in the acoustic startle reflex suggested that the pain hypersensitivity was not caused by induction of a general hyper-responsiveness. Pain thresholds returned to baseline after sleep recovery.
To test if decreased alertness due to sleep deprivation was the cause of increased pain sensitivity, mice were given caffeine or modafinil, which act at different points of the dopaminergic signaling pathway, after either acute or chronic sleep deprivation. Remarkably, both compounds not only enhanced overall alertness as expected but also prevented sleep deprivation–induced pain hypersensitivity. Altogether, these findings provide a tantalizing hint that reduced dopaminergic signaling may be a key driver of sleep deprivation–associated pain hypersensitivity. Although this study shows that caffeine can lessen pain sensitivity after sleep deprivation, it also underscores the importance of getting enough sleep and the potential for defining the drivers of sleep deprivation–induced pain hypersensitivity at a cellular and circuit level using this powerful mouse model.Blurryface is a very dizzying and ambitious album. Sure, they could have taken the safe route here and went with Vessel: Part Deux, but why? There are many adjectives that I can use to describe the fourteen-track sophomore offering from Twenty One Pilots, but like the music that is within the album, I would be all over the spectrum. My thesaurus would be on fire from flipping pages.
Following the much-deserved success of Twenty One Pilots’ first album Vessel, I was wondering if we would we get an honest representation of how the two-man band has grown from playing small clubs to sold out festivals. To understand Blurryface, you have to understand that it’s a character created by singer Tyler Joseph. Not so much a character however, but a personification of the insecurities within himself and his rise to fame, but also the listener. Yes, good ol’ perfect “you”.
1) “Heavydirtysoul”: The track starts off with a fast drum cadence from drummer Josh Dun paired up with Joseph’s rapid delivery rapping. The tempo of the track could indicate how manic Joseph or “Blurryface” feels as the insecurities creep in. There’s a part in the bridge where Joseph sings “death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit”. Death is a great motivator, but the idea that you can perish at any time almost sets the stage for the frantic pace of the album.
2) “Stressed Out”: There’s an interesting parallel here as Joseph has vocal that repeats throughout the song “My name’s Blurryface and I care what you think”. If you notice throughout the album, there are sudden changes of vocal tone or alterations (see “Fairly Local”) that will indicate a difference between the character and Joseph. The song shows a longing for the “good ol’ days”, but when you grow up, everything becomes complicated.
3) “Ride”: This is a song that has a reggae undertone which will be one of the many genre switches within Blurryface. The subject matter again touches on fearing death: “Yeah I think about the end just way too much/But it’s fun to fantasize”. It’s crazy how the upbeat tempo of the song can clash with the how dreary the lyrics can be. There is a silver lining however. Joseph sings this in the chorus that within the constant back and forth in this mind, he has to enjoy the ride.
4) “Fairly Local”: I previously wrote about this song and how it fits within the whole concept. Read it here.
5) “Tear In My Heart”: This song is almost one of those old ’50s-style songs combined with the piano and style of drumming. The whole song is an ode to Joseph’s wife, Jenna Black. There’s a context where bleeding does not necessarily mean a bad thing. It’s in the feel good song within a lot of darker material. You almost feel relieved that there is something for Joseph to smile about.
6) “Lane Boy”: This song is essentially a middle finger of all the people who may have listened to previous Twenty One Pilots material and griped about their genre-hopping. “They say ‘stay in your lane, boy’/but we go where we want to.” The song starts with an almost calypso feel and then breaks out into a big, furious rave time change.
7) “The Judge”: When I first listened to this song, just from a base perspective, I felt that it had “Holding On To You” potential. The song is that catchy (especially chorus-wise). Again, up-tempo subject matter with sad lyrical content. I noticed something in particular about song structure with Twenty One Pilots’ material: a lot of things are deliberate. With Joseph singing alone with the ukulele, you get the feeling that as he sings the lyrics, that he feels alone in the fight for his sanity. Also, accentuating the duality in the first verse. Joseph refers to himself in the third person and “Blurryface” within the first lines. “As he cranked out those dismal chords/And his four walls declared himself insane.”
8) “Doubt”: Is that a “trap” breakdown I hear? Joseph is face to face with his doubts and fears where in the chorus, his voice gets glitch-like. I think this is where the lines between himself and Blurryface become…blurred: “Shaking hands with the dark part of my thoughts/you’re all that I’ve got”.
9) “Polarize”: This song addresses the whole Twenty One Pilots fan family. “Help me polarize” is referring to removing the good and bad parts of himself into different halves. Listen to the end of the song where the drums are turned down and the organ is paired up with Joseph’s voice as he says “I wanted to be a better brother, better son”. It’s almost as if he is at a church confessional.
10) “We Don’t Believe What’s On TV”: The song, where it’s half almost country-like with a little bit of punk twist with a ukulele and drum kit. The song is a critique on what’s being sold to us as our dreams or what’s real happiness (take a look at reality TV shows). It’s also a plea from Joseph either to his fellow band member or his fans to support him or the band itself even when it may be that they aren’t on the incline forever.
11) “Message Man”: Another reggae style within the verses, I see this as a internal dialogue between Blurryface and Joseph. This is the start of the thinking that perhaps the dark side of Joseph is needed. It’s an argument inside his head.
12) “Hometown”: This song has an ’80s synth feel to it. Listening to it almost feels like traveling down an endless street. There’s a illusion to the sun here, both an urge to get to the sun and the hometown which could be either Joseph himself or fans that may feel like they don’t have a home: “I won’t let them win, go quietly” speaks to fighting your demons and not going gently. This is sang by a layered voice which could speak to how the TOP fan base gives Joseph strength.
13) “Not Today”: The lines “This one’s a contradiction because of how happy it sounds/But the lyrics are so down” sums up the album perfectly. There are pieces of upbeat music as I referred to coupled with these melancholy themes. Here’s the thing: anxiety is described in the first verse, but if you look at the chorus, it makes it seem like Blurryface is a necessary evil. That part of Joseph is needed to overcome his impending introverted nature. “Heard you say “not today”/Tore the curtains down, windows open, now make a sound.”
14) “Goner”: This one is interesting because it’s an older song. There were ideas for the track starting in 2012, so perhaps the idea of Blurryface started to manifest itself then. It’s kind of like those trilogies where the last movie is released first. Joseph has reached the end of his rope in this piano laced track finally denouncing |
they couldn’t have him reading minds, so she made a mark on his chart and injected more into his IV lead.
“No,” he’d protested, watching the syringe with a helpless panic. “No, please, I just want to talk—” He spoke very good Enithi.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she really was. “We’ve got to keep you under. It’s better, really. I know you understand.”
And he did, or at least he’d see what she understood, that it wasn’t just about keeping information from him. It also kept the Gaantish prisoners safe, when otherwise they’d be outnumbered and battered by hostile thoughts. He still looked very unhappy as he sank back against the bed and his eyelids shut inexorably. As if something fragile had slipped out of his hand.
“Poor things,” Calla said, brushing a bit of lint off the man’s forehead.
“You’re very weird, Cal,” her chess partner said, finally making his move. “They’re Gaantish. You pity them?”
“I just think it must be hard, being so far from home in a place like this.”
She found out later that Valk hadn’t quite been asleep through all that.
Valk made his next move and winced, just as a nurse came over with a hypodermic syringe and vial on a tray, sensing his pain before he even knew it was there.
“No,” Valk said, putting up a hand before the nurse could set the tray down.
“You’re in pain; this will help you rest,” he said.
“But Technician Belan is here.”
“Y-yes sir.” The man went away without administering the sedative.
So much conversation didn’t need to be spoken when the participants could read each other’s minds. They would only say aloud the conclusion they had come to, or the polite niceties that opened and closed conversations. The rest was silent. Back at Ovorton it had often left her reeling, when she was meant to be working with a patient and two nearby doctors came to a decision, only ten percent of which had been spoken out loud, and they stared at her like she was some idiot child when she didn’t understand. She had learned to take delight in saying out loud, forcefully, “You have to tell me what you want me to do.” They’d often be frustrated with her, but it served them right. They could always send her back to the prisoner barracks. But they didn’t; they didn’t have enough nurses as it was. She had accepted an offer to trade the freedom of the rest of her unit for her skills—send the others home in a prisoner swap and she would work as a nurse for the Gaantish infirmary. They trusted her in the position because they would always know if she meant ill. Staying had been harder than she expected.
The nurse lingered near the game. It made Calla just a little bit nervous, like those days at the camp, surrounded by telepaths, and she the only person who hadn’t brought a spear to the war.
“This is a very complicated game,” the nurse observed, and that made Calla smile. That was why Valk told her he wanted to learn—it was very complicated. The thoughts people thought while playing it were methodical, yet rich.
“It is,” Valk said.
“May I watch?” the nurse asked.
Valk looked to Calla to answer, and she said, “Yes, you may.”
Enithi troops told awful stories about what it must be like in Gaantish prisoner camps. There’d be no privacy, no secrets. The guards would know everything about your fears and weaknesses, they could design tortures to your exact specifications, they could bribe you with the one thing that would make you break. No worse fate than being captured by Gaant and put in one of their camps.
In fact, it worked the other way around. The camps were nightmares for the guards, who spent all day surrounded by a thousand minds who were terrified, furious, hurt, lonely, angry, and depressed.
As a matter of etiquette, Gaantish people learned—the way that small children learned not to take off their pants and run around naked just anywhere—to guard their thoughts. To keep them close. To keep them calm, so they didn’t disrupt those around them. If they often seemed expressionless or unemotional, this was actually politeness, as Calla learned.
To the Gaantish, Enithi prisoners were very, very loud. The guards working the camps got hazard pay. They didn’t, in fact, torture their prisoners at all. First, they didn’t need to. Second, they wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
When her unit had been captured, processed, and sent to the camp, she had been astonished because Lieutenant Valk Larn—now Captain Larn—had been one of the officers in charge. Her shock of recognition caused every telepath in the room to stop and look at her. They would have turned back to their work soon enough—that she and Valk had encountered each other before was coincidental but maybe not remarkable. What made them continue staring: Calla revealed affection for Valk. Not outwardly, so much. She stood with the rest of her unit, stripped down to shirts and trousers, wrists hobbled, hungry and sleep-deprived. No, outwardly she’d been amazed, seeing her former patient upright and in uniform, steely and commanding as any recruitment poster. Her expression looked shocked enough that her sergeant at her side had dared to whisper, “Cal, are you okay?”
The Gaantish never asked each other how they were doing. She’d learned that back in the ward, looking after Valk. During his brief lucid moments she’d ask him how he was feeling, and he’d stare at her like she was playing a joke on him.
The emotion of affection was plain to those who could see it—everyone in a Gaantish uniform. And she was, under all that week’s pain and discomfort and unhappiness and uncertainty, almost happy to see him. She was the kind of nurse who had a favorite patient, even in a prison hospital.
He couldn’t not see her, not with every Gaantish soldier staring at her, then looking at him to see his reaction. She couldn’t hide her astonishment; she didn’t want to and didn’t try. She did realize this likely made the meeting harder for him than it did for her—whatever he thought of her, his staff would all see it. She didn’t know what he thought of her.
He merely nodded and waved the group on to continue processing, and they were washed down, given lumpy brown jumpsuits and assigned quarters. Later, she suspected he’d been the one to arrange the deal that won the rest of her unit’s freedom.
Calla had always thought it strange that people asked if prisoners were treated “well.” “Were you treated well?” No, she thought. The doors were locked. The guards all had guns. Did it matter if they had food and blankets, a roof? The food was strange, the blankets leftover from what the army used. Instead she answered, “We were not treated badly.”They were treated appropriately. War necessitated prisoners, since the alternative was slaughtering everyone on both sides, which both sides agreed was not ideal. You treated prisoners appropriately so that your own people would be treated appropriately in turn. That meant different things.
She was treated appropriately, which made it odd the day, only a week or so into her captivity, that Valk had her brought to his office alone. It wasn’t so odd that the guards hesitated or looked at either of them strangely. But she had been afraid. Helpless, afraid, everything. They left the binders around her wrists. All she could do was stand there before his desk and wonder if he was the kind of man who enjoyed hurting his prisoners, who enjoyed minds in pain. She wouldn’t have thought so, but she’d only ever known him when he was asleep and the brief waking moments when he seemed so lost and confused she couldn’t help but pity him, so what did she know?
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, after a long moment when he simply watched her, and she tried to hide her shaking. “You can believe me.” He asked her to sit. She remained standing, as he must have known she would.
“You were one of the nurses at the hospital. I remember you.”
“Not many remember their stays there.”
“I remember you. You were kind.”
She couldn’t not be. It was why she’d become a nurse. She didn’t have to say anything.
“You were playing a game. I remember—two people. A board. You enjoyed it very much. You had the most interesting thoughts.”
She didn’t have to think long to remember. Those afternoon games with Elio had been a good time. “Chess. It was chess.”
“Can you teach me to play?”
“Sir, I’d lose every single time. I’m not sure you’d enjoy the game. Not much challenge.”
“Nevertheless, I would like to learn it.”
This presented a dilemma. Could it be interpreted as cooperating with the enemy? More than she already was? He couldn’t force her. On the other hand, was this an opportunity? But for what? She was a medic, not a spy. Not that Enith even had spies. Valk gave her plenty of time to think this over, waiting patiently, not revealing if her mental arguments and counterarguments amused or irritated him.
“I don’t have a board or pieces.”
“What would you need to make them?”
She told him she would have to think about it, which would have been hilarious if she hadn’t been so tired and confused. The guards took her back to her cell, where she talked to the ranking Enithi officer prisoner about it. “Might not be a bad thing to have a friend here,” he advised.
“But he’ll know I’m faking it!” she answered.
“So?” he’d said, and he was right. Calla was what she was and it wouldn’t do any good to think differently. She asked for a square of cardboard and a black marker and did up a board, and drew rudimentary pieces on other little squares of cardboard. She’d rather have cut them out but didn’t bother asking for scissors, and no one offered, so that was that. It was the ugliest chess set that had ever existed.
Valk learned very quickly because she already knew the rules and all she had to do was think them and he learned. The strategy of it was rather more difficult to teach. He’d get this screwed-up look of concentration, and she might have understood a little bit of what attracted him to the game: There was a lot to think about, and Valk liked the challenge of so much thought coming out of one person. And yes, he always knew what moves she was planning. Which was when she started playing at random. If she could surprise herself, she could surprise him. Then she agreed to the deal to get her people released, she worked in their hospital, they played chess, and she got sick.
She could not learn to marshal her thoughts and emotions the way these people learned to as children. She tried, as a matter of survival, and only managed to stop feeling anything at all.
The diagnosis was depression—Gaant’s mental health people were very good. She, who had been so generally high-spirited for most of her life, had had no idea what was happening or how to cope and had grown very ill indeed, until it wasn’t that she didn’t want to play chess against Valk. She couldn’t. She couldn’t keep her mind on the game, couldn’t recognize the pieces by looking at them, couldn’t even think of how they moved. One day, walking in a haze between one ward and another at the hospital, she sank to the floor and stayed there. Valk was summoned. He held her hand and tried to see into her, to see what was wrong.
She didn’t remember thinking anything at the time. Only seeing the image of her hand in his and not understanding it.
He arranged for her to be part of another prisoner swap, and she went home. Before the transfer he took her aside and spoke softly. “I forget that this is all opaque to you, that you don’t know most of what’s going on around you. So, since I didn’t say it before: Thank you.”
“For what?” she’d replied. He’d looked at her blankly, because he didn’t seem to know himself. Not enough to be able to explain it, and she couldn’t see.
Others came to watch the game—drawn, Calla presumed, by the tangle of thoughts she and Valk were producing. He was getting frustrated. She was playing with the giddy abandon of the six-year-old she had been when her mother taught her the game. And now the whole room shared her fond memories, and the fact that her mother had died in one of the famines that wracked Enith when food production had been disrupted by the war. Ten years ago now. Everyone on both sides had stories like that. Let us share our stories, she thought.
“You won’t win, playing like that,” one of the observing doctors said. After half an hour of watching they probably all understood the rules completely and could play themselves. They’d have no idea how the game was really supposed to be played, however. She wasn’t playing properly at all, which was rather a lot of fun.
“No, but I may not lose,” she said.
“I’m still not sure what the point of this game is,” said a nurse, her confusion plain.
“This game, right now? The point is to annoy Major Larn,” Calla said. This got a chuckle from them—those who’d been looking after him knew him well. Valk, however, smiled at her. She had not spoken the truth, precisely. Everyone else was too polite to say anything.
“The point,” Valk said, addressing the nurse, “is to fight little wars without hurting anyone.”
And there was silence then, because yes, they all had stories.
He made his next move and took his hand away. Her gaze lit, her heart opening. Even the way she played with him, all messy and at random, a moment like this could still happen, where the board opened up as if by magic and her way was clear. Because it was her turn it didn’t matter if he knew what she was thinking, because he couldn’t do anything about it. She moved the rook, and his king was cornered.
“Check.”
It wasn’t mate. He could still get out of it. But he really was backed into a corner, because his next moves and hers would all lead back to check, and they could chase each other around the board, and it would be splendid. Neither could have planned for this.
He threw up his hands and settled back against his pillow. “I’m exhausted. You’ve exhausted me.” She laughed a gleeful, satisfied laugh.
The observers looked on. “This is how you won,” one of them said, amazed. He wasn’t talking about the game.
“No,” Calla said. “This is how we failed to lose.”
“I learned the difference from her,” Valk said, and was that a bit of pride in his tone? She might never know for certain.
Calla started resetting the board for the next game, not even realizing that meant she was having a good time. The nurse interrupted her.
“Technician Belan, the major really must rest now,” he said kindly, recognizing Calla’s eagerness when she herself didn’t.
“Oh. Of course.”
“I promise I’ll rest in just a moment,” Valk said. He was speaking to the doctors and attendants, who’d expressed a concern she couldn’t see. They drifted away because he wanted them to.
That left them studying each other; he who could see everything, and she who could only muddle through, being herself, proudly and unabashedly.
She asked, abruptly, “Do you still have that old cardboard set I made?”
“No. When Ovorton closed, I lost track of it. Probably got swept away with the trash.”
“Good,” she said. “It was very ugly.”
“I miss it,” Valk said.
“You shouldn’t. I’m glad it’s all over. So glad.”
That dark place that she barely remembered opened up, and she started crying. She had thought to pretend that none of it ever happened, and so carried around this blackness that no one could see, and it would have swallowed her up if Valk hadn’t sent that telegram. She got that message and knew it was all true, knew it had all happened, and he would be able to see her.
She scrubbed tears from her face and didn’t try to hide any of this.
“I wasn’t sure how much you remembered,” Valk said softly.
“I wasn’t sure either,” she said, laughing now. Laughing and crying. The darkness shrank.
“Are you sorry you came?”
“Oh, no. It’s just...” She put her hand in his and tried to explain. Discovered she couldn’t speak. She had no words. And it didn’t matter.
“That Game We Played During the War” copyright © 2016 by Carrie Vaughn
Art copyright © 2016 by John Jude PalencarTentatively, unhappily, but soberly and seriously, the Edwards old guard began discussing their obligation to the party to come forward with what they knew. When should they leak the truth to the Washington Post or the New York Times? Which of them would make the call?
The Iowa results, of course, rendered such considerations moot. For Edwards, winning the caucuses had always been the sine qua non of survival. Informed the night of the contest that he would finish a distant second, with Hillary a far-off third, Edwards put on the bravest face he could but thought, Well, we’re fucked.
Yet Edwards had no intention of going quietly into any good night. He had a contingency plan. Two months earlier, he had asked Leo Hindery, a New York media investor who was one of his closest confidants, to convey an audacious proposal to Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and a mentor to Obama: If Edwards won the caucuses, Obama would immediately drop out of the race and become his running mate; if Obama won, Edwards would do the converse. Wounding though a loss in Iowa would be to Hillary, she might be strong enough to bounce back. The only way to guarantee her elimination would be to take the extraordinary step of uniting against her.
Hindery had presented the proposal to Daschle, with whom he’d long been friends. Daschle brought it to the Obama campaign. The talks were tentative; nothing had been decided.
Now, with the results of Iowa in, Edwards determined it was time to make the deal. A little while before taking the stage to deliver his concession speech, he summoned Hindery to his hotel suite and issued a directive: Get ahold of Tom.
Hindery considered the timing miserable. Obama just frickin’ won Iowa, he thought. Give him a chance to savor it. But Edwards wanted to set the wheels in motionimmediately.
Hindery left the Edwards suite and tried frantically to locate Daschle, but discovered that he wasn’t in Iowa. Calls were placed. Messages were left. No one knew where he was.
As Edwards delivered his speech, Hindery stood to his right, until an aide alerted him that Daschle was on the phone. Hindery stepped offstage and took the call, straining to hear Daschle over the noise of the crowd. Tom? I’ve got John right here, Hindery said. You aren’t going to believe this, but he’s willing to cut a deal right now. He’ll agree to be Barack’s V.P.
Are you sure you want to do this now? a dumbfounded Daschle asked.
I’m not, but he is, Hindery replied.
All right, Daschle said. I’ll take it to Barack.
But with the victory in Iowa now gusting at his back, Obama rejected the entreaty out of hand. Convinced along with his advisers that he was all but certain to win the New Hampshire primary five days later, he was poised to plunge the dagger into Hillary all by himself.
Clinton’s astonishing comeback in New Hampshire put an end to Obama’s hopes of a quick finish to the nomination contestand led Edwards to believe that there was still an opening to strike a bargain. On the eve of the South Carolina primary two weeks later, he again dispatched Hindery to make a revised offer, this time a trade for Edwards’s endorsement.
John will settle for attorney general, Hindery e-mailed Daschle.
Daschle shook his head. How desperate is this guy?
Leo, this isn’t good for John, Daschle replied. This is ridiculous. It’s going to be ambassador to Zimbabwe next.
When Obama heard about the suggested quid pro quo, he was incredulous. That’s crazy, he told Axelrod. If I were willing to make a deal like that, I shouldn’t be president!
South Carolina brought an end to the Edwards campaign; after finishing a derisory third in the primary, he dropped out of the race a few days later. Yet for months that spring, as Obama and Clinton engaged in their epic tussle, Edwards continued in his Monty Hall mode, attempting to try to claim some reward from either candidate for his backing.
The trouble with Obama, from Edwards’s point of view, was his refusal to get transactional. When Edwards told Obama that he wanted him to make poverty a centerpiece of his agenda, Obama airily replied, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I care about all that stuff. Clinton, by contrast, proposed that she and Edwards do a poverty tour together, even suggested that Edwards would have a role in her administration. Edwards still had his eye on becoming attorney general, and thought the odds of getting that plum were better with Hillary than with Obama. But after South Carolina, the chances of Clinton claiming the nomination just kept fallingand Edwards didn’t want to back a loser.Now that I have your attention, never ever do that! That’s some terrible advice! Betting your savings on one company is never a wise investment strategy. Diversification is the key. Spread your risk. Think Enron, AIG, GM.., in case you’ve been living under a rock, they all tanked!
But to make up an interesting read, let’s say I had to pick one and only one stock, I have one such stock in mind. First, let’s look at the numbers. Opinions are passe.
Market Cap 201.20B Performance Till Date (till 2009) 434,057% Years In Operation 46 Outperformed the S&P 500 38 times Trailed the S&P 500 7 times
Performance During Bear Market Years (Annual Percentage Change)
S&P 500 (%) Mystery Company (%) 1966 -11.7 20.3 1973 -14.8 4.7 1974 -26.4 5.5 1977 -7.4 31.9 1981 -5.0 31.4 1990 -3.1 7.4 2000 -9.1 6.5 2001 -11.9 -6.2 2002 -22.1 10.0 2008 -37.0 -9.6
Anyone can make money in a bull market, what about the performance during bear markets? Glad you asked!
Performance When Trailing The S&P 500 (Annual Percentage Change)
S&P 500 (%) Mystery Company (%) 1967 30.9 11.0 1975 37.2 21.9 1980 32.3 19.3 1999 21.0 0.5 2003 28.7 21.0 2004 10.9 10.5 2009 26.5 19.8
Those are some impressive numbers. There aren’t too many companies that can boast such returns and if you are an informed investor, you probably know which company I’m talking about.
Berkshire Hathaway.
This company is run by the most modest man in the world – Warren Buffett. It is hard to find a more humble person who happens to be one of the richest in the world. He still lives in a house in Omaha, he purchased for $31,500.
What does Berkshire Hathaway do?
Berkshire Hathaway is more similar to an actively managed mutual fund company than a traditional one. Berkshire is a holding company of a variety of companies handpicked by Buffett and his partner Charles Munger. Yet, unlike mutual companies, Berkshire Hathaway buys up so much stock in a company that they have a say in all strategic decisions the company makes. Buffett can influence the direction a company takes which is not true with mutual fund managers.
What’s Wall Street’s opinion on Berkshire Hathaway? According to Bloomberg, bond investors consider Berkshire Hathaway notes safer than US government bonds! That’s like saying they have more faith in Berkshire Hathaway than the US government on a loan default!
So what’s the catch?
For one, the top 2 people who run Berkshire Hathaway are aging. Buffet is 79, Munger is 86.
Berkshire Hathaway is huge. It may not be able to give the same returns investors are used to
If you like to bet on technology stocks, Berkshire Hathaway is a bad choice. Buffett is known for his aversion to tech stocks
The current market can trip even the best of managers
The price on 1 share of BRK.A is $121,987! And will most likely never split. (You still can get in on the gravy train by getting its sibling brk.b which trades at around $82)
If Buffett became the world’s third richest man working the market, he knows something that others don’t. I would pick Buffett over any other money manager considering Buffett’s performance record. So if I had to bet my savings on one stock, I would pick BRK.B (I can’t afford BRK.A, yet)A group of police officers who allegedly broke the leg of an arts student and told her ''we don't care if it's legal'' have been allowed to change their defence at the eleventh hour after CCTV footage of the assault emerged.
Rachel Gardner is suing the NSW police force claiming she was kicked, sat on, handcuffed, pushed against a fence, loaded into a paddy wagon and then dumped at a nearby train station without charge after being caught without a train ticket on March 13, 2011.
CCTV footage emerges: Victim Rachel Gardner. Credit:Nick Moir
Police initially denied the kick occurred but sought to amend their defence in the Sydney District Court on Monday, minutes before the beginning of a five-day trial, after Ms Gardner's legal team revealed they had obtained CCTV footage from Cronulla station.
On Tuesday, Judge Sharron Norton lambasted the force's barrister Matthew Hutchings for presenting an "entirely different" defence document on the morning of the trial but she allowed it and deferred the trial to November.Wary of the fast changing demographic profile in districts bordering Bangladesh in favour of Bangladeshi Muslim population, Centre has started making quick moves to make Assam a tribal majority state.
Tribal affairs ministry has been asked to prepare a cabinet note in April itself to explain in detail the case for inclusion of six communities of Assam – Moran, Mutock, Tai Ahom, Koch Rajbongshis, Sootea and 36 tea tribes in the Scheduled Tribes list.
Once these communities get the status of scheduled tribes, it would bring in more than 40 per cent population of Assam under tribal status.
This figure, when translated into assembly strength, would bring as many as 80 out of 126 assembly seats under reserved tribal status, thus ensuring that despite changes in demography, Assam's politics would not be dictated by Bangladeshi Muslims, said sources.
The decision to prepare an express cabinet note was arrived at in a meeting between union home minister Rajnath Singh and tribal affairs ministers Jual Oram in the presence of the Registrar General of India, this week.
Taking note of Assam government's proposal the ministers decided to work out the plan to grant tribal status to six communities in question at the earliest.
All these six communities are currently on the list of other backward classes and would be willing to included in the list of scheduled tribes as the new status would accrue them more benefits.
Their inclusion became possible after insertion of new criteria for granting scheduled tribe status that includes socio-economic, including educational backwardness vis-à-vis rest of the population of the state; historical geographical location; consideration of autonomous religious practices where the priests or ojas are from the community; distinct language or dialect; presence of a core culture relating to life-style, marriage, songs, dances, paintings and folklore; and, endogamy or marital relationship primarily with other Scheduled Tribes.
Sources said the Registrar General of India (RGI), National Commission for Scheduled Tribes(NCST) and Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) have already submitted their opinion on granting these six communities the scheduled tribe status.
Once the decision is cleared by the cabinet, a bill be drafted between the tribal affairs and union home ministry and tabled in the parliament. Sources said they are confident of getting the legislation passed by both the houses of the parliament in one session, possibly the monsoon session, as the major opposition party Congress is already on board.
The catalyst to the whole move came because of religion data of 2011 census that has not been revealed so far but, according to sources, made the union home ministry and PMO sit up in alarm because of 5-7 per cent change in the demographic profile (in absolute terms) in favour of Bangladeshi Muslims as compared to 2001 census.
The possible fallouts of demographic change were discussed in detail by national security advisor Ajit Doval with top officials of the union home ministry officials and security agencies and sounded out to the senior cabinet ministers.Thanks, Comey.
The Justice Department’s inspector general is now investigating the way the F.B.I. director conveyed the false impression of an emerging Clinton scandal just days before the election, even as he said nothing about ongoing investigations into Russian intervention and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. That action very probably installed Donald Trump in the White House. And it’s already obvious that the incoming commander in chief will be a walking, tweeting ethical disaster.
On the other hand, he’s also dangerously delusional about policy.
Some Republicans appear to be realizing that their long con on Obamacare has reached its limit. Chanting “repeal and replace” may have worked as a political strategy, but coming up with a conservative replacement for the Affordable Care Act — one that doesn’t take away coverage from tens of millions of Americans — isn’t easy. In fact, it’s impossible.
But it seems that nobody told Mr. Trump. In Wednesday’s news conference, he asserted that he would submit a replacement plan, “probably the same day” as Obamacare’s repeal — “could be the same hour” — that will be “far less expensive and far better”; also, with much lower deductibles.
This is crazy, on multiple levels.
The truth is that even if Republicans were settled on the broad outlines of a health care plan — the way Democrats were when President Obama took office — turning such an outline into real legislation is a time-consuming process.Three people are recovering from gunshot wounds after a fight broke out during a party being held late Friday.
According to Grand Rapids Police, officers responded to a call of shots fired in the area just before 11:30 p.m.. When they arrived, they found several shell casings on Wealthy Street near Fuller Avenue SE, but there were no victims at the scene.
Several bullets hit buildings in the 1100 block of Wealthy, requiring windows to be boarded up.
Officers learned that two of the victims went to local hospitals while a third went to a home. All three of them have non-life-threatening gunshot wounds to the lower extremities.
The victims' ages are 17, 18, and 38.
At this time, no one is in custody and there are no suspect descriptions available.
Anyone with information about this shooting is encouraged to call 616-456-3400 or Silent Observer at 616-774-2345 or by clicking here.Ohio State University on Monday morning sent out multiple alerts to students and staff to “Run Hide Fight” and take shelter to avoid an attacker on campus. Police and school officials confirmed that there had been a car-and-knife attack — not a shooting — at the university, which has nearly 60,000 students.
The story is quickly developing, so some details may be wrong and may change. Here’s what we know and what we don’t.
What we know
Before 10 am on Monday, a car slammed into a group of pedestrians at the Ohio State campus. The suspect then got out of the vehicle and attacked students with a butcher knife, Ohio State and law enforcement officials said at a press conference.
University police officer Alan Horujko, who was in the area after investigating a nearby gas leak, shot and killed the suspect.
School officials identified the suspect as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an Ohio State student. According to the Associated Press, he was born in Somalia and was living in the US as a legal permanent resident.
Eleven people were injured and sent to local hospitals due to the attack, the AP reported. Eight victims are in stable condition, but one remains in critical condition.
There are a lot of police in the area, including SWAT. But the scene is secure, according to the school and police.
Although Ohio State officials originally claimed it was an “Active Shooter” situation, they later clarified that the suspect did not seem to have a gun.
The Associated Press explained why the school sent out an alert telling people to “Run Hide Fight”: “‘Run, hide, fight’ is standard protocol for active shooter situations. It means: Run, evacuate if possible; hide, get silently out of view; or fight, as a last resort, take action to disrupt or incapacitate the shooter if your life is in imminent danger.”
What we don’t know
What the attacker’s motives were.
Correction: Based on original reports from Ohio State and media, this article originally noted that the attack was a shooting. Later reports clarified that it was a car-and-knife attack.August 4, 2008
Violence Against Men
A British taxi driver was robbed of everything -- his family life, his social life, his credibility, his livelihood, his money, and the well-being of his children. The perp, a 17-year-old girl who falsely accused him off rape, got off with a two-month wrist-slap: two months in jail. And they won't even print her name in the paper. Joe Sinclair writes in the Yorkshire Evening Post:
Taxi driver Aftab Ahmed, 44, of Allerton, Bradford, was accused of rape in January last year after driving the girl home. The 17-year-old had been out drinking in Bradford city centre with her sister and friends before they put her in his taxi. The girl, from Shipley, West Yorkshire, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice when her case came to trial last month. Speaking after she was sentenced to a four-month detention and training order at Bradford Magistrates' Court, Mr Ahmed said the girl had "destroyed" his life. The teenager was told she would serve two months in custody, but the married father of 11-year-old twin daughters said: "Today is the worst day of my life, I can't imagine that the person who destroyed a whole family got only two months.... She should be named and shamed."
She absolutely should. And I believe those who can be proven to have falsely accused someone else of rape should be made to serve the time the falsely accused would've, and pay restitution as well.
That said, how, really, do you ever give this guy back what he lost and repay him for the pain he and wife and his kids must have gone through? And, all because he picked up the wrong drunk brat and tried to get her home safely.
Here's a ruined life a little closer to home: a doctor who lost everything after being accused of rape, and under the most unbelievable circumstances, in an excerpt from a Pulitzer-winning piece by the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz:
They were, indeed, remarkable charges. If the accusation were to be believed, the defense attorney pointed out, Dr. Griffin had decided in the midst of his examination, to place his tongue in a vagina swimming in fecal matter thanks to the condition in which the patient arrived for her colonoscopy. And he had chosen to do this in a thinly curtained room surrounded by staff workers four feet away, a room in which his assistants could enter any moment. Dr. Griffin had, in his career, performed close to 9,000 colonoscopies and endoscopies without ever having shown such proclivities -- and now, the defense argument went, of all the women he might have violated he had decided to sodomize one in this condition?... There would be an additional charge of sex abuse, on Ms. Jeffreys's complaint, that while performing her colonoscopy the doctor touched her vagina. On the stand Ms. Jeffreys told of the apprehension she had felt about testifying, the strength she had needed to endure. As became clear early in the proceedings, the complaining witness had nothing to fear in this courtroom, where she was given singular protection from questions that might raise questions about her credibility. Judge Kahn prohibited the defense from raising instances of the complainant's alleged perjury in the civil case against her landlord, and in testimony before the Office of Professional and Medical Conduct. The defense could not raise her prior meritless litigation, her history of financial trouble, her string of bounced checks, nor could the jury know the millions she was asking in her suit against the doctor -- all issues that could establish motive and a willingness to lie for financial gain.
Shockingly, Griffin was convicted. The conviction was reversed. Shockingly, the Manhattan D.A.'s office mounted another trial:
The atmosphere of the second trial and the rulings from the bench bore small resemblance to that of the first. Unpreoccupied with imperatives like the need to encourage rape victims to come forward, Judge Jeffrey Atlas afforded the defense the standard rights of cross-examination. The judge also precluded any attempt to inject the race of the complaining witness, a black woman, as prosecutor Fleming had done at the first trial. At this trial, attorney Callan described the effects of Demerol and Versed, a drug known to produce memory loss and sexual fantasy -- noting, for instance, that women going into labor are not given Versed because its power is such it will wipe out the memory of the birth. When it was all over, five weeks |
real offal on their bodies, so that was horrible. But this time round it's all fake - there's no real livers and things around! There's a severed foot at one point which was pretty disgusting."
Phil: "The art department did a very fine headless corpse. We found it very difficult to film it."
Rupert: "It was too gruesome really."
Phil: "It was a bit too gruesome, yeah. We had to be politic in the way it was shot. But I'm not particularly squeamish. Were you guys squeamish?"
Rupert: "No."
Steve: "I don't really get to see all the nasty stuff, although I would love to. Buchan's down in his basement and he likes the paperwork rather than the actual bodies, so unfortunately I never got to see it."
Rupert: "One of the things I think that's great about the show which we had obviously with the copycats, because it was copycatting real people - this time round you have us using the past as a map. But all the stories, all the things that we use, the past crimes, they're all real so you still get that element of real life crimes that have actually happened and some of them are pretty ghastly."
Sally: "If Claire Rushbrook who plays Llewelyn was here, she'd tell you that she's very, very squeamish."
Rupert: "She's the most squeamish."
Sally: "But has managed to conquer her fears."
What was hard about filming the headless corpse?
Richard: "It was a challenge. We used quite a lot of wide angle shots. We were in a mortuary, so the body's quite distant and far away. Then it was a matter of using detail in a slightly impressionistic way. But we had a lot of debate in the edit as to what was and wasn't acceptable and eventually found a line that we felt was about right for Whitechapel. I shot lots of stuff that was totally unacceptable, as it turned out, but I thought at least we had it in the bag."
Phil: "But, you know, any corpse that's on a slab in the mortuary is naked, so it's difficult for primetime television to shoot such things."
Rupert: "But when it's naked with no head, no arms and no legs, it's a bit much, I think."
Does anyone - the crew, the extras - ever get sick on set?
Sally: "No, but Claire genuinely was very wobbly in the first series."
Rupert: "The most gruesome thing this year I think, which I've just remembered - and I did feel a bit sick - was within the second story. We were using a fox and there's a sequence where Phil and I have to go and interview the guy that looks after the fox. But when we walked up to the cage, the fox kept running away. So what they had to do was establish that I was bringing food to the fox, but the fox eats chick heads and chick legs, so you had them chopping legs off dead chicks and heads which I had to keep in my pocket. That was pretty horrendous."
Sally: "Which, I have to say, were already dead."
Rupert: "Oh yeah, that's what foxes eat, isn't it? No animals were harmed in the making of this show!"
Steve, with your track record on The League of Gentlemen, have you ever been tempted to give tips to the Whitechapel team?
Steve: "I'm just jealous I didn't think of it first! When we were doing the first series of Whitechapel, all to do with Jack the Ripper, I was playing a similar Ripper obsessive in Psychoville. So there was a nice crossover there. And in fact I took Buchan's book of Ripperology and used it as a prop for my character David in Psychoville.
"But it was very exciting to read the first one and it's been brilliant for me to be part of it because it is a legitimate drama and I've not done so many of those kinds of things. It's a brilliant character, Buchan, because he does bring some humour into it but also has a great emotional arc through the three stories as well.
"In the first one he takes over a little bit and tries to put his stamp on the police investigation but he loses his confidence a little bit and he ends up in therapy, so there was a lot of great stuff to play in there. It's been a joy to do and it's right up my street, definitely."
Rupert - do you have a love interest this series? Do you have to get your clothes off?
Rupert: "He does grow emotionally through the show. Each story, there's a new woman that he's trying to form some sort of relationship with. But he's very new to the whole thing and it doesn't really work for him. He finds it quite hard work and by the end he does find someone he quite likes, but it's not going to work out for him really. It's the kind of character that he'll always be searching. I don't know if he'll ever find anything. And I do get a bit of kit off, yeah."
Phil: "The full-frontal nudity we didn't show you."
Rupert: "Too gruesome! In the last story it's set where they don't get to go home, so he's constantly changing his shirts. There's lots of shirts being changed."
Steve: "I didn't have to change my shirt."
Phil: "I volunteered on a number of occasions."
Rupert: "We can't be that scary!"
Do we see the relationship between Miles and Chandler continue to develop this series?
Phil: "Yes, the relationship with Chandler has changed from the very first one, when he was opposed to Chandler coming anywhere near to Whitechapel at all, made his life as difficult as he possibly could. But at the end of that story, Chandler did save his life, so he was a bit more sympathetic and there is a sort of friendship. It's still kind of an abrasive relationship and it's still kind of difficult and it does get challenged in these three stories, but they have reached a kind of strange friendship, I think."
Rupert: "He's either a big brother or a father figure for Chandler."
Phil: "Yes. And I think Miles becomes interested in Chandler and feels that he's probably lonely and would like to see him have a relationship with someone or other and is disappointed when it doesn't occur for him, so there's a bit of social engineering going on of Miles trying to give Chandler a happier life, because he is a strange guy."
What about MIles's relationship with Buchan?
Phil: "Well, that's as difficult as it ever was. Miles is very sceptical about Buchan's contribution to these investigations and if it was up to him he'd have him turfed out of the basement."
Rupert: "Part of the dynamic is that Chandler's always caught between these two and trying to get them to get along and they never do, so I'm constantly having to go from one to the other."
Can you tell us about some of the famous cases touched upon in this series, Steve? Did you know about all of them?
Steve: "I hadn't heard of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders and I read up on it a little bit. That forms a great part of the first storyline. But they also touch on stuff like Charles Manson and in the next episode there's some reference to some famous poisoners - Mary Ann Cotton and there's Dr Crippen. So it's a mixture of references, some of which you get.
"There's talk of masked killers like the Zodiac Killer and in the third story there's a spree couple who go around killing people. So for myself a lot of it, as I'm sure will be the case with viewers, you're aware of a lot of it but something like the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, which is quite specific, is not so well known.
"But as Rupert said, they're all true, they're all factual. Nothing that I come up with in terms of the factual stuff is made up, so that's great to know - that everything has a basis in reality. Fiction's never stranger than the truth. All of these stories as bizarre and gothic, as weird as they go - and it does get more strange and gothic - it's all based on real storylines. They're all inspired by these real true life crimes and I think that's part of the appeal of the show - people like to find out about them."
Do any of you have any similarities to your characters? Rupert, do you have any OCD qualities in real life?
Rupert: "I don't think I have. My wife does think I have! I like things in order, but I wouldn't say I was obsessive about it. I'm more comfortable if things are neat and tidy, let's put it like that! But I think a lot of guys are like that."
Phil: "And Miles is irascible and short tempered and difficult. As you can see, I'm nothing like that!"
Steve: "I suppose for Buchan it's the logic - that's why he's drawn to Chandler. And I am quite logical and I like things in order as well, so we make quite a good pair. You forget all these girls you've been dating - I think Buchan and Chandler is the couple!"
Do we see Chandler change at all over the series?
Rupert: "I think since the show's started he's changed quite a bit. He's kind of grown up a bit and become more confident and more manly, really. He was very much a boy when it started. And in terms of relationships with other people, he sees everybody else having a life and having somewhere to go at the end of the day's work and he starts to pine for that himself.
"So he does try to change but it's a long lonely road that he's walking and I don't know if he ever will - that's up to the writers and the producers. I think part of the excitement of the character for me is this lone guy who can't quite make his life work in any other world apart from his job."
Now that Whitechapel has moved away from copycats, there's obviously much more potential for stories. Would you be happy to stay with the show in the future?
Rupert: "Yeah, as long as it stays at the standard it's at at the moment I can't see why I would want to stop."
Phil: "I would certainly like to do some more."
Steve: "I think the third series shows that it does have that longevity because it's no longer rooted to one case or a familiar case - you've got the whole of crime history to draw upon as long as you keep Buchan in his basement!"
Rupert: "To be honest it does feel like without Buchan and Llewelyn we wouldn't solve anything. It's Buchan and Llewelyn that give us all our tips really."
Steve: "Spinoff!"
Phil: "Also, seriously, there's still room for the characters to develop and they're still being challenged and I think becoming richer and more three-dimensional as we go along, so there's still some life in it yet."
Whitechapel returns for its new series on Monday at 9pm on ITV1.Don’t confuse Donald Trump with the facts.
The Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement will not end the global effort to limit the effects of climate change. In the immediate time frame — say, Trump’s first term — it will have little effect, and may even spur a backlash as the rest of the world redoubles its commitment to action (China and the European Union have already taken steps to do so). It will, however, slow and impair international diplomacy. The next American government that tries to negotiate on climate change will be handicapped by the suspicion that it won’t abide by its commitments, undercutting American leadership and making it more difficult to secure cooperation from other countries.
The question is, what purpose does this serve? What economic or philosophical policy goal is advanced? The answer is that it satisfies the same elemental partisan tribalism that has allowed Trump to hold together his party.
It is worth recalling the principal argument that Republicans made against the Paris agreement from the outset was that it would have no effect on developing countries like India and China. “And you know what passing those laws would have — what impact it would have on the environment?” insisted Marco Rubio in 2016. “Zero, because China is still going to be polluting and India is still going to be polluting at historic levels … these other countries like India and China are more than making up in carbon emissions for whatever we could possibly cut.”
Why was the right so certain that India and China would continue to ramp up their carbon emissions regardless of what they said in Paris? Because, they insisted, dirty energy was and would remain the best path for them to raise their standard of living, which was and is well below American levels. National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in December 2015, dismissed plans to steer the developing world onto a cleaner energy path as “a naive belief in the power of global shame over the sheer economic interest of developing countries in getting rich (and lifting countless millions out of poverty) through exploiting cheap energy — you know, the way Western countries have done for a couple of centuries.”
But this analysis has proven incontrovertibly false. Rather than lagging behind their promised targets, India and China are actually surpassing them. According to Climate Action Tracker, India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33–35 percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42–45 percent by that date. China promised its total emissions would peak by 2030 — an ambitious goal for a rapidly industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal.
Why are these countries blowing past their targets? Because the cost of zero-emissions energy sources is plunging. In India, solar energy not only costs less than energy from new coal plants, it costs less than energy from existing coal plants:
The virtuous cycle of political will and innovation is proving more potent than expected. As more governments bind themselves to emissions reductions, business creates the technology to meet those goals, which brings down the cost of reducing emissions, which in turn emboldens governments to raise their ambitions further still. The factual predicate upon which the American right based its opposition to Paris has melted away beneath its feet.
Likewise, the scientific basis for the right’s skepticism of the theory of anthropogenic global warming has collapsed. Conservatives used to dismiss the scientific consensus on heat-trapping gases on account of the fact that 1998 saw an anomalously big spike in global temperatures in the midst of an overall warming trend. For years, conservatives would triumphantly point out that there had been no warming since 1998, as if the data from this one year nullified decades’ worth of rising temperatures. In the meantime, 2014, and every year since then, has since exceeded the 1998 record, rendering the old, misleading talking point outright false. But no rethinking has followed on the right. As justifications for inaction are falsified, new ones take their place, while the conclusion remains the same.
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Liberals used to accuse conservative climate science skeptics of merely shilling for the fossil-fuel industry. Certainly the owners of dirty energy reserves have invested in conservative politics with the aim of protecting their assets, and those investments have borne some fruit. (Trump’s EPA director has in the past literally outsourced his job to oil firms.) But there is far more at work in conservative opposition to decarbonization than the hidden hand of oil and coal; indeed, many fossil-fuel companies prefer the predictability of the Paris agreement to policy that jerks back and forth every time the presidency changes hands between the parties.
The dominant spirit of conservative thought — or, more precisely, verbal gestures that seek to resemble thought — is not even skepticism but a trolling impulse. The aim is not so much to reason toward a policy conservatives would favor as to pierce the liberal claim to the moral high ground.
Here is one representative specimen. Conservative columnist Jamie Weinstein, writing in the Washington Examiner, argues that Democrats cannot actually believe their own rhetoric about the importance of climate change, since their actions did not reflect its urgency when they held power. “Democrats like to claim global warming is the greatest threat the world faces,” writes Weinstein, “but when Obama swept into office in 2009, with liberal majorities in the Senate and the House, this supposedly existential threat was nowhere near the top of the Democrats’ agenda.”
Weinstein’s argument suffers from numerous flaws, each of them fatal. First, as a factual basis, liberals never had close to the 60 Senate votes needed to pass a cap-and-trade bill; during the few months when they had a filibuster-proof supermajority, their caucus contained numerous senators from oil- and coal-producing states, who fervently opposed any emissions limits. Second, Democrats did take significant political risk for the issue, holding a House vote that forced vulnerable Democrats to vote for a bill that stood no realistic chance of passing. They took this dangerous vote with precious little chance of success precisely because they did recognize the world-historical urgency of the problem.
Third, even if Democrats had proceeded cautiously, it’s common for politicians to behave pragmatically even in the face of what they see as moral crises of the highest order. Interventionists in the 1930s who saw Hitler as a dire threat to world peace did not devote all their energy to demanding rearmament. People who see abortion as murder mostly do not act as if they live in a country committing an ongoing holocaust.
Finally, even if none of the above points were true, the question would be, so what? Suppose Democrats undercut their position by refusing to take climate change seriously. What does that tell us about the policy they did carry out under Obama? And, moreover, which element in Weinstein’s chain of reasoning undermines the logic of the scientific consensus of the dangers of greenhouse-gas emissions or policies that are reducing those emissions? Weinstein does not connect his allegations of hypocrisy to any of those conclusions. He simply levies a specious charge and then proceeds immediately to this conclusion: “Rather than condemning the world to a thousand years of darkness, Trump’s decision to scuttle the Paris Agreement will more likely help Democratic politicians raise a few thousand dollars apiece, or more, from their liberal base.”
Nothing he has argued remotely supports Trump’s decision to abandon Paris. It is what Lionel Trilling, describing the intellectual style of the postwar right, called “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Weinstein points a dismissive finger at the left and dismisses the entire problem of climate change as a cynical pose.
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I’m highlighting Weinstein’s column not because it’s especially dumb, or especially smart, by the standards of a conservative climate-change polemic. I am highlighting it because it’s close at hand (having run yesterday) and captures the predominant (though not, of course, universal) style of argument on the subject. It contains a defiant refusal to take the policy questions seriously, combined with a gleeful reproach of the urgency with which liberals view the issue. A crude tribalistic impulse overrides any reckoning with the problem. The proximate issue in conservative minds is not climate change itself but the fact that liberals are concerned about all these things. Disintegrating ice shelves, extinctions, or droughts are abstractions.
It is similar to the predominant response to liberal terror over the prospect of handing the most powerful office in the world to an impulsive congenital liar with authoritarian tendencies. Conservatives on the whole devoted less attention to pondering the risks Trump might pose to their own country and party than enjoying the liberal tears.
“Everybody who hates Trump wants him to stay in Paris,” argues conservative activist Grover Norquist. “Everybody who respects him, trusts him, voted for him, wishes for him to succeed, wants him to pull out.” Here is an argument that approaches, even if it does not fully reach, complete self-awareness: The Paris climate agreement is bad because it is supported by people who oppose Trump. Therefore, the opposing position is the correct one.
If the liberal global elites have established a policy architecture to minimize the threat of climate change, weakening that policy architecture is its own reward. There is not much more to it than that.by Judith Curry
Climate change, once considered a problem for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present. Climate change is already affecting the American people. – U.S. NCADAC
The U.S. National Climate Assessment Report was published Tuesday [link]. I’ve read half of the chapters (at the beginning and end), skimming the ones in the middle.
My main conclusion from reading the report is this: the phrase ‘climate change’ is now officially meaningless. The report effectively implies that there is no climate change other than what is caused by humans, and that extreme weather events are equivalent to climate change. Any increase in adverse impacts from extreme weather events or sea level rise is caused by humans. Possible scenarios of future climate change depend only on emissions scenarios that are translated into warming by climate models that produce far more warming than has recently been observed.
Some of the basic underlying climate science and impacts reported is contradictory to the recent IPCC AR5 reports. Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger have written a 134 page critique of a draft of the NCADAC report [link].
Even in the efforts to spin extreme weather events as alarming and caused by humans, Roger Pielke Jr. has tweeted the following quotes from the Report:
“There has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the continental U.S. since 1900”
“Other trends in severe storms, including the intensity & frequency of tornadoes, hail, and damaging thunderstorm winds, are uncertain”
“lack of any clear trend in landfall frequency along the U.S. eastern and Gulf coasts”
“when averaging over the entire contiguous U.S., there is no overall trend in flood magnitudes”
As a I wrote in a previous post on a draft of the report, the focus should be on the final Chapter 29: Research Agenda, which outlines what we DON’T know. Chapter 28 Adaptation is also pretty good. Chapter 27 Mitigation is also not bad, and can hardly be said to make a strong case for mitigation. Chapter 26 on Decision Support is also ok, with one exception: they assume the only scenarios of future climate are tied to CO2 emissions scenarios.
An interesting feature of the report is Traceable Accounts – for each major conclusion a Traceable Account is given that describes the Key Message Process, Description of evidence base, New information and remaining uncertainties, Assessment of confidence based on evidence. The entertainment value comes in reading the description of very substantial uncertainties, and then seeing ‘very high confidence’. This exercise, while in principle is a good one, in practice only serves to highlight the absurdity of the ‘very high confidence’ levels in this report.
White House
Apparently President Obama is embracing this Report, and the issue of climate change, in a big way, see this WaPo article For President Obama A Renewed Focus On Climate. Motherboard has an interesting article How extreme weather convinced Obama to fight climate change.
In an interesting move, Obama Taps TV Meteorologists to Roll Out New Climate Report, which describes how Obama is giving interviews to some TV weathermen. It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out, since TV weathermen tend to be pretty skeptical of AGW.
The politics on this are interesting also, see especially these two articles
JC reflections
While there is some useful analysis in the report, it is hidden behind a false premise that any change in the 20th century has been caused by AGW. Worse yet is the spin being put on this by the Obama administration. The Washington Post asks the following question: Does National Climate Assessment lack necessary nuance? In a word, YES.
The failure to imagine future extreme events and climate scenarios, other than those that are driven by CO2 emissions and simulated by deficient climate models, has the potential to increase our vulnerability to future climate surprises (see my recent presentation on this Generating possibility distributions of scenarios for regional climate change). As an example, the Report highlights the shrinking of winter ice in the Great Lakes: presently, in May, Lake Superior is 30% cover by ice, which is apparently unprecedented in the historical record.
The big question is whether the big push by the White House on climate change will be able to compete with this new interview with Monica Lewinsky :)There’s only one thing duller than a Twitterstorm, and that’s an Instagramstorm. Particularly when said storms feature figures who like to think of themselves as controversial and as deliberately baiting us: Rihanna posing in a clingy burqa at a mosque, Mario Balotelli posting a racist image, and now Madonna doctoring pictures of African and African-American leaders to promote her new album.
Really, the only dignified thing to do is to not dignify it with a response, and move on. Who cares if Madonna straps black ropes on the images of dead black rights icons? As Peter Robinson wrote in the Guardian: “It’s slightly heartbreaking that Madonna, an artist who made her name through an intuitive grasp of almost every major trend and zeitgeist fluctuation, is so crap at social media.”
But sometimes a solely jaded response betrays our own complacency, like resigning yourself to the fact that there will always be people who think of racist slurs as banter, or those who think it is just fine to appropriate the symbols of others to give their own tepid existence some edge, or people who still wear bootcut jeans. It’s not OK, no matter how persistent and ever-present it is.
Even though Madonna has always been controversial, it also seems that as the world around her has got sharper, she has got duller and more derivative. The appropriation that she and others have carried out is nothing new; we’re just noticing it more. That’s because those who are piggybacking on others’ journeys do not only have more channels to flaunt their cluelessness and sense of entitlement (Iggy Azalea, walk away from Twitter) but they are also being called out on it more. Whether it is usurping religion – crucifixes and nun habits are passe now; it’s niqabs on naked bodies – keep up – homosexuality or now minority rights, Madonna is a manifestation of how privilege feeds off the authenticity of “struggle”. This is a double plundering that leads to further marginalisation: the dominant narrative will oppress you, then co-opt you, and then weave you into your own tiny little section of the tapestry.
Some would argue that slavery and segregation ended long ago (well, segregation in the US in the 60s and apartheid in South African in the 90s, so not that long ago). But that doesn’t mean white people can now happily vandalise the cultural and historical totems of a minority’s struggle as part of some universal poster for the white western narrative of overcoming and learning from our mistakes. Imagine a pop artist using the recent CIA torture as part of their campaign – perhaps showing dead Arab personalities being waterboarded. No? Too soon? Well, when it comes to certain issues, it will always too soon.
Of course, the charitable position is that Madonna, or to a different extent, Iggy Azalea, are not doing this with any high degree of self-awareness or design – they might see all contemporary culture as equal-access human heritage that they can dip into and sample as a vehicle for their talent.
They would be right to some extent, but the sad fact is that these modern iterations of minority culture that they are sampling all arose from suffering and oppression rather than from a series of tortured geniuses in drawing rooms across Europe. Yes, there are spaces where our common mix of religious, sexual and racial legacies intermingle – gloriously, sometimes. But that is usually an uncurated, spontaneous thing, not a cynical shopping list.
To put it simply, edginess comes from just that: being on the edge. Ironically, all Madonna and her ilk’s desperate antics to appear so only confirm that they are, in fact, utterly comfortable and mainstream. Cultural appropriation is now the standard default of the unoriginal. It is a common and predictable template, where one becomes a cliche in trying to avoid being a cliche because you have nothing new to offer – something Madonna would surely be mortified by.Sometimes when you're looking for one thing, you find something completely different and unexpected. In the scientific endeavor, such serendipity can lead to new discoveries. Today, researchers who found the first hypervelocity stars escaping the Milky Way announced that their search also turned up a dozen double-star systems. Half of those are merging and might explode as supernovae in the astronomically near future.
All of the newfound binary stars consist of two white dwarfs. A white dwarf is the hot, dead core left over when a sun-like star gently puffs off its outer layers as it dies. A white dwarf is incredibly dense, packing as much as a sun's worth of material into a sphere the size of Earth. A teaspoon of it would weigh more than a ton.
"These are weird systems - objects the size of the Earth orbiting each other at a distance less than the radius of the Sun," said Smithsonian astronomer Warren Brown, lead author of the two papers reporting the find.
The white dwarfs found in this survey are lightweight among white dwarfs, holding only about one-fifth as much mass as the Sun. They are made almost entirely of helium, unlike normal white dwarfs made of carbon and oxygen.
"These white dwarfs have gone through a dramatic weight loss program," said Carlos Allende Prieto, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Spain and a co-author of the study. "These stars are in such close orbits that tidal forces, like those swaying the oceans on Earth, led to huge mass losses."
Remarkably, because they whirl around so close to each other, the white dwarfs stir the space-time continuum, creating expanding ripples known as gravitational waves. Those waves carry away orbital energy, causing the stars to spiral closer together. Half of the systems are expected to merge eventually. The tightest binary, orbiting once every hour, will merge in about 100 million years.
"We have tripled the number of known, merging white-dwarf systems," said Smithsonian astronomer and co-author Mukremin Kilic. "Now, we can begin to understand how these systems form and what they may become in the near future."
When two white dwarfs merge, their combined mass can exceed a tipping point, causing them to detonate and explode as a Type Ia supernova. Brown and his colleagues suggest that the merging binaries they have discovered might be one source of underluminous supernovae -- a rare type of supernova explosion 100 times fainter than a normal Type Ia supernova, which ejects only one-fifth as much matter.
"The rate at which our white dwarfs are merging is the same as the rate of underluminous supernovae - about one every 2,000 years," explained Brown. "While we can't know for sure whether our merging white dwarfs will explode as underluminous supernovae, the fact that the rates are the same is highly suggestive."
The papers announcing their find are available online at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3047 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3050.Embedding sensors into an entirely 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip, researchers hope to test the efficacy of pharmaceuticals on patients—without administering the drug to the patients at all.
Research jointly conducted by two separate Harvard institutions—the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering—has led to an automated process which can rapidly fabricate a customizable heart-on-a-chip. The artificial organ, which can use cells from particular patients, employs embedded sensors to drastically simplify the work-intensive process of collecting data such as heart rate. This data can help researchers develop safer drugs—and might even help health professionals predict which drugs are right for individual patients.
The 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip employs embedded sensors to measure the strength and rate of heart beat. Image courtesy of SEAS.
The Technology of the Organ-on-a-Chip
An organ-on-a-chip (OC) is a type of artificial organ which is used to simulate the physiological response of an organ. These 3D microfluidic devices give a model to investigate the effect of drugs and toxins on human organs. Although the technology is still in its infancy, scientists hope that, one day, it will be possible to develop a precise in vitro model of the organs. They also believe that the technology may eliminate the need for experimenting with animals. Typically thousands of animals are killed to test a single drug and, unfortunately, the results cannot truly predict the drug effect on human organs.
These microfluidic devices can significantly speed up drug research and make the analysis of the test results much easier. The heart, the lung, kidney, artery, bone marrow, and skin are a number of the organs which have been previously modeled by an organ-on-a-chip.
Moreover, OC technology holds the potential for personalized medicine. Replicating the genetic properties of a specific patient onto a test device, scientists would be able to more accurately predict which drugs would be beneficial and find more successful solutions.
Screenshot courtesy of Johan U. Lind, Alex D. Valentine, Lori K. Sanders, and Leah Burrows via SEAS.
OC Technology with Embedded Sensors
Harvard’s OC is composed of a clear flexible polymer about the size of a memory stick. It includes some hollow tubes which are connected to the living cells. To provide the organ with a more realistic environment, researchers apply mechanical forces which model the breathing motion of lungs.
The researchers have previously 3D-printed heart tissue; however, the new technology integrates sensors into the chip. These sensors allow the scientists to monitor tissue response, such as the strength of a heart beat and beat rate at particular intervals as well as over a long period of time. Recording the readings of the sensors, researchers can easily analyze the effect of thousands of compounds on the tissue.
While experimenting with animals requires taking multiple blood samples and sometimes performing surgeries, the new OC gives instant feedback about the contractile strength of muscles and other responses to drugs and circumstances.
Testing a single drug through clinical studies is not only time-consuming but also very expensive. According to the Wyss Institute, the procedure may take years and cost more than $2 billion.
As Johan Ulrik Lind, a postdoctoral fellow involved in the study and the first author of the published paper, notes it is possible to replicate the genetic profile of a patient who suffers from a heart problem. To this end, scientists can extract stem cells out of the patient’s skin cells and use them to make cardiac cells. Now, the cardiac cells, which still attain the patient’s genetic characteristics, can be used in the heart-on-a-chip. In this way, an accurate model of the patient’s characteristics is obtained.
According to Kit Parker, co-author of the study and professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, the new microfabrication approach is a big stride in achieving in vitro tissue engineering, toxicology, and drug screening research.
The results of this study are published in the journal Nature Materials.
Featured image courtesy of Johan U. Lind, Alex D. Valentine, Lori K. Sanders, and Leah Burrows via SEAS.An experienced gardener who collapsed and died after tending to a millionaire’s estate may have been the victim of the deadly wolfsbane plant, a coroner has heard.
In a twist worthy of TV programme Midsomer Murders it appeared that Nathan Greenaway, 33, may have brushed against the flower aconitum, also known as Devil’s Helmet and Monkshood, while tending the garden of Millcourt House, owned by retired venture capitalist Christopher Ogilvie Thompson and his wife Katherine.
After collapsing at the million-pound estate, Mr Greenaway was rushed to hospital where despite numerous blood tests, doctors were unable to establish what was wrong and he died from multiple organ failure five days afterwards on 7 September.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
It was only after the gardener’s distraught father, Richard, took up investigating his son’s mysterious death that the connection with the deadly plant came to light.
Histopathologist Asmat Mustajab said it was “more likely than not” Mr Greenaway died handling the deadly purple flower to North Hampshire coroner Andrew Bradley.
The toxins of the plant, which is rarely identified as a cause of death despite growing wild across the country, can easily enter the blood if protective clothing is not worn when handling the flower.
Shape Created with Sketch. The most incredible flowers in the world Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The most incredible flowers in the world 1/9 Most poisonous Most flowers are known for their beauty or fragrance – but some obtain their notoriety by shadier means. With an unassuming nickname like ‘Lily of the Valley’, you might think that Convallaria Majalis was harmless – it certainly looks it, with its charming bell-shaped droops – but this flower, native to Europe, North America and parts of Asia, is incredibly dangerous, secreting poisonous toxins which can be fatal. Common symptoms following exposure to Convallaria Majalis include nausea, vomiting, severe headaches and a slowed heart beat – so it’s no surprise that this deadly plant made its way into the public’s consciousness when arch-villain Walter White used it to poison a child in the hit show Breaking Bad. Mark this flower under ‘one to avoid’! 2/9 The rarest The ‘Ghost Orchid’ is actually less harmful than it sounds. This delicate flower was believed to be extinct until it was re-discovered in recent years and can only be pollinated by one species of insect indigenous to the local area, making it one of the rarest flowers in the world. Finding this flower might prove difficult – it’s mainly found in remote Cuban forests, and only for two months of the year – but it has recently been discovered in the Everglades, so if you’re willing to make a detour while sunning yourself on the beaches of east-coast USA, this flower is well worth the journey thanks to its stunning appearance and gorgeous, sweet fragrance. 3/9 Most carnivorous Plenty of flowers across the world have been known to catch prey – there are many water-based plants which feed off small insects and fish – but the Nepenthes, also known as the Monkey Cup, takes things to the next level. This large plant is native to China, India, Australia, Borneo and Malaysia among other locations (if you’re feeling brave, the most tourist-friendly places to see it are the Seychelles and the Philippines, where it grows freely), can grow up to 15m tall and contains a sticky fluid which can |
at $99.
The Super NES might be the best of the 16-bit systems. We say "might" because we haven't had it long enough, or seen enough games, to know for sure. We do know it's hot, though. The graphics, color and sound look pretty much like what Genesis brings to the screen, which is saying a lot. But the Super NES gets the nod for play control. Where the Genesis controller has A, B, C and Start buttons, the Super NES sports A, B, X, Y, Start and Select buttons on the face and Left and Right buttons on the front side. Obviously, that increases your options. It also gives game programmers more room to move when they're dreaming up new titles. Looking back to my time on the Digital Press message board, there was a lot of debate on when the exact launch date. In all likelihood, retailers started to sell it as soon as they got stock, which appears to be between August 21st and August 23rd in California. Looking at rec.game.video, there were several posts from August that confirm a late August release. An article by 1up for the 15th anniversary state an earlier date of August 13, 1991, but they don't state where that date comes from. I'm guessing someone posted it by mistake on Wikipedia, so I looked into when this date was added to the Super NES article. My investigation of that shows that a date of August 14th was added by an anonymous user with a Canadian IP on October 30th 2005, and almost immediately changed by someone else to the 13th. No justification was given for these edits, and I would assume this is where the 1up article got its date from. There is an anecdote on the Digital Press thread of someone getting it on the 13th, but at this point I would say that it is just hearsay. Release in Canada When the Super NES was released, Nintendo obviously expected brisk sales. Due to this, they clearly did not believe they would be able to release the system in Canada until 1992: From the Nintendo Power FAQ on the SNES in the October 1991 issue. The vice-president of Nintendo of Canada, at the Summer CES, pretty much says they didn't want to cut into the sales of the NES, which had not been available as long in Canada. From the June 4th, 1991 edition of the Ottawa Citizen:...
The S-NES, which has been sold in Japan for nine months, was unveiled to buyers at Chicago's Summer Consumer Electronics Show.
It will be available in the U.S. by September, but not in Canada until 1992.
Peter MacDougall, vice-president and general manager of Nintendo of Canada Ltd., said the company doesn't want to confuse Canadian consumers into thinking it's time to trade in that old eight-bit system _ and stop buying up eight-bit software.
''Because the eight-bit system hasn't been on the Canadian market too long, (Canadians) haven't fully explored many interesting and exciting eight-bit games,'' MacDougall said. ''If they quickly switched, they would never explore it. Now they can fully appreciate what those games can do.''
.... However, there were two factors that probably led them to release it in Canada early. First was that the initial sales were underwhelming in the US. In 1991, America was in the midst of a recession. There were plenty of parents who questioned why there was a need to spend money on a new system. From an article dating to September 16, 1991 from the Seattle Times: The $700 million question is not whether Mario will defeat Bowser's Krazy Koopa Kritters.
That depends on players of "Super Mario World," the game bundled with the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
No, the $700 million question is whether kids will demand their parents buy the new $200 video-game player made by Nintendo of America.
Big money rides on what kids want. Nintendo figures sales this year of Super Nintendo and its software will hit $700 million, making Nintendo again the biggest moneymaker of Christmas toys. Nintendo predicts sales of Super Nintendo will at least double next year.
Super Nintendo is now on sale at such outlets as Toys R Us and Lionel Playworld. A nationwide advertising blitz has started, to be followed by an album of Nintendo-inspired music by Crosby, Stills & Nash, Alias, Sheena Easton and other stars, and a Mario movie next year. Danny DeVito is expected to star as Mario, the digitized Italian plumber who dodges electronic villains.
Because the old and new Nintendo machines are not compatible, games for the old system don't work on the Super Nintendo. That means Mom and Dad have to buy another set of games at $50 each.
Robert Kleiberg, an analyst with the stock brokerage Piper, Jaffray & Hopwood, says parents will split into two groups: those who believe they have spent enough on Nintendo and that their "kids' brains are sufficiently fried," and parents who want to see their children entertained. Since kids have a lot to say about what they get as presents, Kleiber expects Nintendo will have a "strong Christmas."
But is Nintendo overestimating kids' enthusiasm for the new machine? And parents' willingness to pay $200 for it?
The Nintendo craze does have limits. The Software Industry Bulletin reported that Nintendo's sales have slowed during a period of intensifying competition. The bulletin said the video-game market faces a clutter of new technologies and a wobbly national economy. Kleiber doubts that the Super Nintendo will sell strongly beyond a few years. The other factor, of course, was the release of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis. Also aiding Sega was the fact that the system was $50 cheaper and had a larger library. From the December 18th 1991 edition of the Austin American Statesman:...
On the national level, Sears, Roebuck and Co. said it was enjoying good sales of big-screen televisions selling for $2,000. Sears also reported strong sales for Sega and its arch-rival, the new Super Nintendo system. "Both are doing exceptionally well," Sears spokeswoman Marcy Grossman said.
A big unknown before the start of the holiday season was how well video systems would fare in the soft economy, especially the Super Nintendo, which retails for $200. Another question was how the recently launched Super Nintendo would do against its cheaper and more established competitor, Sega.
"Super Nintendo isn't doing that great," said the Electronic Boutique's Carlo, who found customers leaning toward Sega because it is a faster machine and has more games available. Carlo said his store, which is part of a national chain, has already sold out one shipment of Sega units.
Super Nintendo's price tag may be a stumbling block for some consumers.
"Fifty dollars is a lot in this economy," said one national retailer, who spoke on condition his name not be used.
"Sega is outselling Super Nintendo..." he said. "By the end of Christmas, there won't be a piece around." Due to these factors, Nintendo decided to release the Super NES in Canada before the Christmas holidays, specifically December 2nd, 1991. They even launched it at a relatively reduced price, probably to stave off the competition from Sega. From the December 3rd 1991 edition of the Ottawa Citizen: Aiming squarely at Christmas sales, Nintendo of Canada released its much-vaunted ''Super'' Nintendo system in Canada Monday.
The 16-bit Super NES system, available in Japan for a number of years and introduced earlier this year in the United States, is being sold at a suggested retail price of $219, undercutting U.S. prices.
The Canadian firm's vice president and general manager, Peter MacDougall, said Nintendo is aiming for 75 per cent of the 16-bit market within a year. He said sales of 325,000 units are projected next year, along with sales of 700,000 games and 155,000 accessory units.
Since its introduction in the U.S., more than 2.2 million systems have been sold, MacDougall said.
The firm is targeting a core group of Nintendo enthusiasts in Canada -- boys of eight to 14 -- with the new system which offers players enhanced graphics, multiple scrolling screens, digital stereo sound and 3D capabilities. Further, it appears that Nintendo also wanted to combat cross-border shopping, according to an article in the December 14th edition of the Windsor Star. However, the quote from the editor of Players' Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games rightly says that it was also to try and prevent Sega from gaining a foothold in Canada. Super Nintendo arrived in Canada several months ahead of schedule.
"It really was an overwhelming response from our players," says Nintendo Canada vice-president Peter MacDougall. "Even we underestimated it."
Vancouver-based Nintendo had not planned to release it until spring, more than six months after its Labor Day release in the United States.
But so many Canadians were flocking across the border to buy Super Nintendo - at prices up to $400, says MacDougall - that the company moved up the Canadian launch.
Nintendo set the Canadian price at $219, about $100 more than the old system and a few dollars below the equivalent U.S. retail price for Super Nintendo.
"We've been very sensitive to the whole cross-border shopping issue," says MacDougall.
Nintendo figures there are 2.5 million old Nintendo systems in Canada, compared with 30 million in the United States. It has 85 per cent of the video game market in North America and plans to keep issuing new games for the old system.
MacDougall thinks Nintendo can get 75 per cent of North America's 16-bit game market with Super Nintendo.
But as in Super Mario World, the new system's flagship game, there are hidden threats.
Nintendo wasn't first out of the blocks with a 16-bit system. NEC, the Japanese electronics giant, has marketed its Turbo Grafix system for two years. The Sega Genesis system, which sells for about $50 less than Super Nintendo, offers more than 100 games versus Super Nintendo's dozen initial offerings in Canada.
THE SEGA SYSTEM has good word-of-mouth among game buffs, says Selby Bateman, executive editor of Players' Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games, a U.S.-based magazine with 300,000 circulation. That loyalty might eat into sales projections for Super Nintendo.
"I think they probably won't sell quite as many as they think they would," says Bateman. In summary, Nintendo had a disappointing start to its release of the Super NES in North America. It was hurt by a weak economy and competition from the Sega Genesis. The SNES would remain behind the Genesis in total sales until late 1994, when the release of Donkey Kong Country put it over the top. Launch titles Much like the system itself, there were no specific release dates for games, and they would have hit the shelves as soon as they were shipped to retailers. We can, of course, say that Super Mario World was released simultaneously with the system, as it was a pack-in. F-Zero and Pilotwings were also released on launch date. Several games came shortly afterwards, but their release dates are unlikely to be determined any more precisely than by month. As I host a large PCB archive, I have the ability to come up with an objective estimate of when games might have come out. About 80-90% of ROM chips come with a manufacturing date stamp, which gives the week number of when it was produced. All games in 1991 were made in Japan, so the timing of release would probably be at least a week or two after the chips were made, to give time for shipping. I specifically have put out a call to try and find the oldest Super Mario World. The oldest chip identified so far has a stamp of 9132, which is the first full week of August, two weeks before the SNES started hitting the shelves. I looked through my archives to find all games that were manufactured by the end of August 1991 (9134), and this is my list: Pilotwings - 9128
F-Zero - 9129
Gradius - 9131
Populous - 9131
Super Bases Loaded - 9131
Super R-Type - 9131
UN Squadron - 9131
Super Mario World - 9132
Drakkhen - 9134
HAL's Hole In One Golf - 9134
SimCity - 9134 All of these games could conceivably have come out either at the official nation-wide launch of September 9th 1991, or soon after. I would regard all of the above games as "launch" titles. Note that my PCB archive is hardly comprehensive, so it is possible that other games are in this window. I will point out that the oldest game I have is Pilotwings, but I would imagine the manufacturing of Super Mario World would have started by the time Pilotwings did. This does not include other games that came out near launch, such as Final Fight, Final Fantasy II and Super Castlevania IV. The oldest manufacturing dates for these games would have put them outside of the launch week by at least a few weeks. Super Mario World F-Zero Pilotwings Super Bases Loaded Super R-Type Populous Gradius III Drakkhen SimCity HAL's Hole In One Golf U.N. Squadron So in total there were at least 11 games that came out in the launch window of the SNES. They include three shooters, a racing game, three simulations, two sports games, one platformer and one RPG. The launch lineup was very much a display of the capabilities of Mode 7 (F-Zero, Pilotwings and Drakkhen use it extensively). Super Bases Loaded was also the first game to use the Super NES hi-resolution mode, although I would argue this is one of the most bare-bones baseball games for the system (save maybe Relief Pitcher). Drakkhen was the first RPG for the system, but was soon overshadowed by Final Fantasy II, which came out soon after launch. SimCity and Populous were conversions of popular PC games, which at the time was a big deal since PCs were not ubiquitous like they are now. Gradius III was one of the biggest shooters to come out, but the slowdown problems that plagued it did not make it enduring to the Genesis crowd. Overall, a launch lineup containing Super Mario World, F-Zero, SimCity and Pilotwings was likely enough to satisfy early adopters, but not enough to blow the Genesis away. In hindsight, if crushing Sega were the goal, they would have released the system before Sonic The Hedgehog came out (which was in June 1991). Super Mario World, although an incredibly deep platformer with branching paths, could not compete with the the coolness of Sonic. Nor could the relatively slow processor in the SNES, which led early games like Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts and Gradius III to have major slowdown problems. It wasn't until Street Fighter II came out that the SNES really started to hold its own in the console wars. We have to look at the launch of the SNES as an incremental step above the NES, but Nintendo was too hesitant in the face of their first real competition in the console market. Even so, the SNES launched with a solid lineup of games, with titles like Super Mario World, F-Zero and SimCity still holding up to this day. Bibliography Nintendo Power, Pak Watch - Super Famicom Showcase (announcement at the Winter 1991 CES), Publication date: February 1991, Volume: 21, Pages: 94
,, Publication date: February 1991, Volume:, Pages: 94 Nintendo Power, Pak Watch - Winter Consumer Electronics Show (states the Super NES was not playable and only shown behind closed doors), Publication date: March 1991, Volume: 22, Pages: 95
,, Publication date: March 1991, Volume:, Pages: 95 Nintendo Power, Player's Poll Contest (win a Super Nintendo system and a trip to Redmond Washington), Publication date: July 1991, Volume: 26, Pages: 82-83
,, Publication date: July 1991, Volume:, Pages: 82-83 Nintendo Power, Super NES Q&A: Answers to Your Top 10 Questions, Publication date: October 1991, Volume: 29, Pages: 70-71
,, Publication date: October 1991, Volume:, Pages: 70-71 Thread on Digital Press discussing the 15th anniversary of the SNES (link)
Thread on Digital Press on the release date of the SNES (link)
Sears Wish Book Advertisement for the Super NES in 1991 (link)Frazer Town
car
Bangalore
Cox Town
rape
police
Sexual Assault
FIR
It was a Friday dinner rendezvous that Trisha (name changed) had with old friends. The dinner done, the group had gathered outside the restaurant to say their farewells for the night. It was just 11.30 and Trisha, who is pursuing a postgraduate course in Mangalore, had decided to take an auto back to her home inwhere she stays with her parents. But one of her friends, the son of the owner of a marquee restaurant, advised her against it. The friend said it was unsafe to travel alone at that hour. He offered to drop her -- and two others from the group -- and Trisha agreed.The two friends had to be dropped off first since their homes came en route and by the time Trisha, 22, and her male friend arrived at the gate of her apartment complex in Frazer Town, it was almost midnight. The duo sat in thefor a bit, chatting. It was then that a night of horror unfolded.“As we sat in the car, chatting near the apartment gate, I noticed another car, a Skoda Fabia drive up the street and pass us twice,” Trisha toldMirror. “It returned again a third time and the driver parked right in front of our car. Six young men got out and surrounded our car. One of them ordered me to get out and to go and sit in their car. My friend asked them why. To this, one of them rudely told my friend that he need not reply and to do just what they said.“My friend realised that the youths meant business and that they had planned something drastic. So he told me to get out quickly and make a run for my apartment. I got out and ran towards the gate, but three of the gang caught up with me, wrenched me by the hand and pulled me back into my friend’s car. They forced me into the rear seat. They forced my friend out and pushed him too into the rear seat beside me. Two of the gang got in, one on either side, and we were sandwiched between them. Two others occupied the front seats and we began to move."With the remaining two gang members following in the Fabia, the gang drove Trisha and her friend around the area for more than an hour. All the while, the gang member seated next to Trisha allegedly sexually assaulted her.“One of the gang members said they are policemen in mufti,” Trisha said. “They told us that they had regularly seen us sitting in the car, late in the night. I told them that this was untrue and that I had never sat out like that before. I requested them to leave us, but the gang leader said he would leave us only if we gave them Rs 50,000. Or I had to spend five minutes intimately with them. I told them that I wasn’t carrying that much money and would pay them if they took me to my house. They refused and demanded that we hand over the money on the spot. I realised that they had no intention of robbing us. They were set on sexually molesting me.”Trisha says that at around 1.30 am, the two cars drove to a desolate area near the railway tracks in. “The two men sitting in front got out and pulled my friend out. I was left alone with the two men in our car. One of them told the other to go out and tell my friend to just wait for 15 minutes without making any noise. They put a knife to his neck. The guy who was inside my car told me that they would kill my friend if I did not cooperate with him.”Trisha says he then began fondling her and “doing despicable things”. “It was tantamount to,” Trisha sobbed. The ordeal went on for about 15 minutes after which she was allowed to go. They released her friend too.“We drove back home. I cried and cried the whole night. I did not tell my parents about it. The next day, my friends came to console me. I told them that I had seen the man who had attacked me the most previously in the area. My friends decided to hunt him down before approaching the. On Saturday evening, they spotted the Fabia (KA 01- MJ 8433) near MM Road. But before they could approach, it sped away. My friends did not give up.”With Trisha’s friend who witnessed the assault leading, the group of friends fanned out in the area on Sunday. “On Sunday night, we saw the Skoda car parked near a fitness centre opposite Albert Bakery on Mosque Road,” the boy said. “We waited there for more than 90 minutes and eventually the gang member came to take the car. We surrounded him and called Frazer Town police. They came and took him into custody. After this, we went to Trisha's house and took her to the police station to lodge a complaint.”But another drama enfolded at the police station, making the incident all the more painful for Trisha.The night of trauma still fresh in her mind, Trisha had accompanied her friends to Frazer Town police station at around 11 pm on Sunday. She alleges that there, the police gave her a first-hand version of their style of policing and their sense of justice.“I began writing the complaint after confirming that the man who my friends had caught was the same man who had misbehaved with me,” Trisha told Mirror. “I addressed the complaint to the police inspector and wrote the subject — ‘Kidnap,and Molestation’. I don't remember the names of the policemen at the station, but I know an inspector and sub-inspector were present, while another policeman named Kumar dictated to me. They told me not to mention sexual assault and kidnap and asked me to keep only molestation as the subject.”Trisha says the explanation the police gave was that since she was taken in her friend’s car, “it did not amount to kidnap even if they did it forcibly”. “They said that to include sexual assault, I would have to undergo some medical tests.”Under such duress, Trisha dropped the sexual assault and kidnap from the subject and merely narrated the entire incident in detail. While police are expected to file cases based on the details in the complaint, the usual practice is to simply go by the subject specified in the complaint.Trisha says that after a three-hour ordeal at the station, the complaint was eventually accepted. But the police did not register animmediately, violating a Supreme Court direction. And instead of taking the girl for a medical test, the cops sent her home along with her friends.On Monday morning, Trisha's friend went to police station again to obtain a photocopy of the complaint and a copy of the FIR. He claims he was made to wait interminably before police inspector, Mohammed Rafiq, finally spoke to him over the phone and asked to bring Trisha to identify the miscreants who misbehaved with her.On Monday evening, this BM reporter went to the police station along with Trisha's friend and found that the police had still not registered an FIR. Trisha's friend repeatedly requested for a copy of the FIR, but the police instead asked him to get into a jeep. They took him to the spot from where Trisha and her friend were abducted for the Mahajar report (spot visit report). An FIR was registered only after the police learnt that BM had been to the station — almost a full 24 hours after the complaint was first received.Police have registered a case under IPC sections 341(wrongful restraint), 384 (extortion), IPC 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention), IPC 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and IPC 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty). Section 384 carries a maximum sentence of imprisonment of three years. The other sections attract a lesser sentence.Braveheart Trisha meets police chief, seeks action against those who leaked her personal information resulting in media invasion of her privacyHer parents don’t want her to fight this battle. Like any others in their place, they are worried sick for her safety. The happenings over the past week have so distressed them that they want her to drop studies and just be secure within the confines of their home. But this Bangalore braveheart has decided to battle on.On Wednesday, Trisha (name changed), who was sexually assaulted after being abducted from right outside her Frazer Town home on Friday night, stepped up her fight, submitting another petition to the police commissioner, seeking action against those who had leaked her personal information resulting in media invasion of her privacy.The 22-year-old’s battle for justice, however, is taking a toll on her family. “My parents are concerned about my safety and future. They are traumatised to such an extent that they have advised me to discontinue studies and stay at home. They want me to drop the battle. But I don’t want to give up. I must continue my fight so that no other girl suffers like me on the streets of Bangalore,’’ Trisha told Bangalore Mirror soon after meeting the police commissioner.Trisha says her relatives who stay out of Bangalore rushed down after the incident came to light. “They are scared and concerned about my safety. They don’t want me to step out of the house. How can I continue my fight by hiding inside?” she says.Striking a note of hope, she adds, “I know my parents will come around and support me in my fight.”Meanwhile, Trisha’s friends, who instilled courage in her after the horrific incident, accompanied her to the police commissioner’s office. In her petition, she has stated: “I would like to bring to your notice the painful act that has caused further trauma for me and my family by the police and the television channels who revealed my identity, address, phone number and my photograph. Due to this, my house has been surrounded by the media.”She says reporters have been persistently calling her ever since her identity was made public. Pointing out the extent of her harassment, she said they have also made calls to the organisation where she interned for a month, seeking information about her. “A few regional channels have aired my photograph. Though my face has been blurred, my identity was given away due to the saree and another dress I was wearing. Also, a group photo was uploaded on a channel. Again my face was blurred, but the faces of my friends were visible, making it easy for several to figure out who the victim was.”The petition states this is the second letdown by the Pulakeshinagar police. They failed to take action against the accused who Trisha and her friends nabbed by risking their lives and also tried to burk the sensitivity of the case to favour the accused.This time, they failed to protect her identity and provide adequate security. “Hereafter, I don’t want any person or media to reveal my identity, address and photographs. If the police fail this time, I would be compelled to take extreme measures because of the stigma.” She says they have been getting calls from unknown numbers with the callers claiming to be relatives and family members of the accused. “They want us to retract the complaint. We also feel there are people following us.” All of this compelled Trisha to seek security and permission to put tinted glass on her car.Responding to her petition, police chief Raghavendra Auradkar said he was aware of the calls. “I have already instructed the investigating officer ACP Noorulla Shariff to take the numbers from you and take up a separate case of intimidation against those responsible.”The commissioner gave her permission to put tinted glass on her car. He also deputed a woman SI as personal security officer for Trisha as long as she wanted.The commissioner also ordered the investigating officer to conduct an inquiry into the disclosure of her personal details.He told her to convince her parents that she had the backing of the entire city police. To further bolster her morale, he gave her his cellphone number and asked her to call him in case of any emergency.Android gobbles half of Q3 smartphone market
Android‘s rise continues, with the platform now running on over half of all smartphone sales in Q3 2011, and well ahead of iOS’ 15-percent smartphone market share. Samsung grabbed smartphone vendor top-spot, according to Gartner‘s figures, while Apple shipped 17m iPhones – up 21-percent annually but down almost 3m units from Q2 2011, which the analyst firm puts down to iPhone 5 hype and anticipation – and saw its market share dip year-on-year.
“Android benefited from more mass-market offerings, a weaker competitive environment and the lack of exciting new products on alternative operating systems such as Windows Phone 7 and RIM” Gartner
Symbian – classed as a smartphone OS in Gartner’s stats, though Nokia continues to marginalize the platform in favor of Windows Phone – remains in second place with 16.9-percent market share; however, that’s less than half what it was last year. Despite Microsoft’s push with Windows Phone, meanwhile, it has a mere 1.5-percent of the smartphone market, down from 2.7-percent a year before. That’s even counting Windows Mobile in among those figures, which is still loaded on some enterprise and vertical market devices.
In fact, Samsung’s bada is ahead of Microsoft, with 2.2-percent of the market, doubling share from 2010. RIM slumped more than 4-points to 11-percent market share; earlier this week it was reported that developers are now more interested in creating apps for Windows Phone than they are for BlackBerry devices.
Despite the shuffling stats, smartphone segment growth overall slowed according to Gartner, now accounting for 26-percent of all mobile device sales (and up a mere point from Q2 2011). Apple is expected to stage a renewed assault on Android in the run up to the holidays, however, given the new iPhone 4S and the reduced-price iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS hitting more affordable entry-points.ARM Holdings, one of the UK’s biggest technology companies, has been taken over by a Japanese company for £24bn. The country’s new Prime Minister is citing it as a success of Brexit – but Steve Furber says it’s on a par with selling the crown jewels.
Was it a coincidence that, during the week that ARM announced it was being sold to the Japan-based SoftBank, Sophie Wilson and I got recognition from the Royal Society for our contributions to the design and analysis of the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) microprocessor in the 1980s?
ARM technology is close to my heart and we have a shared history, although my involvement with ARM technology predates the existence of the company.
Back in the 1980s I led the development of the early ARM processors at Acorn Computers. In those days ARM stood for Acorn RISC Machine, where RISC stood for Reduced Instruction Set Computer, a radical approach to the design of a microprocessor first expounded by the great American universities at Berkeley and Stanford.
In those days the common view was that we could invent things in Britain, but it took American companies to turn those inventions into commercial success. With the ARM we reversed this, taking US academic research and turning it into a major success for British industry, though really Sophie and I just sowed the seeds of that success.
Pioneering visionary with entrepreneurial flair
It took Sir Robin Saxby’s vision of turning the ARM into a global success over its first decade – all of which happened after I had returned to academia in Manchester – through the creation, amongst other things, of a radically new business model. This was followed by Warren East’s very successful decade in charge. Warren has now taken on leadership of another British engineering icon – Rolls Royce – and I can only hope that he is as successful there as he was at ARM.
Under these leaders, and through the efforts of a few thousand very bright and industrious staff, ARM grew into a major global technology company that, more than any other, has defined the evolution of computer technology over the last quarter of a century.
My iPhone states on the back that it was designed by Apple in California and assembled in China. What it does not state is that it is powered by a small host of compute engines based around an architecture designed by ARM in Britain. But I know that to be the case.
In any country on the planet, even in the remotest village, folk are using ARM technology to communicate. In any room where I speak, I know that there are more ARM processors in pockets than there are faces in the audience. At the last count, over 75 billion ARM processors had been manufactured – that’s over 10 for every human on the planet.
Why the takeover is bad news
In my opinion news of the takeover is bad news. Although the offer price is a decent-enough premium and there is a promise of doubling the number of UK ARM jobs, I think it is bad news because it is the last British technology company with a global reach. And in the BBC report Acorn founder Hermann Hauser summed up my feeling saying that “This is a sad day for me and a sad day for technology in Britain… ARM gave Britain real strength. It was a British company that determined the next generation microprocessor architecture.”
What else is there to say? ARM will continue to trade, and its new owners have promised that it will retain its independence, so in all likelihood it will continue to flourish. Does the ownership of a company’s equity really matter in any case? Once a company has made a public offering its shares are openly traded, so the company has relinquished control over who owns it.
However, a corporate take-over makes the ownership unambiguous, and the ultimate fate of the company is then outside its control. The board of directors can no longer negotiate and deal with a range of shareholders; they must now do as they are told by their owners. At a much lower level, the shares are no longer traded on the stock market, so individuals who wish to buy a stake in this leading British technology company – and I know many who did, at least partly as an expression of national pride – can no longer do so.
None of the above should be taken as any sort of disrespect to the new owners, or to Japanese business. I have many Japanese contacts and friends, and a great affinity and respect for Japanese business and culture. That isn’t the problem.
Evidence that Brexit has worked?
Apparently (according to the same BBC news item) Theresa May views the ARM deal as “in the country’s national interest”, and cites it as evidence that we can make a success of leaving the EU. Chancellor Philip Hammond also welcomed the deal. I disagree.
In my view what this deal represents is on a par with selling the crown jewels. The British industrial crown has few enough prize jewels in it, and I cannot rejoice at the sale of one of the brightest – especially one that I had a small part in creating.
I am delighted by the Royal Society Award but, like Hermann (and others) I am deeply saddened by the sale of the company. What else is there to say?It's going to be the Steam version of Skullgirls
Go here for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/salty/comments/6z6bpo/salty_saturday_3_or_super_salty_saturday_special/
Please remember to check in, it starts an hour before the tournament
It's going to be the standard 2/3 until top 8 which will be 3/5 from then on
I also decided to add that if you're in losers bracket and you're in a rush and don't want to be on stream, you can opt to just play it out on your own. Be sure to report the scores here. (I want to stream all of top 8)
It's really important that you add my steamid Pielordx like said in the topic, I'm going to do a group chat on steam to announce the next match as well as on twitch. It makes it very easy for me to find you if you have me addedSAN FRANCISCO — The Giants went 30-42 after the All-Star break. They waited until the final four games of the second half to put together a four-game winning streak. The best team in baseball through 90 games did not clinch a postseason spot until 3:10 p.m. on the final day of the regular season.
It was ugly and bizarre and tense, but as champagne and Bud Light hit the walls of the clubhouse, the Giants did not seem to think much of the tortuous road.
“Who cares about the way?” Hunter Pence said, smiling. “Where we are is on the way to where we want to be. We want a chance to win the Wold Series, and we get that chance.”
The first step on the new path will be taken Monday, when the Giants fly to New York to start preparing for a Wednesday night showdown in New York. They have traversed this path before, winning the 2014 title as the second wild card team, and throughout an unimaginably bad half of baseball, players clung to a comforting thought. Find some way into the postseason, and then hand the ball back to Madison Bumgarner.
Two years and four days after he blanked the Pirates, Bumgarner will tangle with Noah Syndergaard and a Mets squad that made the postseason with an entire rotation on the disabled list. It won’t matter on Wednesday, but the Giants go in with the hottest five-man group around. Matt Moore, the No. 3 starter acquired on at the deadline, kept pace Sunday with eight dominating innings, leading the Giants to a 7-1 win they absolutely needed since the Cardinals were headed for a similar victory 2,000 miles away.
With the final win, the even-year darlings finished 87-57, a game ahead of St. Louis and thus a game clear of a Monday night tiebreaker at Busch Stadium. A team that once led the National League West by eight games ended up four back after a weekend sweep of the Dodgers. With a win Wednesday, the Giants will fly to Chicago to face the 103-win Cubs.
Those facts were also met with shrugs. Who cares about the way?
Moore smiled as he discussed the second-half slide, saying the adversity can potentially make the Giants a pretty dangerous team in October.
[RATTO: Giants must forget the past, focus on Bochy's magic 2013 shirt]
“Having 87 wins |
have found hexagonal clouds in the North Sea near Britain.
GETTY NOTORIOUS: The Bermuda Triangle has long been the subject of conspiracy theories
SG CLOUDS: Scientists believe they have solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle
“These types of hexagonal shapes over the ocean are in essence air bombs” Meteorologist Randy Cerveny Dr Steve Miller, satellite meteorologist at Colorado State University, said: “You don’t typically see straight edges with clouds. “Most of the time, clouds are random in their distribution,” he told the Science Channel’s What on Earth. Using radar satellites to measure what was happening beneath the clouds, they found that sea level winds were reaching almost 170mph. That’s powerful enough to generate waves of over 45ft high as “air bombs” are forced to come crashing down towards the ocean.
The top 10 conspiracy theories From mind control, to the missing Malaysian airways flight MH370, here are the top 10 conspiracy theories. 1 / 10 AFP/Getty Images In 2011, Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals and buried at sea, but now conspiracy theorists claim that it was all a lie and he is still alive
They also noted that massive clouds were appearing over the western tip of the islands – ranging from 20 to 55 miles across. Meteorologist Randy Cerveny said: “These types of hexagonal shapes over the ocean are in essence air bombs. “They form microbursts and they’re blasts of air that come down out of the bottom of a cloud and then hit the ocean and then create waves that can sometimes be massive in size.”
GETTY STUNNING: Bermuda is a popular tourist spot with BritsConnie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist in Cleveland and author of "...and His Lovely Wife."
LeBron isn’t the only one who's returning. Last fall, my husband and I left our house in the suburbs and moved to Cleveland.
We live in the largest residential development built in the city since World War II. It is a haven of new construction nestled in a zip code that saw one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. You don’t have to drive far from our neighborhood’s entrance before you’re dodging potholes and witnessing continued blight.
Story Continued Below
This is where I belong, in this city with fresh hopes and monumental challenges—not least of which, perhaps, is that it might be the most misunderstood and underestimated city in America.
Greater Cleveland is divided, geographically and ideologically, by the Cuyahoga River. I’ve lived on both sides of it. I raised my children, mostly as a single mother, in diverse neighborhoods on the near east side. After I married Sherrod Brown in 2004, we moved into his then-congressional district—he’s a U.S. senator today—in a virtually all-white neighborhood on the far west side.
It was not a good fit. Not because people weren’t nice. It was the sameness that ate at me. For the first time in my adult life, I was driving on the freeway to and from work to end up surrounded by people who looked just like me. Instead of the usual street-to-street crawl enveloped by the sounds of the city, I was driving 65 miles an hour with windows up and a view of big-box stores by the exits.
I felt exiled, and increasingly left out, watching from afar as the Cleveland that had launched my journalism career dared to reimagine itself into this current renaissance. I’m in the thick of it now. I left a front yard the size of a ballpark for one that takes six steps to walk from the porch to the sidewalk. The head of Cleveland’s Urban League lives on one side of us. A daycare worker and a forklift operator live on the other side. It is impossible not to know pretty much everyone in the neighborhood because people so often stop to say hello.
A month after we moved in, on an unseasonably warm Halloween night, our friend, Sue Klein, showed up with Vietnamese takeout from Superior Pho and—a coup in Cleveland—the season’s first batch of Christmas Ale. We lugged out baskets full of candy and welcomed nearly 400 trick-or-treaters, which was about 350 more than we typically got in the suburbs.
We had the time of our lives meeting the children and their parents, grandparents and older siblings. A number of them said they were surprised to see us, and welcomed us to Cleveland. Most came by car from nearby neighborhoods, and it struck me later that, unlike my experience living in suburbs on both sides of town, none of the neighbors complained the next day about all those outsiders.
To me, this is what it means to live in Cleveland, united in our differences, Midwestern to our core. We don’t have the luxury of uppity exclusion, cherry-picking who belongs. Diversity is the leveler.
Every city has its stories, and Cleveland’s is more complicated than some outside reporters’ short-form fiction. I want to say that we’re more than our problems, but you’ll hear that from residents in any city. More accurately, perhaps, is to say that it takes time to get to know us, and we are worth the effort.
As I was reminded just last week, Cleveland is best understood through conversation.
Two days after the Republican National Committee delivered its jolt of good news to Cleveland, I was talking politics with a cab driver named Jeff.
Jeff had picked me up at home for a scheduled trip to the airport. He had the face of a man who has worked hard all of his life. He insisted on carrying my suitcase from the porch to the car, and waved me off when I apologized for missing two of his four calls to my cell phone in the previous hour. “I just wanted you to know I would be on time,” he said. “I didn’t want you worrying about missing your flight.”
He asked where I was headed.
“Washington,” I said.
We weren’t out of my neighborhood before we engaged in Cleveland’s favorite pastime, after sports. We earn our battleground reputation, one political argument—no, let’s call it a spirited discussion—at a time.
I asked Jeff if he and his fellow cabbies were excited about the uptick in fares bound to accompany those 30,000 Republicans coming to town in 2016 for their national convention.
He shook his head. “I don’t really know anything about it yet, so I can’t say I’m excited. And you should know I’m not affiliated with either party. I’m what you call one of those Tea Partiers.”
He paused, looked at me in his rearview mirror and sensed the invitation to continue.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “There’s not one good thing about Obama.”
Here we go, I thought. Another white, working-class guy who’s angry with the government.Jacob Rees-Mogg (right) is as devout a Brexiteer as you will find on the backbenches of the Conservative Party | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Brexit Files Insight Jacob Rees-Mogg looms over Brexit talks Theresa May faces a test on her ECJ red line, with a hard Brexiteer said to be waiting in the wings.
In its bid to convince the EU that the rigid "separation first, trade second" approach to the Brexit talks makes no sense, the U.K. is bombarding its negotiating partners this week with a series of five papers laying out the British position on a variety of issues.
Crucially, most of them are about things the EU doesn't want to talk about yet.
Whether this is a belated attempt by Brexit Secretary David Davis to ignite the "row of the summer" over the sequence of the talks or not, something that could significantly kick on that timetable is the publication on Wednesday of the U.K.'s vision for how the adjudicatory role of the European Court of Justice can be replaced post Brexit.
Theresa May has made shedding the influence of the EU's highest court in Luxembourg a red line in the talks, but its involvement in countless Brexit issues makes it a massive sticking point.
Producing a serious, workable alternative proposal for a mechanism to oversee trade, security and the rights of EU citizens in the U.K. after Brexit could yet help to unclog talks.
But this is easier said than done for the British government.
Enter Jacob Rees-Mogg — as devout a Brexiteer as you will find on the backbenches of the Conservative Party — whose Tory leadership prospects have filled British column inches in the arid summer months for political news.
The MP’s wit, self-deprecation and mastery of media has caught attention and earned the parliamentarian, once dubbed the “honorable member for the early 20th century,” a following (one poll of Tory members last month put him third favorite behind David Davis and Boris Johnson).
As Tories soul-search after a disastrous election, some wonder if this right-wing social media sensation is the antidote to opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has harnessed the youth vote with a savvy online cult campaign.
While few Tory MPs consider Rees-Mogg a serious prospect (Rees-Mogg insists he wants to be a servant not master of his party) he is being egged on by some in the hard Brexit wing of the party. And that may make it harder to carve out an ECJ compromise, such as the suggestion that the U.K. could link up with the European Free Trade Association's court as an alternative to the ECJ.
"The big difficulty is that the EFTA court takes its lead from the ECJ and while its rulings are technically advisory, in practice they take direct effect in the countries concerned. That would be unacceptable," Rees-Mogg told the Times.
The hard Brexit wing of the party has been supportive of Theresa May since her disastrous general election result. They fear the distraction of a leadership race could put Brexit at risk. But Rees-Mogg leadership headlines (along with other more obvious candidates in the Cabinet) are a helpful reminder that there are Tory MPs waiting in the wings if May deviates from a hard Brexit path.
The loyalty of Brexiteer Tory MPs will be tested this week when they see what the government's ECJ red line looks like in practice.
This insight is from POLITICO's Brexit Files newsletter, a daily afternoon digest of the best coverage and analysis of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. Read today’s edition or subscribe here.Researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed a manufacturing technique that could double the electricity output of inexpensive solar cells by using a microscopic rake when applying light-harvesting polymers.
When commercialized, this advance could help make polymer solar cells an economically attractive alternative to those made with much more expensive silicon-crystal wafers.
In experiments, solar cells made with the tiny rake double the efficiency of cells made without it and are 18 percent better than cells made using a microscopic straightedge blade.
The research was led by Zhenen Bao, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), which is run jointly by SLAC and Stanford. The team reported its results August 12 in Nature Communications.
"The fundamental scientific insights that come out of this work will give manufacturers a rational approach to improving their processes, rather than relying simply on trial and error," Bao said.
"We also expect this simple, effective and versatile concept will be broadly applicable to making other polymer devices where properly aligning the molecules is important."
The Problem With Polymers
Although prices for silicon-based solar cells are dropping, it still takes five to 15 years before they produce enough electricity to offset their purchase and installation. Silicon solar cells also require a large amount of energy to manufacture, which partly offsets their value as renewable energy sources.
Polymer-based photovoltaic cells are much cheaper because they're made of inexpensive materials that can be simply painted or printed in place. They are also flexible and require little energy to manufacture. While small, lab-scale samples can convert more than 10 percent of sunlight into electricity, the large-area coated cells have very low efficiency -- typically converting less than 5 percent, compared with 20-25 percent for commercial silicon-based cells.
Polymer cells typically combine two types of polymers: A donor, which converts sunlight into electrons, and an acceptor, which stores the electrons until they can be removed from the cell as usable electricity. But when this mixture is deposited on a cell's conducting surface during manufacturing, the two types tend to separate as they dry into an irregular assortment of large clumps, making it more difficult for the cell to produce and harvest electrons.
The SLAC/Stanford researchers' solution is a manufacturing technique called "fluid-enhanced crystal engineering," or FLUENCE, which was originally developed to improve the electrical conduction of organic semiconductors.
In the current work, as the polymers are painted onto a conducting surface, they are forced through a slightly angled rake containing several rows of stiff microscopic pillars. The rake is scraped along the surface at the relatively slow speed of 25-100 micrometers per second, which translates to 3.5-14.2 inches per hour. The large polymer molecules untangle and mix with each other as they bounce off and flow past the pillars, ultimately drying into tiny nanometer-sized crystals of uniform size with enhanced electrical properties.
Simulations and X-rays
The researchers used computer simulations and X-ray analyses at two DOE Office of Science User Facilities -- SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source (ALS) -- to customize the FLUENCE rake for making solar cells.
"At SSRL, the team used X-ray diffraction to measure the degree to which the polymers formed crystals and X-ray scattering to determine how clearly the two polymers segregated themselves," said Mike Toney, SSRL Materials Sciences group leader and a co-author on the paper. "These are bread-and-butter techniques for which we've developed some novel approaches at SSRL in recent years."
To achieve the polymer patterns they wanted for the solar cells, the researchers made the pillars in the rake much shorter and more densely packed than those used earlier for organic semiconductors. They were 1.5 micrometers high and 1.2 micrometers apart; for comparison, a human hair is about 100 micrometers in diameter.
Close, But Not Too Close
"Ideally, the two types of photovoltaic polymers should be close enough to each other for electrons to move quickly from donor to acceptor, but not so close that the acceptor gives back its electrons before they can be harvested to electricity," said Yan Zhou, a Stanford researcher on Bao's team.
"Our new FLUENCE rake achieves this happy medium. Because we understand what's happening, we can tune the rake design and processing speed to alter the final polymer structures."
Future research will be aimed at applying the FLUENCE technique to other polymer blends and adapting it to rapid industrial-scale roll-to-roll printing processes -- which can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour -- that promise the lowest solar-cell manufacturing costs.Work underway at new AECC energy centre
The foundations of the energy centre at the new £333 million Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre (AECC) have started to be laid.
The groundworks, drainage and concrete foundations for the energy centre are underway, with steelworks due to be erected later this month.
Once complete, the energy centre will host the largest fuel cell installation in the UK, providing electrical outputs reaching 1.4MW, will provide power, heat, and cooling for the new AECC.
Aberdeen City Council co-leader, Councillor Jenny Laing, said: “The scale of the new £333m AECC and its energy centre further underlines Aberdeen’s position as global energy capital.
“The new AECC which will open in 2019 is designed to be a world-class exhibition, conference and meeting room venue and also we want it to be a leader in using sustainable technologies.
“I’m delighted we have another milestone to celebrate.”
The new AECC, which is being built by Aberdeen City Council along with partner Henry Boot Developments and Robertson Group as the main contractor, is a key element of the council’s Strategic Infrastructure Plan to grow and bolster the local economy, and is part of a £560m investment in infrastructure by the city council.
Robertson Group’s chief operating officer, Derek Shewan, said: “People are here in Aberdeen in their thousands to attend this year’s Offshore Europe and it’s great to know that when the bi-annual event next opens in 2019, they’ll be heading here.
“Some of our major plant machinery will arrive on site on 25 September, with specialist hybrid plant equipment expected in late October.
“We are currently on track to meet our completion date to have the offsite substation and cabling finished, which will see permanent power supply reach the entire site.”
Nick Harris, Scottish director at Henry Boot Developments, added: “We want the new AECC to be among the most sustainable venues in the UK. The energy centre has been designed to provide the new exhibition and conference centre and hotels with heat, power and cooling, and will use new technology to deliver greater efficiency and environmental benefits.
“It is just one example of how the new AECC will showcase innovation, and I am pleased to see work beginning on this fantastic new facility.”
The new AECC features three conference/exhibition halls including the main arena, four multi-purpose conference rooms, and 15 meeting rooms. The venue is expected to contribute an additional 4.5 million visitors, £113m of visitor spend and £63m net GVA to the Scottish economy.
The arena capacity is 12,500 people (9,000 square metres) with exhibition space of 6,000 square metres and an additional 33,000 square metres in the multi-purpose subterranean space.
Last month, the major steel beams spanning the width of the main arena were installed at the site using two specialised cranes. The 14 beams – or trusses – were lifted into place using two crawler cranes working together to lift them into place. Each of the beams weighs 84 tonnes, which is the same as about 56 medium-sized cars. The 88-metre-long steel trusses span the width of the arena, and given their size, were brought to site in sections and bolted together on the ground.New Haven police chief apologizes for his conduct at Yale-Army game Alders refer incident with Yale usher to police commission for review
New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman Photo: Journal Register Co. Photo: Journal Register Co. Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close New Haven police chief apologizes for his conduct at Yale-Army game 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
NEW HAVEN >> A Yale University professor claims in a letter, which alders forwarded to the Board of Police Commissioners, that Police Chief Dean Esserman threatened to “shut the whole game down” when an usher at September’s Yale-Army game questioned the reportedly ticketless top cop’s entry to the Yale Bowl.
Esserman on Thursday said he apologized for the incident soon after it occurred. He added that he informed Mayor Toni Harp the day after the game what happened.
“I acted inappropriately and I was wrong,” Esserman said. “I didn’t hide it. I’m not proud of my behavior. I was having a bad day but that’s not a good enough excuse. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong.”
Esserman added that he learned on Wednesday that the matter was going to be brought to the Board of Alders.
Dan Weinberger, a city resident who teaches epidemiology at Yale University, wrote that he witnessed Esserman’s encounter with the usher and claims Esserman demanded the usher’s supervisor remove the worker from the premises.
“When the supervisor hesitated the chief threatened that he would ‘shut the whole game down’ if the man was not removed immediately,” Weinberger wrote. “At this point I stood up and went to talk to the supervisor on the man’s behalf to give my account of the situation. I told the supervisor (while the chief was standing there) that the man had simply been trying to help us find our seats. At this point the chief turned to me and badgered and mocked me and asked if I wanted to make a statement.”
Reached Thursday, Weinberger declined to comment further but confirmed he first sent his letter to university officials because the incident occurred on Yale property.
On Monday, the Board of Alders forwarded Weinberger’s letter to Board of Police Commissioners Chairman Anthony Dawson. The letter to Dawson was signed by Board of Alders President Jorge Perez, D-5, President Pro Tempore Tyisha Walker, D-23, Majority Leader Alphonse Paolillo Jr., D-17, Deputy Majority Leader Jeanette Morrison, D-22, Black and Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Dolores Colon, D-6, and Black and Hispanic Caucus Vice Chairwoman Delphine Clyburn, D-20.
“As the Board of Police Commissioners is the proper entity to review this, we are forwarding this to you for your investigation and appropriate actions,” the board’s letter states.
Harp also was included as a recipient, along with Yale President Peter Salovey and university Police Chief Ronell Higgins.
The city’s code of ordinances specifies, however, that the chief of police “shall be subject to the authority of the mayor” but the Charter gives the Board of Police Commissioners authority to “advise and consult with the Chief of Police concerning matters pertaining to the chief’s duties and to the conduct of the department...”
Laurence Grotheer, spokesman for Harp, said the mayor cannot comment on the incident.
“It’s a personnel matter,” Grotheer said.
Dawson could not be reached for comment.
Weinberger stated that the incident occurred about an hour before kickoff of the Sept. 27 game, an event that drew more than 34,000 fans and also marked the 100th anniversary of the Yale Bowl.
He began his letter by noting his respect for the city’s police force and added he is also a “strong supporter” of the community policing initiatives Esserman has launched since he returned to the Elm City in October 2011.
Weinberger described the usher as an “older gentleman” and wrote that Esserman was accompanied by a younger man as he walked down the stairs toward the field. Weinberger noted that Esserman was dressed in a New Haven police polo shirt.
“The usher asked to see the tickets of the chief and the young man,” Weinberger wrote. “The chief replied sharply that he didn’t need a ticket because he was the chief of police and had an ‘all-access pass,’ including some additional belittling comments towards the usher.”
Weinberger said that, as Esserman walked away, the usher turned to the professor’s wife and commented that the chief was “a jerk (or something to that effect),” prompting Esserman to turn around and “loudly and harshly yell at the man” and demand to see his supervisor.
“The chief made the man sit and continued to verbally abuse him,” Weinberger wrote.
After demanding the supervisor remove the usher and threatening to shut down the game, Weinberger said Esserman followed him to where he and his family were sitting. Weinberger noted that he and Esserman talked about what happened for several minutes and added that Esserman “continued to strongly insist that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“The supervisor of the usher came to visit us later and thanked me for defending the employee.”
Weinberger wrote that the out-of-town guests seated nearby “were appalled” by Esserman’s behavior “towards a member of the public who was simply trying to do his job.
“This type of behavior by a leader of our city is a complete embarrassment.”
Weinberger acknowledged that it may have been out of line for the usher to have called Esserman “a jerk” but noted the comment was made during a private conversation with his wife.
“Such a comment is certainly not grounds for the chief to have demanded the removal of the man from his job,” Weinberger wrote. “The chief took what should have been a complete non-issue in a non-threatening environment and escalated it for no apparent reason. It is scary to think how he might behave and react in a true crisis situation.”
Weinberger expressed hope that what happened was an “isolated incident.”
The professor also added his motives for writing the letter were to try to ensure the usher did not lose his job and to urge that it “is critical that the city examine the behavior of the chief to ensure that this is not part of a broader problem in police management and conduct.”
According to the agenda for the Board of Alders’ meeting scheduled for Monday, Alder Adam Marchand, D-25, will submit Weinberger’s complaint into the public record.
Call Evan Lips at 203-680-9367.In countless interviews giving advice on how to avoid surveillance, NSA leaker Edward Snowden has repeatedly namechecked one chat app: Signal.
The free and open source encryption app, which was previously known as Redphone and TextSecure on Android, is now coming to desktops. Open Whisper Systems, the non-profit that develops the app, announced the release of the beta version of Signal for desktop on Wednesday.
"As always, everything is end-to-end encrypted and painstakingly engineered in order to keep your communication safe–allowing you to send high-quality private group, text, picture, and video messages for free," the announcement read.
Signal for desktop is an app for Chrome that links with the user's phone, and syncs messages between it and their computer. Having the chance to use Signal on the desktop offers several advantages. Other than the obvious one—the easier typing experience—Signal users will be able to switch between computer and cellphone seamlessly.
For now, the app is only in beta, and it's just for Android users. But if you use Signal on Android, you can sign up to request early access to the app here. Support for iOS users will come only at the time of the official launch, according to Frederic Jacobs, a developer at Open Whisper Systems.
For the users, everything happens in the background and there's no way of telling if you're communicating with someone on their desktop or their cellphone. The conversation is between people, not devices, according to Lilia Kai, a developer at Open Whisper Systems. Messages and contacts are sent between your devices using the same end-to-end encryption protocol, known as Axolotl.
"When you send a message to someone from Signal Desktop, a second copy of that message is encrypted and sent to your phone, and vice versa," Kai told Motherboard in an email. "The transition between mobile and desktop is seamless."
The app recently became cross-platform, so iPhone users can exchange messages with Android users. Signal is one of many encryption apps that have gained popularity in the last few years, especially in the wake of the Snowden revelations. But the key differentiator between Signal and some of its competitors such as Silent Circle is that it's completely free, and has received praise for being secure and extremely easy to use, not just from Snowden but also respected cryptography experts such as Matthew Green, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.
"After reading [Signal's predecessor] RedPhone code the first time, I literally discovered a line of drool running down my face. It's really nice," Green once wrote.
Given that there aren't many options to chat securely using end-to-end encryption that are also easy to use on a desktop, the app has a chance to become even more popular and give internet users a good way to chat privately.
This article has been updated with more details on how Signal for desktop syncs with the mobile app.FLINT, Michigan — You almost can smell the adrenaline, if it wasn't for the burning rubber and exhaust fumes permeating the cool night air.
It’s late — or rather, really early on a summer night. Still, hundreds of spectators gather under the amber glow of streetlamps for an unauthorized thrill.
Street racing — the city of Flint’s worst kept secret.
A young man stands over the center line on a long stretch of James P. Cole Boulevard on Flint’s north side, just a stone’s throw from the concrete wasteland of Buick City, an icon of Flint’s storied past.
He beckons with a point of his fingers, ushering two American-made muscle cars to the makeshift starting line — unashamedly painted on the road for all to see day and night. Engines rev in anticipation of the coming challenge.
At the end of the strip — about one-eighth of a mile down — a set of headlights blinks on and off. The timer is ready.
The young man at the starting line raises his hands in the air. He looks both drivers in the eye. Then, in one swift movement, he brings his arms and body down to kneel on one knee, signaling the start of the race.
Engines roar to life. Tires squeal.
The cars are gone.
It’s an exhilarating scene — but a dangerous one, too.
A haze of smoke fills the roadway from the blazing engines and tires and some of the hundreds of spectators step into the roadway to watch the finish, unaware or uncaring that cars coming up behind them might not see them through the cloud.
There are no bleachers. No guard rails. No official rules or regulations.
The crowd has no protection from the powerful vehicles reaching upwards of 80, 90 or 100 mph.
Accidents can happen and, recently, have happened.
Two teen spectators were hit and injured during illegal races in the past two months. There have been at least two fatal crashes, killing three people, in the last 30 years.
Now, city leaders are cracking down on street racing in the hopes of putting an end to it, saying the races are too dangerous. They worry about the lack of crowd control, nonexistent safety provisions and suspected widespread use of drugs and alcohol.
Drag racers have been a staple in Flint for generations, sometimes just moving races to a new city street after a crackdown.
For now at least, under the veil of night, Flint’s abandoned straight-aways still belong to the street racers.
A 'harder edge'
It starts every spring. As the snow melts, the air warms and the ground dries, the street racers begin their nighttime ritual.
Sometimes they race on the lonely stretch of I-475 through Flint, “the dark side” as it’s called by the racers. Sometimes it’s Selby Street along the highway on the north side.
Cole Boulevard, by the old St. John Industrial Park, is the most consistent and the most popular spot for racers.
By day, Cole Boulevard is part of one of the city’s most abandoned neighborhoods. After dusk, it’s a much different scene.
Any unsuspecting by-passer turning the corner off Stewart Avenue might think the road is a parking lot, filled with nice race cars, some wanna-be race cars and a whole lot of people.
On a race night earlier this month — one of four attended by The Flint Journal in the last two months — someone brought pizzas that anyone was invited to enjoy.
Car stereos played music — country, hip hop and everything in between — and cars parked on the grassy median, the side of the road or even the sidewalk.
“It’s almost like a club outside,” said Leo, a racer who asked his last name not be used. “It used to be 90 percent racers and 10 percent spectators — now it’s the other way around. It used to be a blast.”
Leo said it only takes a few bad experiences to spoil it for the people who just want to show off their cars and have a good time.
He’s been racing since the ’80s, and said the atmosphere has changed over the years.
It used to be mostly serious racers — car buffs who want to stretch their engines and show off their cars. But, it’s grown more out of control as the crowd of spectators has swelled, he said.
A 13-year-old Burton boy was hit at a race in May and a 19 year old was injured in June when he was hit by a racing motorcycle.
Even before the incidents, Flint City Councilman Bryant Nolden was calling for increased police enforcement against illegal racing. Since the accidents, the council is considering an ordinance change that would allow police to seize vehicles caught drag racing.
The owner would have pay a $900 fine to get it back.
Nolden said he can he can hear the early morning races from his home. And he worries that third-shift workers who live in the area could have a fatal encounter with a speeding racer.
“We need to start doing targeted stings,” Nolden said. “It’s really getting bad and I’m scared.”
Despite a personnel crunch, Flint police have already started a “zero tolerance” crackdown. On the third weekend in May, about 10 officers paid on overtime with federal grant funds suited up and headed out to patrol Cole Boulevard, known to the racers as “the John.”
Broken taillights, speeding, no seatbelts — police pulled people over for any violation, said police Capt. T.P. Johnson.
They towed multiple cars and made at least a dozen arrests, he said, and found drunken drivers, ecstasy, cocaine and illegal weapons, including an automatic rifle.
The racers scatter at the sight of police — and sometimes just the rumor of police — but quickly regather.
“The cops aren’t going to stop it,” Leo said. “We go around the loop, long enough for the cops to leave, and then, bam, we go right back down there.”
Flint street racing has been going on for decades, Johnson said, but it seems to have a “harder edge” these days than it did in the past.
“Most people think it’s just a bunch of good old boys coming together to show off their cars,” he said. “It’s not.”
Even without the drinking and the drugs, it’s illegal and dangerous, he said.
“My worst fear is that one of these cars loses control and veers into the crowd,” he said. “It can be the most skilled driver in the world, but it only takes one thing. Nobody’s down there to hurt or maim somebody but how would they feel if they did?
“They didn’t mean to but somebody’s still dead.”
'Too much at stake'
Michael Lunkas was never into racing, but he remembers how big a role it played in his big brother’s life.
Speed and high performance were more than a hobby for David Lunkas — they were his profession, too. He owned Kustom Equipment, a custom-car shop in the Flint area, and could often be found at various professional drag strips with his Corvettes.
Younger brother Michael would help him trailer the car to be hauled to the track.
“He really believed in going to the sanctioned races,” said Michael Lunkas, 55, who lives in Otisville. “That’s why we were all surprised when we got the call that day.”
For whatever reason, Michael Lunkas said he’s not sure why, the elder Lunkas decided to go street racing one September night in 1992.
Lunkas, 40, of Burton was a passenger when his friend Bruce Shoemaker, 50, of Lennon was racing his hot rod against a high performance motorcycle on Cole Boulevard. The roadster struck a curb and slid into a utility pole, according to Flint Journal files.
Both men were killed instantly.
“It was a tragedy,” Michael Lunkas said of his brother’s death. “The whole family regrets the decision he made that night.”
Lunkas said building a drag strip in or near Flint might go a long way toward cutting down on illegal street racing, since he believes racers will race — one way or another.
“To those guys over time, the speed becomes almost a second nature to them,” he said.
Leo, the local racer, remembers the night Shoemaker and Lunkas were killed.
“If we could do something different to make it safer, we would,” he said. “When one of us gets hurt, it really touches home. No one wants to see another human being get hurt.”
John, who also asked that his last name not be used, rarely races outside of a professional strip these days.
He won’t go down to the Cole Boulevard anymore because he doesn’t like how the atmosphere has changed from 10 or 20 years ago. For awhile he continued racing along I-475, but not any more.
“Last year, I raced a guy and he got caught and I didn’t,” he said. “I haven’t really raced since then.
“There’s too much at stake. Anything can go bad quickly.”
'Baddest in the land'
Despite the danger, street racing is a part of the fabric from which Flint was crafted. A city best known for churning out cars is bound to churn out car enthusiasts.
“Flint racing has been forever,” said Jack Doering, 77.
And he oughta know.
Before he became the owner of Auto City Speedway, Doering cut his racing teeth at a makeshift dragway on Van Slyke Road in the early 1950s.
His favorite story involves his Chevy and a 1948 Ford driven by his best friend, Don Williamson, before he was mayor of the city.
“I lost $5 to him in that race, and in 1953 that was a lot of money,” Doering said. “Everybody did it if they were young and had a fast car.
“You did it because you thought you were the baddest in the land.”
Doering said he eventually wised up to the fact that street racing is too dangerous, and went on to oval track racing — a love that occupied most of his adult life.
Still, he looks back fondly on his drag racing days.
“It took me a while, but I finally won back that first $5,” he said.
Williamson remembers things a little differently.
“I don’t know about that,” said Williamson, who doesn’t think he lost to Doering.
Back then and today too, drag racing is all about the attitude.
“It’s an ego trip,” Leo said. “Have you ever been in a race car and you pull up and the crowd is hooting and hollering? It’s just, your head swells. It’s a good feeling.”
Over the years, police have tried various ways to stop the races, but nothing ever quite worked.
Speed bumps were installed on Cole Boulevard in the ’80s but were later removed, probably because they were causing problems for semi-trailers using the road to do business in the area, police at the time said.
Another police chief in about 1980 ordered the streets flooded and a few years later, police tried barricading the street to keep racers away.
These days, city council members are hoping their ordinance changes — along with stricter enforcement and targeted police patrols — will finally cut down on the illegal races.
But time has proven that there’s really only one thing that stops the decades-old tradition of Flint street racing, and even that is only temporary: the snow.
When the temperatures drop and the ground is covered, the racers will tuck their cars away and retire to their garages, leaving the strip behind to freeze in the winter wind.
Until next year, at least.Written by Greg Otto
The White House announced Wednesday an initiative aimed at greatly accelerating the nation |
upgrade to the $75 pack, but the perks that come with it are much more significant. On top of what we’ve already seen with the Initiate, you’re upgraded to 3 Titles and 34,000 Premium Points. And this is where the goodies become sweeter. You’re given a 1 Month Premium Membership, 1 Name Reservation, a booster pack containing leveling basics—such as pots, 1 Character Alteration Voucher, 2 Extra Character Slots and 2,400 NCoins (valued at $30). The perks definitely match the upgraded value and the pack is great for those who want to play but don’t have the money to completely invest in the Master’s Pack. What you get in the pack saves you the time of investing into things that you might have wanted later on in the game, i.e. additional character slots.
The Master’s Pack is where the big benefits come in and the value of the items you receive exceeds the price of what you’re paying. You get 4 Character Titles, 48,000 Premium Points, 3 Months of Premium Membership, 2 Name Reservations, an extended booster pack, 2 Character Alteration Vouchers, 5 Extra Character Slots, 7,200 NCoins (valued at $90) and unique costumes only available to those who purchase the Master Pack. In this pack not only do you get pretty much double of everything offered in the Disciple Pack, but the amount you pay is practically valued at the NCoins and Premium Membership already. Everything following can be considered a bonus gift, and that’s a lot of goodies for free! The extended booster pack was mentioned to contain items such as Dragon pouches that are used to upgrade your inventory space—typically only available from questing and the Premium Shop. The entire pack is a great setup for anyone planning to play Blade & Soul long term, and provides you with so much stuff that there won’t be any need to spend more money after release (unless you go on a spree and burn through all of your NCoins early!).
Some things to keep in mind are that the NCoins given to you will be available during CBT and the points will be returned to you upon official release. Another point is that you can’t officially upgrade your pack through their website but you can contact support if you purchase the Initiate Pack first and realize you want to invest in one of the more expensive ones. The Blade & Soul team has been kind enough to help many users make it a smooth transaction.
Founders packs are designed to give players an incentive to play prior to release and give those willing to invest some goodies to boot. With any game, if you want to invest in a pack then it’s up to you to decide whether or not you believe the worth exists. These packs don’t give anyone a competitive advantage in the PvE/PvP content so if you don’t choose to buy one then you’re not hurting yourself. The Blade & Soul team presented gamers with three options so consumers of all kinds are given viable choices if they do choose to invest in a pack.
But from a value perspective the Master Pack gives you the most bang for your buck, and if you’re asking if any of the Founder’s Packs are worth it then the answer is a definite yes.Posted by Trevor Johns, Android Developer Relations team
In order to encrypt data, you need two things: some data to encrypt and an encryption key. The encryption key is typically a 128- or 256-bit integer. However, most people would rather use a short passphrase instead of a remembering a 78-digit number, so Android provides a way to generate an encryption key from ASCII text inside of javax.crypto.SecretKeyFactory.
Beginning with Android 4.4 KitKat, we’ve made a subtle change to the behavior of SecretKeyFactory. This change may break some applications that use symmetric encryption and meet all of the following conditions:
Use SecretKeyFactory to generate symmetric keys, and Use PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1 as their key generation algorithm for SecretKeyFactory, and Allow Unicode input for passphrases
Specifically, PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1 only looks at the lower 8 bits of Java characters in passphrases on devices running Android 4.3 or below. Beginning with Android 4.4, we have changed this implementation to use all available bits in Unicode characters, in compliance with recommendations in PCKS #5.
Users using only ASCII characters in passphrases will see no difference. However, passphrases using higher-order Unicode characters will result in a different key being generated on devices running Android 4.4 and later.
For backward compatibility, we have added a new key generation algorithm which preserves the old behavior: PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1And8bit. Applications that need to preserve compatibility with older platform versions (pre API 19) and meet the conditions above can make use of this code:
import android.os.Build; SecretKeyFactory factory; if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.KITKAT) { // Use compatibility key factory -- only uses lower 8-bits of passphrase chars factory = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance("PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1And8bit"); } else { // Traditional key factory. Will use lower 8-bits of passphrase chars on // older Android versions (API level 18 and lower) and all available bits // on KitKat and newer (API level 19 and higher). factory = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance("PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1"); }A leader of California’s marijuana industry warned Wednesday that the state’s cannabis growers produce eight times the pot that is consumed in the state so some will face “painful” pressure to reduce crops under new state regulations that will ban exports after Jan. 1.
Some marijuana growers will stay in the black market and continue to illegally send cannabis to other states, which is also not allowed under federal law, said Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers’ Assn.
“We are producing too much,” Allen said, adding state-licensed growers “are going to have to scale back. We are on a painful downsizing curve.”
He said some marijuana growers may stop, while others just won’t apply for state permits.
Allen made his comments to the Sacramento Press Club during a panel discussion that also included Joseph Devlin, chief of Cannabis Policy and Enforcement for City of Sacramento, and Lori Ajax, chief of the state’s Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation.
Devlin said estimates he has heard put California production at five times the state consumption; one consultant in the audience said the number may be 12 times what is consumed in the state.
Ajax agreed with Allen that some cannabis cultivators may have to scale back while others may never apply for a state license.
“For right now, our goal is to get folks into the regulated market, as many as possible,” Ajax said. But, she added, “There are some people who will never come into the regulated market.”
Those people, she said, will eventually face enforcement actions for growing marijuana without a state license.
Medical marijuana use was approved by California voters two decades ago. Voters in November approved the legal sale and possession of an ounce of marijuana for recreational use.
© 2017 Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
To subscribe to The Cannifornian’s email newsletter, click here.Authorities have completed their investigation into the death of a 61-year-old bicyclist who was killed last June in a crash in Lincoln.
Lincoln police said Tuesday that Eugene Thornberg, of Wayland, died after he fell in front of the back tires of a dump truck stopped on Concord Road. He was run over when the vehicle began to move with traffic, police said.
Police said no criminal charges will be filed or citations issued against the driver, who remained at the scene of the crash.
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Investigators said Thornberg passed traffic to the right and then briefly went onto the soft dirt shoulder. The loose dirt, coupled with the “deceleration of going off the road,” caused Thornberg to lose control of his bicycle, police said. At that point, he fell and landed in front of the truck’s dual rear tires.
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“At the same time, the driver of the truck began to move with the flow of traffic, unaware the cyclist had fallen under the tires,” according to police. “There is no indication that mechanical failure or the operation of another vehicle contributed to this collision.”
Thornberg was pronounced dead at the scene.
The nearly yearlong investigation was handled by the office of Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan and state and Lincoln police. It relied on interviews with several witnesses and a reconstruction of the collision.
A “ghost bike” memorial service was held Sept. 10 for Thornberg.
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Another cyclist, Mark Himelfarb, was struck and killed by a motor vehicle on Virginia Road in Lincoln last year, two months after Thornberg died.
Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannearNew Arizona Law: Guns From Buybacks Can't Be Destroyed
Enlarge this image toggle caption Joe Raedle/Getty Images Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Cities in Arizona that conduct buyback programs to get guns off the street will now be required to re-sell those weapons, according to a new law signed by the governor.
Gov. Jan Brewer signed the legislation late Monday "preventing local governments from melting down the weapons obtained from these popular civic events. Before the new law, the state had allowed such firearms to be destroyed," according to Reuters.
The news agency says:
"The bill had the support of the National Rifle Association and Arizona's Republican-controlled legislature. It cleared the state Senate earlier this month by an 18-12 vote. The state House approved the bill in March. Supporters of the measure said municipalities were wasting taxpayers' money by not realizing the revenue from reselling turned-in weapons. Opponents argued that it sent the wrong message and that the state needed to focus on the broader issue of gun control."
The Arizona Daily Sun reports that:
"Brewer separately signed another bill Monday which spells out that local governments are strictly prohibited from keeping lists of those who own or otherwise possess firearms. That expands on existing statutes which say cities cannot track buyers, sellers or others who transfer a gun. At this point, there is no evidence any city is keeping such a list. But proponents said they want to be sure that government never gets a chance to compile one."
As we reported in January, while gun buybacks have proved popular with municipalities, especially in the wake of December's Newtown, Conn., school shooting, the efficacy of those programs has been questioned.Egyptian men blame women for sexual harassment: survey
Posted
Nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women in the most populous Arab country and a majority say women themselves are to blame for their maltreatment, a survey shows.
The forms of harassment reported by Egyptian men, whose country attracts millions of foreign tourists each year, include touching or ogling women, shouting sexually explicit remarks, and exposing their genitals to women.
"Sexual harassment has become an overwhelming and very real problem experienced by all women in Egyptian society, often on a daily basis," the report by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights said.
Egyptian women and female visitors frequently complain of persistent sexual harassment on Egyptian streets, despite the socially conservative nature of the traditional Muslim society.
The behaviour could have repercussions for Egypt's tourism industry, a major foreign income earner, with 98 per cent of foreign women saying they had experienced harassment in the country, the survey said.
The survey of more than 2,000 Egyptian men and women, as well as 109 foreign women, says the vast majority of Egyptians believe that sexual harassment in Egypt is on the rise, citing a worsening economic situation and a lack of awareness or religious values.
- Reuters
Topics: discrimination, tourism, men, women, sexual-offences, egyptAs if to dispell all doubt that innovation is alive and well in Redmond, Microsoft has filed a patent application for – wait for it – the "Virtual Page Turn".
Yes, with filing number 20100175018 at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Microsoft is seeking to patent the animation of a page-flip when a user makes the appropriate gesture on an ebook's touchscreen. As the filing reads:
A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display... The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page... A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.
And that's about it. It's essentially the animation you've seen if you've ever used, say, Apple's iBooks for the iPad and iPhone, or Kindle on a touchscreen device, Stanza on the iPhone, Aldiko on an Android device, and presumably others The Reg hasn't played with.
Flick your finger to turn a page forward or backward — innovation at it's most inspired
To be fair, the filing does include one breakthough we haven't yet seen in an ebook reader: the ability to turn a pile-o-pages with one gesture. Microsoft envisions the ability to flip through multiple pages by dragging your finger down the right margin. "Furthermore, the relationship between the speed of the gesture and the resulting speed of the page flipping can be linear, exponential, or any other suitable relationship," the filing notes.
Touch at page 247, drag, and end up at page 533
The patent application, which was originally filed in January 2009 but published only Thursday, may have been an outgrowth of Microsoft's work on its Courier foldable tablet, which Redmond killed this April. At its death, Microsoft communications VP Frank Shaw said: "At any given time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them."
If a "Virtual Page Turn" is an example of a "new idea" coming out of Redmond, the Ballmer years are not turning out to be the most innovative of Microsoft's 35-year history.
The filing's 'foldable digital reading device'
There is, of course, a faint possibility that if this patent is granted, that Microsoft could stir up some licensing trouble for Apple, Amazon, and others who have page-turning animations in their apps, but such actions seem unlikely. ®
Bootnote
We would be remiss if we didn't credit Microsoft with one intriguing detail in the 11-page patent application. In discussing input methods, the filing notes that "sources other than fingers may be used to execute a page-turning gesture." We'll simply leave the implications of that capability to your imagination.So we did it. We went to Iceland to check out the show and spread some Smashing YoYo Company love. We all had a great time. Especially because it was the Brits first chance to meet Abby in person and she’s as wonderful as we’d imagined she is. Roland, Victor and Abby did a fantastic job of representing us and where we’re going, I could not be more happy or more proud to have them with us.
Anyway, onto the good parts. Here’s Abbys routine for the Women Division.
And who could forget Victor?
#
We’re already planning our trip to Shanghai and probably Cleveland too! We can’t wait to meet you all there. In the mean time, enjoy this picture that one of our party took.
Post worlds with @chaosgow @slvrandblk and @ciczlow A post shared by Josh Holland (@jshholland) on Aug 12, 2017 at 2:11pm PDTBy Planet Green
We produce a lot of waste. In 2008 alone, Americans generated 250 million tons of trash, and though about a third of that was recycled, a lot went into landfills or was incinerated. Our culture is centered around disposability, and only we have the power to change that.
Take stock of the disposable, overly-packaged, and single-use products that you use, and then look for reusable alternatives. Not sure where to start? Here are more than two dozen items that many people use... and can easily live without.
25 Wasteful Things You Can Live Without:
Tin foil — Use an oven-safe pot or dish with a lid. Plastic wrap — Instead, use a container with a lid. Disposable cleaning cloths, dusters, etc. — Use a microfiber cloth that can be washed. Paper towels — Use a tea towel, instead. Disposable pens — Buy a good pen that only needs the ink well changed. Plastic cutlery — Use the metal stuff. Paper plates — Washing dishes may be an effort, but it’s worth it. Paper or plastic single-use grocery bags — Get a few reusable bags. Packaged fruits and vegetables — Produce does not need to be packaged. Individually wrapped snacks — Snacks travel better anyway in a hard container. Disposable razors — Invest in a razor that only needs the blades changed. Juice boxes — Put juice in a reusable container (not plastic). Electric pencil sharpeners — Use the hand-crank version of days gone by. Disposable diapers — Cloth diapers aren’t that much more difficult to use. Disposable cloths — Fabric cloths can be washed regularly to avoid bacterial or viral build-up. Plastic cups — Stick to reusable cups. Bottled water — Install a water filter on your tap or pick up a water jug with a filter. Non-rechargeable batteries — Make the investment for rechargeable batteries and you’ll save money in the long run. Electric can openers — Use a little muscle. Single-serving pudding or yogurt cups — Buy a large container of yogurt or make your own pudding, and send it in a reusable container. Antibacterial wipes — If you must, use a gel hand sanitizer. Disposable table cloths — Spills are a reality of life; just clean them up as they happen. Facial tissues — Unless you have a bad cold, a handkerchief will work just fine. Paper billing — Switch to e-billing for your bank statement, credit card bill, utility bill, etc. Plasticized sticky notes — Use the original paper sticky notes; they can be recycled when you’re done with them.
Related:
5 Mental Habits for Cutting Consumption
5 Ways to Reduce Food Waste
10 Products to Ban From Your Home ForeverA new report from Friends of the Earth suggests combined pressure from habitat loss, inbreeding and disease may pose significant threats to the survival of the koala in Victoria and South Australia.
The group is calling for federal protection for key populations of the species.
The death of koalas during logging of plantations across Victoria and South Australia has attracted international attention. A petition to the Victorian government by German environmental group Rainforest Rescue received more than 85,000 signatures after a report on ABC's 7:30 in July last year suggested many koalas had been killed during logging of plantations.
Friends of the Earth campaigner Anthony Amis told Green Left Weekly that the last endemic southern koala population in Victoria, in the Strzelecki Ranges to the south-east of Melbourne, “needs to be managed the same as animals that have federal protection in New South Whales and Queensland, they need to be treated as a separate management unit.
“Koala populations in the south-west of the state need management to look after their animal rights, so they don't suffer when plantations are logged. Their only protection at the moment is the state wildlife act,” Amis said.
Amis says there could be thousands of koalas in bluegum plantations in south-western Victoria and south-east South Australia. “Most of the bluegums were established after 1996. The biggest year of planting was around 2000 to 2001, and the trees are generally cut at about 10 to 12 years.”
Plantation companies appear to have improved practices after the TV exposure, but the report notes that these leave unanswered the question of what happens to displaced animals, once their habitat has been removed.
THE SAD HISTORY OF THE VICTORIAN KOALA
Friends of the Earth's report chronicles some of the sad history of the koala in Victoria and South Australia, after being nearly wiped out by hunters in the early 20th century. The history shows why, despite a rebound in numbers, the species still faces serious threats to its survival.
Most populations of koalas across Victoria and SA are descended from a mere handful that were saved from hunting in the early 20th century: a group of four that were translocated to Frenchs Island in Victoria, and another small group on neighbouring Phillip Island.
The only populations known to have survived in the wild, preserving a larger and more diverse gene pool, are in the Strzelecki Ranges. Other koalas in the two states are nearly all descended from the very small founder populations on French and Phillip Islands.
As the koalas bred and overpopulated the islands over the years, thousands of animals were translocated all over the state and have again overpopulated some regions, leading to starvation and population crash. These translocated populations are descended from the same handful of animals that lived in the early 20th century, what is known in genetics as a “bottleneck event”.
A HARD LESSON IN GENETIC DIVERSITY
Across Bass Strait, the Tasmanian devil is expected to become extinct in the wild within a couple of decades due to the devil facial tumour disease.
Devils were estimated to have numbers as high as 150,000 in the 1990s before the disease emerged, but these numbers were based on low genetic diversity after the population experienced a bottleneck event or events in the past, probably at least partly due to widespread hunting and poisoning in earlier decades.
While the exact historical details are lost, a severe lack of genetic diversity seems to be a major contributor to the lack of immune resistance to the disease.
Unlike the devils, who became extinct in mainland Australia 600 years ago, koalas do have larger, more genetically diverse populations in northern NSW and Queensland. But these are a different breed to the southern koala, which some scientists have even considered a separate subspecies.
No threat equivalent to the devastating but highly unusual devil facial tumour disease has emerged in southern koalas, but the low genetic diversity of much of the population still gives Amis cause for concern. “I don't think those translocated populations are going to be very stable, long term. Phillip Island in the 1970s and 80s had a big population, but it's now around 20 koalas,” Amis said.
The report includes information from animal carers, not yet subjected to formal scientific study and publication, documenting what may be congenital deformities in some of the translocated populations. One published scientific report has found that the Kangaroo Island population in SA has widespread testicular abnormalities, likely resulting from its extraordinarily narrow gene pool.
A widely reported koala disease is Chlamydia, which is transmitted sexually and from mothers to their offspring. A large percentage of koalas are infected, and the disease leads to many problems including infertility. Chlamydia has been implicated in the rapid decline of some koala populations in the past, but this is usually in combination with other stress factors such as habitat destruction.
In fact, koala populations established from the French Island refuge lack Chlamydia, and it is thought the lack of this disease is a factor leading to overpopulation and subsequent starvation in some translocated koala colonies. Amis thinks this “boom-bust” cycle has been accentuated through the planting of hundreds of thousands of hectares of new habitat in plantation industry areas.
SAVING DIVERSITY: PROTECT THE STRZELECKI KOALAS
the two endemic populations of the Victorian koala in Gippsland have been scientifically recognised as genetically distinct populations, with far greater genetic diversity than the translocated island populations. Yet no special conservation status is given to them under state or federal environmental law.
This is because existing conservation law only applies to threatened sub-species at the lowest level, not smaller sub-groups such as populations.
Southern koalas overall have high numbers, but the overall number obscures the many internal and external threats facing populations. It masks the real threat to the future of the Strzelecki koalas. The Friends of the Earth report details the survey work conducted on them.
“We're trying to get a handle on the possible size of the Strzelecki population,” Amis said. “I am taking a bit of a guess but I think it's under a thousand animals. There's a couple of hotspots where we have found 100-150 animals, but outside those the numbers are much lower.”
Amis blames “roadkill, logging, fire, and dog attack” in particular for a steep decline in numbers. “The 2009 fires knocked out about 40% of the animals – about 40% of the priority habitat got burned, including a lot of spots we knew that were chock-a-block with koalas. If you combine that with the logging, there's been a lot of habitat destroyed in the last 15 years or so. Over the last decade, perhaps a 50-60% reduction in numbers in the Strzelecki Ranges alone.”
The Strzelecki koalas are geographically and genetically close to the NSW populations, but according to Amis “the situation in southern NSW is quite dire.”
He said: “Koalas in the Strzeleckis and south-eastern NSW are related, they are basically the same animal, but I think there's about 20 koalas left in the Bega region. All the way from the south coast of NSW up to Wollongong I think there's only a few hundred animals.”
While the presence of the genetically diverse Strzelecki koala populations suggests that the southern koala could regain a healthy population size and gene pool, a lot still rests on how their habitat, including plantations, is managed, most crucially in the Strzelecki Ranges.
The ongoing habitat surveys are being conducted in a partnership between Friends of the Earth, Friends of Gippsland Bush and Rainforest Rescue. They have found two separate areas of Koala hotspots in the Strzeleckis, and the report notes: “The job now is to try and link up the 'islands' – if possible.”
As an account of the devil facial tumour disease by science journalist David Quammen grimly concludes, “the best time to cope with the problem of genetic impoverishment is before that problem occurs... behind the genetic complexities, lie old truths we know well: keep habitat abundant and intact, and don’t let a species become rare.”
Now would be a good time to put those principles into practice for the southern koala.
[Download the report. Ben Courtice is a member of Friends of the Earth.]
Like Green Left Weekly on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.FOX News Pundits Inadvertently Prove Michelle Obama Right About America Being A Mean Country
In a three-on-one pile on, three male conservatives on Hannity & Colmes Friday night (5/16/08) didn't seem to realize they were making Michelle Obama's case for her as they badgered, belittled and bullied political science professor Caroline Heldman for arguing that there is truth to Obama's "America is a mean country" statement. Even more hypocritically, later in the show, during an interview with CBS News' Charles Osgood, Sean Hannity (the head badgerer, belittler and bully) twice stated that politics has become vicious. With video.
It was another unbalanced Hannity & Colmes panel with two partisan conservatives (Republican John Kasich, Republican Frank Luntz) and the seemingly non-partisan Heldman. Despite the browbeating she received, Heldman stood up to Hannity coolly and got in some excellent zingers while she was at it. I can think of many a professional “Democratic strategist” who could take lessons from her. I only wish she had stated the obvious: That for a group of guys who were upset about someone calling this a mean country, they were behaving in ways that seemed pretty darned mean. But Alan Colmes made that point, instead.
The three-part discussion began with the playing of a Republican ad attacking Mrs. Obama for saying, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country."
“What does it say that the so-called 'family values party' is attacking a candidate's family?” Colmes asked.
Luntz started out with a nod toward neutrality. “I don't like this tone. I think that there's such an effort right now which is not good on either side, to try to demonize, to try to take words out of context... I think this is what is wrong with politics right now.” That's sort of a tacit admission right there that Obama had a point about the meanness. But, predictably, Luntz never took Heldman's side as she pointed out some of the mean aspects in American society.
Kasich also agreed it wasn't "all that good" to attack Mrs. Obama but, he added, “But you see, this is a big values issue.” Kasich went on to criticize Obama's wife anyway. "And what is big about this is when somebody who is a blue collar working person hears the fact that they're not proud of America, it goes the wrong way."
With bullyboy glee, Hannity yelled that it was fair to scrutinize her. He repeatedly interrupted Heldman, barked at her and made an overt effort to tyrannize her.
“What a nice conversation,” Colmes quipped at the end of Part 1 (shown in its entirety in the first video below).
In Part 2, Hannity continued attacking Heldman over Obama (not shown in the video). At the end, Colmes stated, “I think there's a certain meanness to attacking somebody's family and going after the wife of a candidate. That, in fact, makes Michelle Obama's point.”
Indeed.
In Part 3, Heldman was berated for defending Barack Obama's position of being willing to talk to Iran. But she nailed Hannity with this statement: "Obviously, (our current policy) hasn't worked in Iraq to – fighting the global war on terror, Iraq has been utterly abysmal so Ameicans want something else and one of those tools is diplomacy.”
Nobody had an answer to that. Instead, Kasich interrupted to say accusingly, “Americans do not want to talk to a guy who says that he's going to destroy, blow up Israel. I mean, the guy's a nutcase and the people inside this country, these mullahs (said with disgust), they're just extremists as well... Come on! You just don't go round the world and talk to people! That's naive!”
In fact, Kasich is completely wrong. Polls consistently show that Americans favor diplomacy when it comes to dealing with Iran.
And, by the way, tough-talking Kasich never served in the military.
Later in the show, there was an interview with CBS journalist Charles Osgood about humor in politics. In what seemed to be a pre-taped interview, almost the first thing Hannity said was, “It's getting pretty vicious out there in the political world.” Later, he reiterated, “It's a very different time (from the days when politicans could disagree and still be friends) and it seems more vicious.”
Osgood agreed that politics has become nasty and later, Colmes said something similar.
Hannity didn't seem to mind a bit.Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to take away the rights of average citizens in response to a random crazy person's attack on the Country's parliament.
In what is being reported as signalling a shift to "American-style anti-terror tactics," Harper called for Canada's laws and police powers to be "strengthened in the areas of surveillance, detention and arrest."
"We live in a dangerous world. Terrorism has been here with us for a while, and we've come dangerously close on a number of occasions," he said.
Of course, "strengthening police powers" means taking away individual's rights, which is precisely what he is proposing by advocating for an expansion of Canada's own Patriot Act-style legislation.
In short, the actions of one criminal will be exploited to take away the rights of everyone else in no way connected to the attack.
So much for the "measured response" Canada's been praised for in the aftermath of this shooting.Three Veterans Affairs employees face charges of conspiring to steal prescription drugs from a Little Rock VA hospital and distribute them throughout the community.
On Wednesday, Christopher R. Thyer, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, announced the unsealing of a federal indictment against 44-year-old Satishkumar “Steve” Patel of North Little Rock, 33-year-old Alisha Pagan of Mabelvale, and 42-year-old Nikita Neal of Little Rock.
Thyer says the indictment stems from an investigation that was started by the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General (VAOIG) and the DEA in June 2016. It alleges the three were involved in a scheme to order prescription drugs and divert them from the VA John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital to distribute on the street.
Thyer states the investigation revealed that Patel, who was working as a pharmacy technician, used his VA access to a medical supplier's web portal to order more than 7,000 oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, 14,000 Viagra and Cialis pills and 308 ounces of promethazine with codeine syrup. It is alleged that Patel falsified payment invoices to avoid detection.
According to authorities, Patel would then give the prescriptions to pharmacy technician Pagan, who would distribute a portion of the drugs to Neal, a pharmacy technician student trainee.
These items have a street value of more than $160,000 and cost the VA more than $77,000 dollars.
“This case is an example of government employees using their position of trust to not only steal from the taxpayers of Arkansas, but also to poison the communities we live in with dangerous drugs,” Thyer said.
All three defendants are charged with conspiracy to steal the medication and conspiracies to distribute oxycodone and hydrocodone. Patel faces four additional counts of possession with intent to deliver oxycodone and Pagan faces one count of the same charge.
Conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute oxycodone and hydrocodone and possession with intent to distribute oxycodone and hydrocodone is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, a $1 million fine and up to 3 years supervised release. Conspiracy to steal government property is punishable by up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years supervised release.
A spokeperson for the Central Arkansas VA said in a statement to Channel 7 News that two people have been fired and one is still employed, but on unpaid suspension.
"Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System (CAVHS) deeply regrets that these 3 Pharmacy professionals have broken public trust when implicated in pharmaceutical diversion. CAVHS Leadership contacted VA OIG in 2016 when first becoming aware of serious operational concerns within Pharmacy. CAVHS has fully cooperated with every step of the subsequent investigation.
The facility took immediate action to ensure that patient safety was not affected. Two of those mentioned in the indictment are no longer employed by CAVHS, and one is on indefinite suspension. “Inappropriate, unethical, and criminal behavior is not tolerated at CAVHS,” said Dr. Margie Scott, Medical Center director. “We are continuing to work with authorities.”1 7 1 8 9 10 11 ATP III Definition Any three or more of the following criteria: a) Waist circumference: >102 cm in men, >88 cm in women b) Serum triglycerides: ≥150 mg/dL c) HDL-cholesterol: <40 mg/dL in men, < 50 mg/dL in women d) Blood pressure: ≥130/85 mm Hg e) Serum glucose: >110 mg/dL WHO Definition Diabetes or IFG or IGT or insulin resistance, plus at least two of the following criteria a) Waist-to-hip ratio: >0.90 in men, >0.85 in women b) Serum triglycerides: >150 mg/dL or HDL-cholesterol: <35 mg/dL in men and <40 mg/dL in women c) Blood pressure: >140/90 mmHg d) Urinary albumin excretion rate > 20 μg/min or albumin/creatinine ratio >30 mg/g An association between obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension has been recognized for some time. Reaven's 1988 Banting lecture is generally considered a turning point in codifying a unifying principle under the name of MetS or Syndrome X (Reviews: []. Although there is no universally accepted definition or mechanism, (Table) a rough common denominator is the set of five features: obesity (high body weight, BMI and/or waist circumference), high glucose and insulin levels, low HDL, high TAG and high blood pressure. Involvement of insulin resistance is generally a common feature and a likely causative agent for at least some of the symptoms. A subset of these metabolic markers, the TAG:HDL ratio, has been proposed as a simple marker for identifying insulin resistance []. It has recently been questioned whether the risk attributed to MetS is greater than the sum of the individual symptoms [] and, ironically, Reaven has taken the "Con" side on a debate on the viability and diagnostic usefulness of the concept []. Nonetheless, there seems little controversy on the inherent potential for risk in the individual components.
In reading recent reviews of low CHO diets [12, 13], we were struck by the fact that the symptoms of MetS are precisely the ones targeted by diets that restrict CHO. This effect is not entirely surprising since it has been known that dietary CHO tends to raise glucose, insulin, and TAG and lower HDL and conversely, replacing CHO with monounsaturated fat or with fat and protein improves glycemic control and dyslipidemia expressed as elevated TAG and lowered HDL. Nevertheless, most formal guidelines and clinical papers have not emphasized CHO restriction as a viable approach to treating MetS or the individual components [14, 15] and although several authors have indicated an association between MetS and CHO restriction in passing [5, 13, 16, 17] the explicit connection has not been made.
In this study we have isolated five features that are common to almost all definitions. Waist circumference is probably the currently preferred measure for obesity, but most of the literature provides data on body mass and we have used that measure. We have collected information in the literature supporting the notion that these symptoms are specifically ameliorated by reduction in dietary CHO, and to the extent that they have been directly compared, low CHO strategies appear to have an advantage over low fat diets or simple calorie reduction. We conclude that response to CHO restriction may be an operational definition for MetS and that a likely |
lined up to vote against it.
Just one opposition-uniting issue (EU purdah) has appeared so far, although next week's vote on Sunday trading and, further down the road, the newly published Investigatory Powers Bill might just provide more.
It's an interesting question how far the dearth of such issues is down to conscious choice.
Image caption Conservative MPs remember the John Major years
The 19th Century maxim that Whigs were about legislation and Tories were about administration may be coming back into force; the Cameron government's most contentious actions often seem to be administrative - not needing a Commons vote at all, or perhaps requiring secondary legislation rather than a full-dress bill. It's the hallmark of a very cautious government.
What all this implies is that there are occasions where the smaller parties can exercise considerable leverage.
They can choose their moment carefully, wait until the government is committed to a position and then search their souls and discover a reason not to support it.
Then they can allow themselves to be wooed back into the fold by suitable sweeteners.
'Best Chief Whip'
Perhaps this is one of the factors behind the government's impending climb-down on cuts to Short Money, likely to be embodied in a resolution of the House next week.
Short Money - named after the former Labour Deputy Leader Ted Short - is the money paid to opposition parties to support their Parliamentary work; the cuts were much resented by the smaller parties and certainly made the government business managers' lives harder.
And at the heart of the government's undefeated Commons record, is the Tory whips office.
Image copyright Conservative Party Image caption Mark Harper is in charge of party discipline
Chief Whip Mark Harper ("the best Chief for a generation," one source told me) gets good reviews from some surprising people, for smart judgement of the mood of his Commons flock.
The whips have all kinds of ways of making the lives of errant MPs difficult, and the "usual suspect" rebels may think his punishments of their infractions are heavy-handed - they would, wouldn't they?
But loyalists, especially those who, if you will excuse the mixed metaphor, have to grit their teeth when they toe the line, rather relish the resounding public smack of firm government. A number thoroughly enjoyed the removal of awkward squaddie Chris Chope from a plum role on the Council of Europe.
Reconciliation and revenge
In the last Parliament the EU was a deadly issue for the Conservative leadership; it was John Barron's precision-targeted amendment to the Queen's Speech regretting the lack of an EU referendum that forced the Conservative leadership into attempting to get a referendum bill through as a Private Members Bill (the Lib Dems vetoed having a full government Bill) and then into the manifesto commitment which led inexorably to the vote due in June.
The leadership may not have liked it, but it produced a position around which the Conservative Party could unify - for the time being.
So in this Parliament, with a referendum legislated for and a date set, there have been few occasions for euro-rebellion.
But what happens after the referendum is anyone's guess.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Cabinet Euro-rebels are at odds with prime minister
Acrimony is on the rise in the referendum debate, words are being spoken that will not be easily forgotten, and the prime minister and Mr Harper will doubtless be pondering the exact combination of reconciliation and revenge they should deploy to keep the party together.
They will be helped by the increasing realisation that, given Labour's disarray, the Tories could be in power for quite a while, as long as they avoid civil war.
Guerrilla campaign
That message is being whispered into certain ears by a group of Parliamentary patriarchs who retain post-traumatic memories of the Maastricht era and its disastrous impact on the Major government.
As we know, referendums are supposed to settle big questions the parties in parliament cannot resolve for themselves, and settle them for a generation.
And as we also know, it doesn't always work out that way; ask the SNP.
Disappointment is one of the most corrosive emotions in politics, and a close vote to stay in will mean the Euro-pot continues to simmer and may occasionally boil over.
It could provoke a Commons guerrilla campaign by some Conservative Brexiteers, against contentious EU-related measures, but, again, for them to win they would need the support of the mostly pro-EU opposition parties, which looks improbable on most issues.
On the other hand, a vote to leave will overturn the Tory top table, and result in a new leadership, leaving the pro-EU wing with nowhere to go.
It is hard to imagine pro-EU Tories daring to defy a referendum vote to leave, by rebelling on the necessary legislation.
There are many cleaner ways to commit political suicide than that. But a close Remain vote is more dangerous to party unity.I’m comforted to know I’m not the only one to get bamboozled by MLM schemes.
Many followers have been kind enough to contact me to share their experiences with MLMs – we’ve had accounts from Ann Summers, Arbonne and of course, Maz Carrah adding her voice to #TeamPoonique.
UK-based follower Della [not her real name] has asked for her Avon story to be shared with you all. Now, Avon has established itself as a household name, and its perceived as “the teddy-bear of MLMs“, so it will be interesting to hear her story.
Before reading Della’s experience, please remind yourself of my mission statement here. In a nutshell, all views presented in this blog are ours, and ours only. Your own personal experiences with MLM companies may differ, negatively or positively. All names and identifying features have been changed to protect the individuals concerned – this is Della’s personal opinion of her time with Avon.
It is so important for more people to speak out – you could help someone else from losing money, friends and dignity (and eventually bring about the demise of MLM – here’s to hoping!). Your anonymity is always guaranteed.
Take it away, Della. Memes and devil’s advocacy added by yours truly 😉
[Della:] This all happened back in 2010. I decided to be an “Avon Lady” to help my depression and to help me get out the house (after losing my job 2 years earlier when I became disabled).
I signed up as a representative, and got my mums shopping trolley (one of those 2-wheel pull along things) to help me carry books and orders, as I had to use a walking stick to help me get about.
My housing estate was fairly new, and I was told there was no Avon rep officially operating my area. There was a woman called Angie operating in our area unofficially, but she didn’t actually live on our estate – she was only doing so because her daughter lived here, and apparently the daughter wasn’t eligible to do Avon herself.
My upline Sales Leader, Bettina, (yes, there are uplines in Avon) told me that she “would tell Angie the area was mine, and that she should stick to her own area that she was given, not to do both.“
So with that knowledge, I went full steam ahead in my mission as an Avon Lady – the more I made friends with my customers, the more I began to hear horror stories about Angie. Apparently, she used to screech at them if they hadn’t given her catalogues back, or if they weren’t in when she called for delivery. They said Angie was always rude, and if they had forgotten to get money out to pay her, or needed to pay another day, she would give them more abuse.
[Elle:] Just chiming in, Della, as I need play devil’s advocate here – although its not professional to scream at her customers, I can actually see this through Angie’s perspective. It must have been frustrating for her, if people regularly hadn’t got their order money ready, or she tried to make her deliveries and no one was around.
Also though, Angie needs to remember that perhaps her customers had unpredictable work and family commitments, and she was being a little too hard on them. Its a two-way street, I know. Presumably Avon reps have to pay for her catalogues etc?
[Della:] Yep unfortunately – catalogues, bags for books, order forms, paper bags for orders, samples and other stuff!
[Elle:] So perhaps this added to her frustration? Again, not defending her attitude towards customers, but something to bear in mind from an outsider’s perspective?
[Della:] Oh trust me, Elle, her behaviour got worse, the more I established myself in the area. I also found out that because she was doing my estate as her unofficial second area, she was giving the customers the outdated catalogue, whereas mine was always the latest.
So, bearing in mind that my books were newer, I started to find they were going missing from my customers’ doorsteps. Or, they would tell me that “Angie had already collected it – she said it was hers.”
Thing is, these customers loved me being their local rep – they would talk to me for ages, some would invite me in for a cuppa, and lots would place orders through me. This did not sit well with Angie.
Angie was not going to give up her “second territory” without a fight. She wanted me gone, so she started with the abusive voicemails. Turns out, she had got my mobile number off the front of one of my catalogues. The moment I first got abuse from her, I panicked and told Bettina.
Bettina did what a Sales Leader is supposed to do, and reprimanded Angie – but Angie turned on her too, her own upline! After I received each abusive call that week, I would still let Bettina know, but it was relentless.
I tried to ignore it, and get on with my job as Avon Lady, but that made Angie worse. If she couldn’t get a reaction from me over the phone, she started turning up on my doorstep shouting and swearing at me, even in front of my 5 and 3 year-old sons.
My mental health subsequently worsened. I became tearful and would have panic attacks whenever I saw her. In the end, I cracked up. I called Bettina and asked for a meeting, as we needed to sort this once and for all.
When the day of the meeting came, I was so nervous. Bettina turned up to the meeting with her own upline Tara, the Avon Area Manager, and I felt intimidated from the start. Tara was brusque, cold and had little sympathy for the situation.
They told me they had already conduced a separate meeting with Angie, but they didn’t elaborate further. They proceeded to go through my little black book of customers, and tore it to shreds (not literally, may I hasten to add).
I was asked to point out who my favourite customers were, my best customers, and ones that had expressed that they preferred me over Angie. I did as they asked, and before I knew it, they both started crossing loads of names out, saying I “wasn’t allowed to go to them anymore.”
This was despite me telling them that these were my frequent customers, who expressly preferred me. When they had finished crossing out names, they left me with the bare minimum. All of my best customers were gone, leaving me with ones that would only order out of 1 book in every 4, if that.
I begged and pleaded with them but they wouldn’t listen to me. Through my tears, I pointed out that it seemed they were more on Angie’s side, not mine. This was despite the abuse she had also given them! They told me they “just wanted an easy life” which to me, simply said they were scared of her too.
I was disheartened, but still vowed to carry on after that. As resentment bubbled up inside me, I thought screw them and I carried on going to my favourite customers – they all told me they would never order from Angie, even if they were forced to. I wasn’t entirely rebellious though – I did stop going to some of the ones that were taken away from me, although it really sucked.
One day I went to a new road nearby, as I was told by some of the residents that they had no Avon Lady to order from.
Not long after, I received a phone call from another rep called Wendy, who politely told me it was her road. I apologised straight away and we got talking. I mentioned my issues caused by Angie, and she said she had the same problem with her stealing books and giving her abuse over the phone. Little did I know that things would start to get worse than I could ever imagine.
Despite the fact Angie had most of my customers now, the abuse continued. It was getting to the point where the thought of leaving my house was terrifying. That’s when I knew I had to get the police involved, as it was sheer harassment.
Before I tell you about the police involvement, I have to give you a bit of information about my boys, as it’s relevant.
My sons were 5 & 3 years-old at the time, as I mentioned before. Both have speech problems. My eldest has a severe speech disorder, and has been having speech therapy since he was in nursery.
He had started school in the September of 2010, and was unable to talk more than a few words but was difficult to understand him. He was so bad that he was given a special-needs statement, had special-needs help, and the extra funding too. He hardly spoke to other children because they couldn’t understand him but he would still play with them. My youngest boy also had speech problems, but his was a delay and severe shyness.
Now back to the police bit.
So I contacted the police and they said they would send someone out, so I wasn’t surprised when there was eventually a knock on my door. However, the officer said they weren’t here to talk about the harassment, they were here to talk to me about my husband and I “stalking Angie’s family, and my eldest son bullying her grandchildren.”
I was gobsmacked – I didn’t even know Angie’s family, so how could we stalk them? After talking to the police I found out that Angie’s daughter lived near me (I can see her house from mine), and we happen to walk past her house everyday for the school run.
As soon as we calmly explained all this to the police, it was clear that no we weren’t stalking the family. Now onto the bullying allegation – we were told that our non-verbal son had been verbally abusing this women’s grandchildren. They went to the same school, but were much older than my boy.
I know I shouldn’t have, but I laughed, to which of course the police looked at me like I was a crazy women. This was until I explained to them about the fact my boy is non-verbal, and I even called him into the room to show the police. They were evidently taken aback that Angie had lied to them about this innocent little boy. I then started to talk to them about why I had called them and how bad it was making my mental health.
They told me they would talk to her about the false statements and the abuse towards me. They even said that she was hostile towards them, and that it was likely she wouldn’t listen.
[Elle:] Sounds like this Angie was a law unto herself then? A good candidate for The Jeremy Kyle Show, from what you’re saying.
[Della:] Pretty much! I told you it got worse, didn’t I. The police then advised that if i really wanted to get some of my sanity back, then it was best to quit Avon for good.
So I talked about it to my husband, to decide what was best for our family. He said, “well you haven’t been happy for a couple of months, Della, and your depression is worse, not better.”
He went on to say that the family was suffering because of it, and that he was scared for me when my phone rang or the door knocked (in case it was her). Plus, there was the effect it was having on our poor boys. So that was it, decision made – I was going to quit Avon.
Before I officially knocked things on the head, my best friend, Renee, had just started Avon herself. She was given her own area, but I knew some of my faithful old customers really didn’t want to deal with Angie, ever. So I went to visit them, bringing Renee with me -I explained why I was quitting, and also asked them if they wanted Renee as their Avon Lady, instead of Angie.
Needless to say, all of the customers wanted Renee. So, once that was agreed and I was satisfied my customers would be in good hands, I rang Bettina to quit. I told her why; the lack of support, the news about the police, and most of all, that Renee was being given my customers. Did she care? Well, she pretended to, I guess.
Fast forward a few months and my eldest son was coming on leaps and bounds in school, and even got himself a little friend, Tilly. Apart from the fact he was only 5 and they were being told off for always giggling in class, there was another problem – Tilly’s mother was the best friend of Angie’s daughter, and I was scared of her because of this. It took me months to pluck up the courage to talk to her, but when I did, she realised that the lies she was told about me were not true – we eventually became best friends.
It’s now 7 years later, and things are definitely calmer. I still have to walk past the family’s house, but if I see them in the street I still can’t even look at them. I just don’t know what lies Angie told about me, but maybe that’s just my anxiety talking. Needless to say, I won’t be picking up my Avon Lady mantle again.
I would like to thank Della for sharing her experiences with me, and giving me permission to publish her tale on my blog. Della has also said she is happy to answer any further questions readers may have on her Avon story – simply drop me a line, and I will be sure to pass them on to her.
If you like what I do and wish to support my anti-MLM mission (and turn my #Poonique story into a detailed novella), please consider becoming my Patreon.
If you have a MLM experience you would like to share, feel free to drop me a line below. Your anonymity is always guaranteed.
Don’t forget to join the MLM fight on social media – if you’re on Twitter, please give @ElleBeauBlog a follow (and help me get the #Poonique hashtag trending again!). Alternatively, join in the discussion with Elle Beau, the Anti-Blogger on Facebook. I am also on Instagram now – look for @ellebeaublog!
Are you stuck in a MLM and are looking for a way to leave? My friends at Bot Watch have produced a fantastic guide on how to get out – read it here.
Or, are any of you concerned for a loved one who is totally and utterly wrapped up in MLM? Bot Watch have advice for you on what to do and how to remain supportive – read it here.
Please, also check out the good work of the people of Bot Watch, Juice Plus/MLM Lies Exposed and Timeless Vie. They work tirelessly to expose the truth and lies of the MLM industry, so anyone considering this line of work can make a fair, informed decision. In fact, I now have a Recommended Reading page for Anti-MLM writers and interesting lifestyle bloggers I think you will enjoy, such as Chammy in Real Life and my very first Patreon, @YourOlly.
For something a little different to pyramid schemes, I would also recommend a look at what Bad Psychics are up to. Award-winning and seen-on-TV, they have worked to expose false claims made by psychics, mediums and the paranormal since 2003.
AdvertisementsThis is a truly devastating tale.
Sophie Taylor, the 16-year-old girlfriend of gamekeeper Calum Murray, 18, was accidentally killed as her boyfriend's gun went off as he was cleaning it. The accident was so devasting, that Murray reportedly killed himself immediately after it happened.
The tragic events were apparently witnessed by another couple who were with Taylor and Murray in a cottage on the Glenavon estate near Tomintoul, the highest point in the Scottish highlands.
From the Press and Journal:
Mr. McPherson [a local] said the young couple were with another young couple when the incident happened. He added: "The story around the village is that there were two couples there and the two males were cleaning their guns and the gun went off in the house and killed Sophie, at which point Calum got up and went out to the front porch and shot himself.
According to MSNBC, no one else is being sought in connection with the shooting.
"The only saving grace is apparently there was the other couple there who witnessed the whole thing. There will be no conjecture with this one. It's all sorted out," McPherson told the P&J.
Both families are devastated. Taylor's parents released a statement saying, "We are devastated at the loss of our beautiful daughter Sophie, who will be greatly missed by us, her brother and her grandparents as well as her many friends."
The Scottish Gamekeeper's Association also expressed "widespread shock and sadness" over the tragedy, according to the Herald Scotland.Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi confirmed the results of the commission will now be examined by the CDF. (EP)
Vatican Commission Completes Medjugorje Investigation
The international Vatican commission investigating the events at Medjugorje has completed its work and will submit its findings to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican confirmed today.
The Vatican released the following statement this morning:
"The director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi, confirmed on Saturday that the international commission investigating the events in Medjugorje held its last meeting on 17 January. The commission, created by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is presided by Cardinal Camillo Ruini. The commission has reportedly completed its work and will submit the outcomes of its study to the Congregation."
After the commission’s report is examined by the CDF, it will be given to the Pope who will have the final say, but this may take some time.
The commission, which has been working in strict secrecy since 2010, is made up of an international panel of cardinals, bishops, theologians and other experts who have been undertaking a detailed study of reports of Marian apparitions at Medjugorje which began in 1981. These apparitions continue regularly to this day, according to the shrine’s six “seers”, attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year.
The local hierarchy has sought to discourage the “Medjugorje phenomenon” which prompted the Vatican to carry out its own investigation. The Holy Father met Bosnian Cardinal Vinko Puljić, Archbishop of Vrhbosna, Sarajevo, in private audience on Thursday.
In November last year, CDF prefect Archbishop Gerhard Mueller unsettled devotees of Medjugorje when he sent out an instruction to forbid ‘seer’ Ivan Dragicevic from speaking in the United States.
Some Croatian news outlets have speculated the commission's findings are "neither yes or no" and that the Vatican will continue to allow people to visit.
The Vatican currently does not forbid anyone visiting Medjugorje, but visitors are asked not to engage in public celebrations that take for granted the authenticity of the apparitions.
H/T Te Deum LaudamusI hadn’t even considered the possibility that Gabe Newell would be joining us.
When Valve invited me to its office last week for a series of roundtable interviews, the company made it clear that I wasn’t going to learn about Half-Life 3. “No new announcements,” Valve communications boss Doug Lombardi explained to me in a message. What Lombardi didn’t have to tell me, however, is that I wasn’t going to get to speak with Valve founder Gabe Newell. I already knew that.
So I admit that when Newell walked into the large conference room that overlooks Bellevue, Washington at Valve’s headquarters, I was a bit surprised. And then I was even more shocked when he sat down at the table and prepared to field questions from me and a group of about a dozen other reporters as part of our session on Valve’s efforts with virtual reality.
Newell’s presence didn’t stun me due to his star power — although I think it’s fair to feel that way. The luminary founded Valve and led the teams that would create Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and the Steam PC gaming platform. That distribution service is now responsible for a significant portion of all PC gaming sales, and it generates billions of dollars in revenue for that market.
No, I was surprised because Valve is not a company that typically opens up to reporters, and it rarely offers Newell for interviews. It’s something of an old inside joke among journalists that reaching out to Valve for a comment is pointless. No one at the company is going to respond (although, to be fair, that’s not true in my experience despite this meme). So it’s already a big deal for Valve to open up and give reporters a chance to ask questions — and it’s something else entirely for Newell to join in on that.
But Newell did open up. And as I observed the industry veteran responding to questions or fiddling with a pen while other Valve employees carried on about the state of VR industry or the next generation of SteamVR controllers, I heard a number of open and plainly honest answers. And I learned a lot about this revered company and its enigmatic captain.
Valve knows you crave communication
For the last session of the day, Newell and long-time Valve employee Erik Johnson fielded questions about Valve as a company. And as he had done earlier as part of the VR panel, Newell dominated the discussion. But he opened this time by answering the question that I think all of the reporters in attendance were wondering: “Why did Valve invite us here for these interviews?”
Valve in 2017 While the company was once only a developer, it is now that and much more. Here are some of its active projects. It runs the Steam PC gaming portal for buying and downloading games.
Dota 2, its free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena, which is one of the most lucrative games on PC.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, its latest take on the long-running competitive shooter, which is the best-selling Steam game ever.
Team Fortress 2, its class-based team shooter, which helped bring the company into the free-to-play business model.
Well, because of you.
“There was a bunch of stuff that we thought was not particularly interesting that clearly is interesting to [our customers],” Newell said in reference to a recent question-and-answer session he did with the public on Reddit. “So this was kinda like, ‘OK, well — maybe we should start also having conversations with you [reporters] more.’ And so, as always, this is an experiment.”
Newell also dispelled the notion that he avoids the press because reporters annoy him.
“To be honest, I kinda get bored listening to myself talk, so I assume other people are bored listening to me talk,” said Newell. “It’s not irksome at all. It’s a way of connecting with the customers, and that’s what pays the bills.”
But I got the sense while watching Newell answering our questions throughout the day that this roundtable didn’t happen just because Steam customers seemed enthusiastic during a Reddit AMA. Reading between the lines, I think Valve recognizes that it has transformed as a company over the years, and that transformation probably felt like a natural, slow-paced evolution inside the Bellevue headquarters. But for those of us outside Gabe’s walls who grew up on Steam, Valve feels radically different than the developer that made Half-Life 2.
And so this interview happened because enough people at Valve finally noticed the gap between the public perception of the company and the internal perception among employees. And someone at Valve must’ve felt that it was worth closing that gap either because it caused them distress or because they are so excited about how the company functions that they wanted to share that with you.
The time economy
Valve has an employee handbook that describes a flat corporate structure where no one has a title and no one is in charge of anyone else. That’s real, and it’s something the company takes seriously. So when I write that someone at Valve must’ve felt it was important to do this interview, I mean that someone must’ve felt strongly enough to convince everyone else participating that it was worth their time.
“Any time you have decision-making processes in an organization, you have to have some mechanism,” said Newell. “A lot of places have hierarchy. The person higher up the chain makes decisions that filter down. The problem with that is that it assumes data is flowing efficiently in the organization. Especially when you’re doing invention rather than command and control kinds of organizations. The information to make good decisions is actually relatively local. It’s distributed throughout your organization. So you actually want to push decision-making as far out into the weeds as possible.”
Image Credit: GamesBeat/Jeffrey Grubb
Essentially, Newell is explaining that if he wanted to decide what everyone at Valve should put their time and energy into, he would need all of the information that everyone in the company possesses. He argues that is wasteful, and he takes that to an extreme: Valve doesn’t have budgets.
Now, Valve is a company that can afford not to have budgets thanks to the insane revenues that Steam generates. But it’s not the only company in the world that has that privilege. It is, however, one of the few companies that actually acknowledges that money is not its scarce resource. Instead, Valve’s most precious resource is time.
“There’s not a group of people who say, this is how much money we’re going to make on this title, so that’s how many people we assign to that project,” said Newell. “That’s an economy based on the budgetary process. Our economy is based on people’s time. That’s the scarce commodity. If we could spend money to improve people’s productivity, there’s almost no case where that’s not a good tradeoff. The scarce commodity here is not money. It’s how many hours there are in a day.”
Valve expects its employees to take responsibility on voting where they should spend their time to best serve the company’s customers. According to Newell, not a single person at the company is working on a project because someone else told them it was important and they had to. He gave an example of how this can start from nothing and then snowball into a major project.
“When we started Dota [2], a bunch of people were skeptical,” said Newell. “This sounds stupid. Why are we doing this, giving a game away for free? There’s this economy aspect to it? User-generated content seems kind of wacky. Nobody was assigned to work on it. But after Adrian Finol, a week after he started, had the top-down camera working. Suddenly other engineers go, OK, there are other interesting problems in the space I can work on. Then more and more people pile on to the project as they think it’s interesting.”
This process might come at the expense of what you might expect from any other gaming publisher on Earth. Whereas you know Activision is going to have the next Call of Duty out this holiday, you don’t know when Valve’s next game will drop.
“Nobody’s working on yet another sequel,” said Newell. “Everybody works on what they think is cool. If someone thinks nothing we’re working on is interesting enough, they can always articulate what they think is an interesting problem. That’s how VR started. There was no top-down impulse behind VR. It came about because people said, I think these problems are tractable enough and we can add value in this space by doing X-Y-Z.”
It’s not all cozy engineers chasing their hobbies
As Newell fidgeted with his pen and explained the structure of Valve, it was obvious that he has faith in this system. Or, more likely, he has ample evidence that a flat hierarchy works because Valve has so many successful products. But the company understands that it’s likely that its customers may not share its confidence.
Image Credit: Jeffrey Grubb/GamesBeat
“We’ve talked about this stuff a lot, and we see our customers talking about it,” Johnson said. “There’s a detail, a bit of nuance in there, that’s usually missing from what customers think about how we work internally. When people are making those decisions, to work on one project or another, they’re conscientious about what customers want as well.”
Valve employees aren’t making their decisions in a vacuum based solely on what excites them. They take a lot into consideration, and that includes the desires of players.
“That’s the fundamental thing,” said Johnson. “It’s not this pure selfish: ‘I feel like working on this on Tuesday but not on Wednesday’ type of thing. They know, when they work on one product or another, the product they’re leaving has a void to fill. They’re moving and making sure our customers are still happy one way or another. It’s not this constant free-flowing thing. They have to consider all factors for all customers.”
But you might not agree that Valve is taking you into consideration. Maybe you think the company’s customer service stinks, or you’ve been screaming for a year that a Counter-Strike map is broken, or you just want to hear from the company why its servers are down. Chances are, if you’re a dedicated Steam user, you’ve found something that you think is busted, and it never seems like the company acknowledges that.
That’s probably not going to change. During a panel with the developers of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2, I asked about the view on community management and communication. I brought the subreddit for Counter-Strike: GO, which often has massively popular threads about Valve screwing up and then publicly acknowledging that.
And while Valve admits that its customer service is garbage — Johnson called it terrible — the company is probably not going to suddenly hire community communication specialists.
“We think it’s critically important for our products — for the people that are actually building things to be as close to customers as possible,” Counter-Strike developer Brian Leventhal explained. “We feel like it’s been successful in a bunch of areas. It has tradeoffs. But generally we want the person who’s going to have to make Dust 2 better have to be the person to defend those decisions to the community. That kind of applies to everything. We don’t think that adding a person in the middle of that process is going to end with — we would much rather fix the problem and tell them it’s fixed than have somebody say, hey, we’re working on it.”
Again, this is about the flow of information. Everyone on the Counter-Strike team is responsible for everything about the game, so they can’t pass off the responsibility of checking in on the community to someone else. And, in the end, the company thinks that it’s more important to solve problems than to have someone tell you that they’re solving them.
But the point is that Valve claims it’s listening, and it often decides to fix something specifically because of a thread on Reddit. Other times, the company make ignore a community outcry because the data shows that the audience actually wants something else, but Valve still argues that this is a form of listening.
Motivating factors
I could see it in Newell when he spoke — all these points of data impacting what his decision about how to spend his time. It’s up to him to listen to you, to look at the user metrics on Steam, and to read the response to reporting like this to figure out what Valve can do and how he can help the company accomplish that.
Today, that information and Newell’s desires have ended up with him on the VR team. He sees a chance to give gamers something beyond mouse-and-keyboard experiences, and he understands how he can contribute to that. But in the past, he has worked on projects that weren’t necessarily about moving Valve or the industry forward. Instead, he focused his energies on building tools and hardware to insulate PC gaming from a potential threat when he thought that Windows 8 could lead Microsoft to close down the traditionally open personal-computing space. That led to Valve creating its SteamOS Linux-based operating system and the console-like Steam Machine PCs.
Neither Valve’s own OS or its PC gaming hardware have really taken off, and no one at Valve seemed that interested in talking about them anymore. And that’s likely because the fear that Microsoft was going to overreach has faded, and so the motivation to get traction with those products has faded.
“Being worried that somebody else is going to do something stupid and wreck the gaming community is a little less exciting than doing something more positive,”said Newell. “But it’s true on any project. Everybody knows you can’t eat marshmallows all the time. We’ve all been doing this a long time. Everyone’s pretty sophisticated. You can tell people in your own field, people who understand that to do what you do well requires you to have a lot of maturity and experience in order to make sure you’re doing both the glamorous, fun parts of your job and the not so glamorous, but equally important stuff.”
But for Valve, VR is glamorous, and the way Newell spoke about it, it’s clear that the company is not going to let it fade. SteamVR will either succeed or implode, but it won’t just quietly fall into the background. And that’s the difference of the motivation. When it’s something the customers are interested in and it’s something Valve employees are excited to work on, then the company will do everything it takes.
From zero to 100
The day I went to Valve, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. Mountain time. I got in my car while it was still dark, and I drove to Denver International Airport. By the end of that day, I had caught a plane back home and got back to my car in the airport parking lot by 11 p.m.
Image Credit: Valve
It was odd to go from having a minimum amount of contact with Valve on the drive to the airport that morning to having hours worth of conversations with some of the company’s most important people to think about on the drive home. That whiplash in going from zero interaction with Valve to 100 was overwhelming because now that I had access, I was discovering a million new questions I wish I would’ve had them answer.
It’s also bizarre to have an opinion on Gabe Newell beyond his persona as an internet meme. A handful of hours aren’t enough to get to know anything, but my first impression gave me enough time to at least notice some interesting things about the way he speaks. He seems to have all the thoughts in the world swimming around in his head all at the same time. It takes him a sentence |
fan appreciation BBQ!
Boston Celtics phenom Paul Pierce, who last visited Kansas University’s Allen Fieldhouse for his jersey-retirement ceremony in January of 2003, will be back again Sept. 24.
This time, he won’t be wearing a suit and tie, but his old KU No. 34 when he competes in an exhibition game in the Jayhawks’ tradition-rich building.
“It will be great coming back to Lawrence and catching up with some old friends and meeting the current players,” Pierce said Monday in response to KU announcing plans for a 4 p.m. all-star game involving former KU players, most currently in the NBA.
“No place compares to Allen Fieldhouse and the rich tradition that is Kansas basketball. When you are a Jayhawk, you’re a Jayhawk for life,” added Pierce, who will be playing for a team led by one of two former KU coaches — Larry Brown or Ted Owens.
“The University of Kansas has meant so much to me,” Hall of Famer Brown said. “I have a lot of fond memories of my time in Lawrence, and coming back for this event will be great. I look forward to visiting with current staff, the old coaches and players and friends.”
Most of KU’s current NBA players are expected to attend — and compete. KU’s current pros are: Pierce, Cole Aldrich (Oklahoma City), Darrell Arthur (Memphis), Mario Chalmers (Miami), Nick Collison (OKC), Drew Gooden (Milwaukee), Xavier Henry (Memphis), Kirk Hinrich (Atlanta), Darnell Jackson (Sacramento), Marcus Morris (Houston), Markieff Morris (Phoenix), Brandon Rush (Indiana), Josh Selby (Memphis) and Julian Wright (Toronto).
Other KU greats such as Danny Manning, Wayne Simien and Darnell Valentine will be on hand, possibly even playing for a minute or two.
“It’s going to be a spectacular event,” KU coach Bill Self said. “Not very often can you spin a negative into a positive, but we get an opportunity to do so with the NBA lockout. There have been numerous times we’d like to get all these guys back at the same time, but it’s always been hard for the current NBA players to come back because their schedules run similar to ours.
“On September 24th we are going to have a KU alumni game, which is basically a legends game, in which many of our most recent KU greats are going to come back, allowing them a chance to run out of the tunnel one more time and play a game, hopefully in front of a packed house.
“We have many committed,” Self added, “the majority being recent guys who have played (under Self), and several of Roy’s (Williams) players will be here as well, including NBA all-star Paul Pierce, who is coming back for the first time in a long time. We’ve asked coach Brown and coach Owens to be the honorary coaches. Much of the proceeds will go to the memory of (former KU assistant coach) Neil Dougherty, who lost his life tragically this summer due to a heart attack. We’re working with Neil’s family to find a cause that will definitely give Neil a lasting legacy in an area of his life that was very dear to him.”
Tickets for Legends of the Phog will be $20 for adults and $10 for students and youth. KU students and Williams Fund members in the Hall of Fame, Champion and All-American membership level may order tickets starting Wednesday. All remaining Williams Fund membership levels may order tickets starting Aug. 29. The public may purchase tickets starting Sept. 6. Tickets may be ordered via the KU Tickets Office online or by calling 800-34-HAWKS. Parking is free.
“This is big,” said Self, who likely will have several top recruits in town for the event. “We’ll put 16,000 in the fieldhouse for sure. Ticket prices are unbelievable. How many people can come back and see Paul Pierce play for $20 or students can come to a game for $10? Think of all the videos that’ll be going on and the introductions and how cool this could possibly be.”
As far as donating to a cause for former KU assistant Dougherty, Self noted: “That’s something we really wanted to do. He’s a guy that loved KU and spent a lot of time here. We want to do something to allow him to have a legacy to benefit youth in our area.”
In addition, KU will donate some of the proceeds to one of Dougherty’s favorite local charities — the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence.
Self indicated several KU players who are playing overseas, such as Sherron Collins, Sasha Kaun and Keith Langford, want to attend if possible. Their commitments to their teams may prevent that from happening, however. He noted players such as Jeff Boschee, Billy Thomas, Greg Ostertag, Ryan Robertson and Jacque Vaughn hopefully will be in the fieldhouse, maybe even playing a few minutes if the NBA teams need players.
“We’ll try to get as many players as we can who are currently professionals,” Self said.
Recruiting
Isaiah Lewis, a 6-foot-3, 160-pound junior point guard from Christ the King High in Brooklyn, N.Y., has narrowed his list of schools to six: KU, Florida, North Carolina, Memphis, Georgia Tech and Miami. The No. 43-ranked player in the Class of 2013 will attend the Oct. 14 Late Night in the Phog. He tells Rivals.com that KU is his leader.A report released this week by the ACT commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment found the ACT government is on track to meet its target of a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.
“The ACT has quickly established a world leading reputation from our work to reduce the impacts of climate change, including our target of 100 percent renewable electricity from wind and solar farms by 2020,” the ACT minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Shane Rattenbury says.
“The report also provides many excellent suggestions as we work towards our target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at the latest,” Rattenbury says.
“We’re implementing a light rail network powered by renewable electricity and we’re trialing electric buses, recognising that public transport and active travel are key to reducing emissions, but also providing health benefits.”
“The commissioner’s suggestion for energy efficiency reform in the building sector is another priority area. More energy efficient buildings, apartments and homes will both reduce emissions and reduce the costs of keeping us comfortable all year round,” he says.
“In coming months, we will engage with the Canberra community on the ACT Government’s next climate change strategy, including interim targets to guide our pathway to net zero emissions by at least 2050.”
“It is more important than ever that we engage with the community on the shared challenge of addressing climate change, and that we demonstrate leadership to other cities across the world,” he says.The entrance of the main railway station is seen in Rome, Italy, January 25, 2016. REUTERS/Tony Gentile
ROME (Reuters) - Police briefly evacuated Italy’s main railway station on Monday after reports of a man with a gun in the building in central Rome.
There were no reports of any shots being fired and state broadcaster RAI later said a man had been stopped with a toy gun at a different train station in the city.
Normal service at the main station was halted for 27 minutes and the platforms were evacuated, railway operator Ferrovie dello Stato said on its news website and Twitter feed. Police did not say whether anyone had been arrested there.
Rome is on high security alert because of a 48-hour visit to the city by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The Iranian delegation was attending an event far from the station at the time of the alert.
Along with many other European countries, Rome raised its security alert last year after gun and bomb attacks killed 130 in Paris. No specific threat to Italy has been officially reported.Is a hooded clitoris to blame for many women’s failure to reach orgasm with their sexual partners? Whether it is or not, the procedure is becoming more popular among both women and physicians.
In Chicago, a physician with offices on Michigan Avenue offers clitoral unhooding today for $1,000 (plus operating room fees). His intention? To more easily enable a woman to reach orgasm. Clitoral unhooding falls under the larger category of female genital cosmetic surgeries (FGCS), surgeries that are reportedly becoming more popular among women and physicians. Some physicians, even those who don’t perform FGCS, see them as part of the future of plastic surgery.
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The assumption is that these surgeries don’t have much of a past. In fact, there is a long history of surgeries on female genitals—especially on the clitoris—as “sexual enhancement” for women, designed to help them achieve their “proper role” as sexual partners. Over a century ago, another Chicago physician also removed clitoral hoods of women, also as therapy to enable them easier orgasms. The use of female circumcision since the late 1800s to treat a woman’s lack of orgasm reveals a medical understanding of the function of the clitoris as sexual—an understanding held decades prior to the physiological evidence supplied by William Masters and Virginia Johnson.
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Understanding the sexual nature of the clitoris and its importance to female sexual pleasure, some physicians have, for well over a century, diagnosed a condition of the clitoris as the physiological cause for a woman’s failure to have an orgasm with her husband. These physicians thus treated the lack of an orgasm in the marital bed as a sexual disorder treatable through surgery.
In the U.S., the first documented use of female circumcision as a sexual enhancement therapy appeared at a time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex was increasingly seen as an important component for a healthy marriage.
By removing the clitoral foreskin, some physicians (as well as non-physicians) thought the clitoris would be more exposed to the penis during penetrative intercourse, and would thus receive direct stimulation from the penis. Physicians performed—and some women or their spouses sought out—female circumcision in order to maintain (or conform to) the sexual behavior deemed culturally appropriate for white, U.S.-born, middle- to upper-class women: orgasm with their husbands.
In the United States, the first documented use of female circumcision as a sexual enhancement therapy occurred in the late 19th century, appearing at a time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex was increasingly seen as an important component for a healthy marriage. Physicians performed female circumcision to help married women who wanted—or whose husbands wanted their wives to have—orgasms during martial sex.
Practitioners who removed clitoral hoods to enable female orgasm included Chicago gynecologist Denslow Lewis, who presented evidence for the benefits of female circumcision at a meeting of the American Medical Association in 1899. In “a large percentage” of women who failed to find marital passion “there is a preputial adhesion, and a judicious circumcision, together with consistent advice, will often be successful,” according to Lewis. Lewis had treated 38 women with circumcision, and had “reasonably satisfactory results in each instance.”
This procedure continued to be used to treat women for their inability to orgasm throughout the 20th century. In 1900, Chicago gynecologist A.S. Waiss wrote about removing the clitoral hood of Mrs. R., a 27-year-old woman who had been married for seven years and who was “absolutely passionless,” something that greatly upset her. Her unresponsiveness troubled her, or her husband, enough for her to seek a medical remedy. The doctor found Mrs. R.’s clitoris “entirely covered” by its hood. He circumcised the clitoris and the patient “became a different woman”—she was, the doctor wrote, “lively, contented,” and “happy,” and sex now brought her satisfaction.
In 1912, Douglas H. Stewart in New York City saw a “fairly robust woman” who, though desirous for sexual intercourse, when the act was attempted found “there ‘was nothing in it.’” Upon examination, Stewart found the clitoris of the patient to be “buried” and preceded to circumcise the woman to reveal the organ.
Charles Lane, a physician in Poughkeepsie, New York, believed the clitoris “a very important organ to the health and happiness of the female,” and performed circumcision on women who were unable to reach orgasm. In a 1940 article concerning his use of circumcision on a patient—Mrs. W., a 22-year-old woman who had recently married but had yet to experience an orgasm—Lane noted “that little trick did it all right.”
And C.F. McDonald, a physician in Milwaukee, noted in a 1958 article that women who complained to him of difficult or painful intercourse often had a clitoris hidden by foreskin. To reveal the organ, he removed the foreskin, with “very thankful patients” as the reward. McDonald operated in the 1950s—during the height of the Freudian vaginal orgasm theory, a theory that held healthy and mature adult women had vaginal, not clitoral, orgasms—suggesting clitoral circumcision as sexual therapy did not stop; indeed, by some accounts, more women underwent circumcision at mid-century to surgically increase the potential for orgasm than at any earlier time.
Physicians, both in print and at medical society meetings, discussed that “little trick” for decades. By the 1970s, information about the usefulness of female circumcision to enable female orgasm during penetrative, heterosexual sex began to appear with more regularity in popular publications as well, with information about the surgery as a sexual enhancement appearing in books such as The Consumer’s Guide to Successful Surgery.
Magazines, too, including Playgirl and Playboy, ran stories about female circumcision. Playgirl carried two stories by Catherine Kellison, who wrote about her circumcision and how orgasms were easier for her to attain after the surgery. The gynecologist who removed her clitoral hood told Kellison that an estimated three-fourths of women did not reach orgasm because of a hooded clitoris, and that circumcision was the surgical solution to this condition. The doctor told Kellison that she would likely benefit from having her clitoral hood removed, and, after undergoing the procedure, Kellison wrote that she did find orgasms easier to attain following the surgery.
While estimating how many American women underwent female circumcision since the late 19th century is not possible—it was a quick procedure, most often performed by physicians in their clinics—evidence of its use can be found indirectly through insurance reimbursement for it.
In May 1977 the insurance company Blue Shield Association recommended that its individual plans stop routine payments for 28 surgical and diagnostic procedures considered outmoded or unnecessary. Of the 28, one was removing the hood of the clitoris. While this information is not translatable into an actual estimate of how many women elected to have their clitorises circumcised, it suggests the procedure was at least popular enough to warrant the discontinuation of paying for it by an insurance company.
In addition to Blue Shield Association, others have labeled the procedure as not medically indicated, with some being even more critical of the assumptions underlying the use of it as therapy to treat a lack of female orgasm. Feminists interested in women’s health began questioning female circumcision as a surgery for purported sexual enhancement in the 1970s as part of their larger critique of the medicalization of the female body and the feminist embrace of the clitoris as an important sexual organ for women.
More recently, women’s health activists with the New View Campaign in the United States protested practitioners of FGCS and launched a website to educate the public about the diversity of female genitals.
Similar to the New View Campaign, both the popular media and academics have weighed in on what the apparent “rise” in these surgeries means about the female body, female sexuality, and the role of medicine. Some academics have further challenged these procedures for the lack of evidence that such surgeries increase female sexual capacity and that women should feel the need to correct their bodies in order to enjoy sex rather than to, for example, change sexual positions or techniques.
In addition to academics and feminist activists questioning the procedures, medical practitioners have also raised concerns about the lack of established medical need for clitoral unhooding and that there is no evidence that female circumcision, along with the other procedures comprising FGCS, are safe. Indeed, in 2007, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommended practitioners not perform female circumcision or other FGCS, since the promotion of FGCS as sexually enhancing was not based on empirical evidence, nor were the surgeries medically indicated.
But while feminists and some medical practitioners since the 1970s have been publicly questioning the physiological basis for female circumcision as a sexual enhancement surgery, the surgery today, like a century ago, continues to be performed as an effort to enable women to have a clitoral orgasm during penetrative sex.View of the Batagaika Crater, Verkhoyansk, Siberia. Image: Google Earth
In the heart of Siberia's boreal forest gapes a monstrous chasm local Yakutians call a "gateway to the underworld," connecting this life to the next.
The ominous crater, which looms a mile long and reaches depths of nearly 400 feet, appeared without warning some 25 years ago. According to geological surveys, it's been growing at an annual rate of more than 60 feet. Yet, outside of Batagai, a rural town in the Sakha Republic's Verkhoyansk district, little is known about this natural phenomenon.
Aerial view of the Batagaika Crater. Image: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North/Alexander Gabyshev
Based on what we do understand, the Batagaika crater probably isn't an entrance to hell. But it is likely a harbinger of something dreadful to come. And, predictably, climate change has a whole lot to do with it.
Sometime during the early 1990s, an industrial facility allegedly cleared a parcel of forest, not knowing that eviscerating the tree stand would kick off a catastrophic geologic event. As climate change worsened around the globe, unprecedented heat waves rippled across Yakutia—one of the coldest places on Earth—melting the exposed layers of glacial ice that had not been seen for up to 200,000 years. Then, one day, the land began to buckle and slump.
Map of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Siberia. Image: Wikipedia
The Batagaika crater is what scientists are now calling a "megaslump": an immense void, or "thermokarst," in the geomorphology of a permafrost landscape. These sudden rifts appear when permafrost is allowed to rapidly thaw, causing scar zones to sink into the "saturated slurry." They can remain active for decades at a time. And while understandably terrifying, thaw slumps are a pretty typical feature in Arctic environments like Siberia.
But some scientists see the Batagaika megaslump as an anomaly, and a potentially irreversible sign of worse things to come.
"I expect that the Batagaika megaslump will continue to grow until it runs out of ice or becomes buried by slumped sediment. It's quite likely that other megaslumps will develop in Siberia if the climate continues to warm or get wetter," Dr. Julian Murton, a geology professor at the University of Sussex, told me.
Murton is currently one of the only people studying the crater, and has been visiting the remote site since 2009 in collaboration with the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North at the North-East Federal University in Yakutsk.
Julian Murton and his research team take sediment samples from within the Batagaika crater. Image: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North/Julian Murton
To a paleogeologist, the unique location and remarkable size of the Batagaika crater can offer an exceedingly rare glimpse into the ice age history of northeast Siberia. Murton says his team has already uncovered the mummified carcass of a bison within the sediment, as well as the frozen remains of a musk ox, mammoth, and a 4,400-year-old Holocene-era horse.
"The Batagaika site contains a remarkably thick sequence of permafrost deposits, which include two wood-rich layers interpreted as forest beds that indicate past climates about as warm or warmer than today's climate," Murton noted. "The upper forest bed overlies an old land surface that was eroded, probably when permafrost thawed in a past episode of climate warming."
Aerial view of the Batagaika crater. Image: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North/Alexander Gabyshev
Right now, however, sinkholes are popping up across the Siberian frontier like a contagion. In northern Russia's Krasnoyarsk region, craters are literally bursting forth from the ground, and many scientists believe that unseasonably warm conditions are to blame.
"We have just learnt that in Yakutia, new information has emerged about a giant crater one kilometer [0.6 miles] in diameter," Vasily Bogoyavlensky, the deputy director of the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told AFP last year. "Footage allows us to identify minimum seven craters, but in fact there are plenty more."
According to geologic records, Murton told me, the last time Siberia saw slumping of this magnitude was 10,000 years ago, as Earth transitioned from the Paleolithic Ice Age into the current-day Holocene. Today, greenhouse gas emissions reaching heights of 400 parts per million have far surpassed the CO2 levels of 280 parts per million that brought about the end of the glacial maximum.
Thermokarsts near Omulyakhska and the Khromska Gulf, North Siberia. Image: Wikipedia
In the near future, Murton plans to drill boreholes into the Batagaika permafrost and conduct a high-resolution analysis of the sedimentary layers, which will hopefully paint a picture of atmospheric conditions present during the last ice age.
"If we can understand how the landscape was altered then," Murton said, "it helps us to anticipate what may happen to Siberian permafrost terrain in the next centuries."Please enable Javascript to watch this video
SALT LAKE CITY -- Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski announced Wednesday that a pair of internal investigations into the arrest of Utah nurse Alex Wubbels have concluded, and both panels have "sustained findings" against the two officers directly involved in the arrest.
Biskupski said now that the Internal Affairs investigation has concluded, state law and existing contracts stipulate that both officers have up to 20 days to respond to the findings before Police Chief Mike Brown makes a decision on the officers' employment status.
The mayor opened Wednesday's press conference with an apology.
"I also want to start by once again reiterating my personal apology to Nurse Alex Wubbels for the way she was treated by officers of the Salt Lake City Police Department as she attempted to do her job, advocating for a patient," she said.
Biskupski said an Internal Affairs investigation into the arrest began the day after on July 27. A second, independent Civilian Review Board investigation began on September 1, after the release of video of the arrest on August 31.
Both investigations were based on interviews with two of the officers who were directly involved, Det. Jeff Payne and Lt. James Tracy; a third officer who witnessed the incident and nurse Wubbels. They also reviewed footage from three officer's body cameras.
The videos show nurse Alex Wubbels being arrested by Det. Jeff Payne after Wubbels refused to allow a blood draw on an unconscious patient without following established procedure.
The video of the arrest prompted nationwide outcry, and both officers were placed on leave after Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill opened a criminal investigation into the incident. Payne has also been fired from his part-time job as a paramedic.
The Internal Affairs investigation sustained findings regarding several possible policy violations, Biskupski said: Conduct unbecoming by a police employee, courtesy in public context, policies regarding misdemeanor arrests, situations requiring a report, the department's law enforcement code of ethics, and the city policy regarding standards of conduct for employees.
The Civilian Review Board panel was led by investigator Rick Rasmussen, who Biskupski said is a 22-year veteran of the FBI who works for the city's human resources department, not the police department.
The review board also voted to sustain findings against the two officers, and Biskupski said a redacted version of that report will be made available online. Click here for that report.
Biskupksi said she has asked Chief Brown not to make any public statements regarding the findings of the two reviews until he has received responses from both officers. The officers have up to 20 days to respond, as stipulated by state law and existing contracts.
Independent of these reviews, the criminal investigation by the DA's Office continues.
Biskupski said she is not making any recommendations on the employment status of the two officers, and instead will leave that decision up to Chief Brown.
"I want to make sure our process can stand up to legal scrutiny, and therefore I'm not putting my finger on the scale," Biskupski said, adding that she doesn't want Brown to feel pressured as he makes his decision.
She said getting involved in that decision could potentially create a "legal issue".
The full press conference can be viewed below:I’ve been playing Elite for nearly two years, and I run the logistics and human resources for one of the largest organizations in the game: the Diamond Frogs. I think Elite remains the best arcade space flight simulator on the market, and I think it will continue to be that for the foreseeable future. In truth, the fact that Elite is the best spaceflight simulator around really just adds to the tragedy of it all. You see, Elite is a game with a lot of potential, but I increasingly don’t believe Frontier has the ability to capitalize on that potential. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s talk this out.
Elite markets itself as a massively multiplayer online space game with a burgeoning, to-scale galaxy modeled with great detail after our own Milky Way. It is a space flight simulator, offering the most compelling arcade flight simulation of a spaceship around. I say arcade spaceflight not as a dig – that’s what it is – but it’s good. It’s great, even. If you haven’t played Elite with a HOTAS or flight stick you’ve done yourself a disservice. I’ve heard it’s amazing in VR, too, and I believe it! The game looks good, it feels good, and it sounds good. But let’s pretend you’ve been doing that for a few months. You’ve flown a bunch of different ships. You’ve gotten an Anaconda. Maybe you committed to the grind and got yourself into a Cutter or Corvette. Now what?
If you ask the guys on Frontier’s forum: you fly your spaceship. You fly it from one station to another, hauling macguffins. It takes a long time sometimes because those same guys on the forums, waaaay back in Alpha, insisted that it should take a long time to get places (10 minutes from Sol to Pluto, was what overwhelmingly won the vote back when Frontier first made the mistake of listening to players instead of making a game that is fun). That’s it. That’s the game. You enjoy flying your spaceship. Because it’s immersive.
Frontier’s problem from the beginning has been that rather than designing a game that is fun, rather than designing a game that makes you want to play it, they have listened time and time again to very vocal players on their forums who value tedium more than fun. Getting credits shouldn’t be easy, the forums say. It should take a long, long time. If players find a way to make easy money, it is always reported by someone as an exploit. “You shouldn’t be able to make money easily in this game, it’s not immersive.” I could imagine the outrage if there was a real economic simulation in the game, if money was somehow a zero-sum game, and by amassing a lot for myself, I deprive someone else, but no. Elite is not that game.
What kind of game is Elite? Well, it’s supposedly a massively-multiplayer online game, but is it really? There’s no way to exchange resources aside from an extremely tedious dropping and scooping of cargo, so I can’t really share my wealth, or interact with others economically. Maybe I can shoot people? Well, I could, but there’s the problem of instancing, where two ships at the same station may not have an instance together and won’t ever see one another. Maybe if I team up with someone, I can shoot NPCs with them? I guess it’s possible, but since 2.1 the client crashes (Matchmaking error!) almost every time a wingmate enters or exits supercruise. And if I do find a person, of course, and they don’t want me to shoot at them, they can just log off, or kill the task, and that’s that. So it’s not massively multiplayer. It’s not even multiplayer. Not really.
Well, maybe it’s a single-player game, but you interact with the game’s storyline through your actions! You can work with others to change the course of the game by playing together, even if you never see one another! Well, no, it’s not really that either. See, the game’s storyline develops at a glacial pace. And I don’t mean modern, global-warming fueled sea-level rise-causing glaciers, but the old ones. The ones that you have to watch for years to tell they’re even moving. Elite’s longest running storyline has been being teased now for years, and it’s the alien first contact. But the storyline isn’t really being played out in game. You can’t go out and crack the clues in the game and cause it to advance. It’s being played out via an out of client ARG, and even that takes a very, very long time. Aliens were first hinted over a full calendar year ago. They don’t yet exist in game.
What about the Dangerous Games, though? Diamond Frogs were a big part of that! We got to compete to try to have an NPC added to Power Play and we’d kind of design the NPC a bit and make three selections about how our Power Play NPC would expand and reinforce and so on (they would have all been combat, like the winning EGP’s, because nothing else is fun, but that’s neither here nor there). That’s affecting the game, right!? Well, yeah, the only way Frontier seems to know how to get players to do a thing is through Community Goals, where Frontier sets up some arbitrary goals that the players have to meet, or not meet. In the Dangerous Games we got to... haul a lot of resources to a place, in a first-past-the-post race. Then we got to... pirate some “technical blueprints” by shooting NPCs just enough that they dropped them but not so much that they died. This mechanic, I will add, was so detested by players that when Frontier tried to run it as part of a normal Community Goal less than 100 people bothered and it didn’t even reach its first tier. Then, well, we got to solve an ARG-like puzzle, and whoever solved the puzzle first would easily be able to steal victory from the jaws of defeat! Except Frontier forgot to add the macguffins we had to collect, so despite solving the mystery in literally minutes from the CG beginning, we still sat around for a day until Frontier bothered to add the things in, by which time everyone else had also solved it.
But yes, technically, yes, Community Goals are a thing, and you can participate in them, and sometimes your participation or non-participation matters, sort of. Except, of course, when it’s not convenient to the storyline Frontier wants to promote, in which case they just kind of do whatever anyhow and make up some lore reason for it. “Welp, players did raise enough resources to change this outcome, but then pirates stole them all. Oh well!”
When it’s not Community Goals, Frontier does other things! Like the CQC Tournament! Oh, that was canceled. Hm, the Icarus Cup? Nobody’s heard anything about it for months. Welp.
But maybe I’m being unfairly critical of Frontier. I mean, yes, it’s a supposed MMO in which players cannot interact economically, or group together under the banner of an organization, or even generally play together for very long without a crash, but surely because of that the gameplay works really well, and new things are being added constantly! Well, yeah, sort of. For example, in 2.2 we got the addition of ship-launched fighters, and passenger missions. Ship launched fighters are really cool and good, but only a few ships can have them. Passenger missions? They’re just a re-skin of a fetch quest: Fly to a place. Scan a thing. Fly back.
We also got core gameplay components broken, for example the surface wave scanner, which you have to use to find rocks in order to harvest materials to get an engineer to buff your stuff. When you’re looking for rocks there used to be some visual and auditory feedback; now the visual feedback is broken, and the auditory feedback is quiet, so I hope you like listening to ticks and whirrs and not music when you play. Surely Frontier would hotpatch a fix for something like this? Well, it’s been a month, so maybe not. However, they have hotpatched out several “exploits” that those pernicious blokes on the forums whined about.
And speaking of them, we also got ship transfers and module storage and transfer in 2.2! After 3 years, you can now store modules that you buy or engineer instead of having to sell them permanently in order to switch equipment. You can also transfer those modules around. But not far, because there is a minimum 8 minute wait to transfer them even from right next door. If you want to transfer a large ship from the bubble to Colonia, the lovely single station Frontier put 22000 LY away, near the galactic core, it’s only going to cost you one billion credits and take three days. Why would they do that? Well, you see, Frontier’s playtesters tested it and determined that adding a wait to ship transfer added nothing to gameplay, and was unfun, and nobody wanted it. So Frontier announced they were going to do it, and, well, the Frontier forum crew whined. Oh how they whined! “You can’t transfer ships instantly, it ruins my immersion.” “Well, don’t use it,” Frontier sagely ans- no, no they didn’t. They made it a poll, gave terrible options, and then went with the results. Frontier literally ignored its playtesters in favor of people who post on the forums a lot.
Hey, Frontier, listen, you know how you guys are game designers, who make games for a living, who have ideas about what is and isn’t fun? Don’t listen to players when you’re designing games you idiots. You know better. I know you do. I know you do because it doesn’t take 20 minutes to build a coaster in Planet Coaster. It doesn’t take 20 minutes to build a coaster because that wouldn’t be fun. So why would you listen to people who deliberately want to create barriers to gameplay (a wait. An eggtimer) when making decisions about your game? Stop doing that. Sure, when you were still being kickstarted, you made some silly promises to be accountable to your backers, and that forced your hand a bit, but that was a full game release ago. This is Elite 2.0!
Multicrew is coming soon, supposedly, but I fear for it. I fear for it because there’s already people on Frontier’s forums complaining about how immersion breaking it would be if you can just show up in your friend’s ship. How you should have to fly to the same station at the very least. How you should have to do that both to board and disembark from your friend’s ship. I fear, more than anything, that Frontier is going to do what it always does, and compromise fun gameplay in favor of immersion.
But, of course, I’m probably wrong. These “realism” based, “immersion” based decisions are what’s going to bring players. The players don’t want to have fun, they want to have a job in space. They don’t want to interact with each other, they want to fly their spaceship in a straight line for minutes and sit back as their ship flies in a straight line for 45 minutes to Hutton Orbital and say “yes, I am a space trucker in real life now. I can feel it!”
As the Diamond Frogs chief of human resources, I’m responsible for recruiting a lot of players to Elite. I wish I didn’t feel so bad about that. Here’s hoping, someday, Frontier stops listening to its forums and makes a game where players can interact, transfer money, join organizations, fight each other, explore together, and so on. Until then, I’ll be playing something else.The recent Net neutrality victory at the FCC is not a silver bullet. We can expect costly court challenges, complicated enforcement, and the risks that come with entrusting a large government bureaucracy to manage a technological problem. More competition would be a better solution—and that’s where Bitcoin could help.
As Marc Andreessen recently told The Washington Post, “The ultimate answer would be if you had three or four or five broadband providers to every house.” In such a world, Andreessen explained, “net neutrality is a much less central issue, because if you’ve got competition, if one of your providers started to screw with you, you’d just switch to another one of your providers.”
But how do you get more last-mile competitors?
Peter Van Valkenburgh About Peter Van Valkenburgh is Director of Research at Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy center focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies. He is a graduate of NYU Law. On Twitter: @valkenburgh.
“I think you actually have the potential for that depending on how things play out from here,” Andreessen said. “You can imagine a world in which there are five competitors to every home for broadband: telcos, cable, Google Fiber, mobile carriers and unlicensed spectrum.”
That last one—using unlicensed spectrum—has been a tough nut to crack. This is actually rather strange given that we are awash in internet connectivity over unlicensed spectrum bands. I’m talking about the Wi-Fi routers in every home, apartment, coffee shop, and office across the country that surround us at all times. The problem, of course, is that |
able to locate and tag enemies in the environment, track the movements of humans and machines alike and gather detailed information about the world around her.
Armed with nothing but a bow, her Focus and the wisdom passed down by Rost, Aloy learns to survive (and thrive) in the sacred land of the Nora people, growing up to become one of the more competent hunters in the region. This is where the game begins to open up, as Aloy prepares to participate in The Proving. If she can take first place in this rite of passage, she will be allowed to join the Nora tribe.
Her first two tasks are to craft fire arrows and barter for a weapon called a Ropecaster. There are multiple systems to familiarize yourself with over the course of the Horizon Zero Dawn campaign, from ammunition crafting to weapon modification, but developer Guerrilla Games does an admirable job at doling them out slowly and giving you a chance to master one before introducing another.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter how gradually the systems were rolled out if they were confusing and incoherent. Thankfully, they’re all easy to understand. Crafting ammo is as simple as holding down the L1 button to open the menu, navigating to the correct weapon with the right stick and holding X until the ammo has been crafted. It’s nearly instantaneous and time slows down while you’re crafting, which means that even in the heat of battle, you can fire your last arrow, open the menu and craft 20 more without missing a beat.
In order to craft those arrows though, you’ll need wood and metal shards. Metal shards you can find on the remains of defeated machines, but you’ll have to gather wood the old fashioned way: tearing it off of the trees scattered around the open world of Horizon. Gathering resources from the environment is a key element in the game — wood is used to craft arrows, plants are used to heal Aloy and machine parts are used to construct ammunition for some of the more advanced weaponry that you will acquire throughout your journey.
Having already spent a few dozen hours in the world of Horizon, I’ve never run out of ammunition for my bow or any of my secondary weapons. Gathering resources eventually just becomes part of your routine, and while it can be somewhat tedious to find the exact right boar skin or fish bone or Thunderjaw heart to purchase a new weapon or upgrade your storage capacity, it makes sense that Aloy would have to be self-sufficient in the context of the game. That’s what really ties Horizon together as a complete package: the world actually makes sense, and everything that Aloy and the other characters do coheres with the world they live in.
[I spoke at greater length about the cohesion of this fictional world in my preview, so read that if you like. And I’m realizing there won’t be a good spot to put this anywhere else in the review, but I played through the entire game on a PS4 Pro, and I can say without hesitation that Horizon Zero Dawn is the reason the 4K console exists. If you can’t tell from the screenshots, this game is an absolute stunner.]
Once you’re done gathering resources and building an arsenal of weapons, you’ll have to utilize everything at your disposal to take down the machine and human enemies that blanket nearly every corner of the gigantic map. As I stated near the beginning of the review, Aloy is always at a disadvantage, whether she’s facing off against a machine twice her size or a camp full of unfriendly bandits.
Therefore, stealth comes into play frequently, as Aloy uses the tall grass around her to stay out of sight and her Focus to track and tag enemies in her vicinity. Picking off enemies one by one from a distance without alerting anyone else in the area is incredibly satisfying every time you do it, especially in some of the large bandit camps that function similarly to the outposts in the Far Cry games.
But stealth isn’t always an option. Some of the larger machines require dozens of arrows to take down, which means that after a few hits, ducking in and out of the weeds isn’t going to be an option anymore. This is where the game kicks into high gear, as you have to be quick on your feet, dodge rolling out of the way as the machine charges, quickly taking aim at a weak point, firing a few arrows and taking cover again.
It’s a loop that I never tired of, even in difficult fights with frustrating machines that refused to give me a second to breathe. Each type of machine has its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as its own temperament (for example, some will simply run away if you startle them), but by the time you’re exploring the far corners of the map, you’ll have the entire codex committed to memory.
And on top of all that, Aloy learns early on in the game how to “override” certain machines, some of which she can use as mounts to traverse her surroundings far more quickly than she’d be able to on foot.
In many open world games, from Grand Theft Auto V to Just Cause 3 to Skyrim, the side quests and distractions are often the reason you play. Being able to run around a sandbox and cause chaos is why you bought the game in the first place — the story is secondary. In Horizon Zero Dawn, the opposite is true.
No hyperbole: Horizon Zero Dawn features the most compelling narrative of any video game of the current generation. In the beginning, Aloy just wants to know where she came from, but she soon realizes that her origin and the origin of the world she lives in are inextricably intertwined. As she journeys further and further from home, she finds herself wrapped up in an increasingly complex web of desperate locals, warring factions and political intrigue — but it’s all a backdrop for an even larger mystery.
Watching that mystery unfold is what will keep you coming back to Horizon Zero Dawn every day until you’ve seen it all play out from start to finish. There are dozens of side quests to complete, errands to run, machines to tame and gear to acquire along the way, but the plot is what you’re playing for.
I could write another 1,500 words about the strength of the voice acting (especially the impeccable Ashly Burch as Aloy), the simple but brilliant skill tree and the surprisingly listenable audio logs (which are often a storytelling crutch in video games), but I’ll leave it at this: Horizon Zero Dawn is the game of the generation and the best game available for the PS4. Guerrilla Games absolutely knocked it out of the park, and if they ever want to revisit this world, I’ll be first in line to see what happens next.
Sony provided BGR with a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 for the purposes of this review.A panel of judges has sided with North Carolina’s new Democratic governor in a growing power struggle with the Republican-led state legislature.
In a brief ruling issued Wednesday, the three-judge panel of state judges placed on hold a law that would have required Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) nominees to head state Cabinet agencies to undergo confirmation hearings before the state legislature ahead of a planned hearing on Friday.
North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature passed the new law in December, after Cooper ousted his Republican predecessor Pat McCrory. Cooper sued to overturn the decision, which he said violated the state constitution. The panel of judges agreed.
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“We need to put these partisan confirmation games behind us and get on with repealing HB2, raising teacher pay and getting better jobs for North Carolinians,” Cooper said in a statement after the decision was released. “The court is absolutely correct in their decision and should not be intimidated by threats from legislative leaders.”
Republicans in Raleigh said the judges had overstepped their authority. State Senate President Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R) said the decision violated the separation of powers over a duly passed law.
“This unprecedented move would be like the legislature telling a judge what jurors to pick to decide a case,” Berger and Moore said in a joint statement. “Judges are not legislators, and if these three men want to make laws, they should hang up their robes and run for a legislative seat.”
The law requiring department heads to undergo confirmation hearings was one of a handful of measures Republicans passed in the weeks between McCrory’s concession and Cooper’s assuming office. A state judge had blocked another of those measures, which changed the way election boards are appointed, in December.
Cooper, the state’s former attorney general, and Berger, North Carolina’s most powerful Republican, have been at each other’s throats for years. Their relationship has only devolved since Cooper won the governor’s office amid lawsuits and a high-profile spat over the controversial 2016 law, HB2, superseding local nondiscrimination ordinances.
Cooper wants the Republican legislature to repeal HB2, which has led sporting events and major companies to pull business out of the state. Both sides blamed each other when a potential deal fell apart at the last minute last month.As Twitter has grown exponentially in terms of membership, usage and popularity, it’s increasingly interesting to look at facts and figures surrounding the micro-blogging platform.
So we’ve put together 50 fun facts about Twitter for your reading enjoyment.
Check out our list, below.
The 50 Twitter Fun Facts:
1. The name of the social network was originally “Twttr,” later changed to Twitter.
2. It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to get to the billionth tweet.
3. Today it only takes one week for users to send a billion tweets.
4. 10 tweets per second mention Starbucks.
5. The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times.
6. Barack Obama’s victory tweet was the most retweeted tweet ever with more than 800K retweets.
7. The 2012 election broke records with 31.7 million political tweets. Election Day was by far the most tweeted about event in US political history.
8. 32% of all Internet users are using Twitter.
9. 69% of follows on Twitter are suggested by friends.
10. In 2012, almost 1 million accounts were added to Twitter every day.
11. Lady Gaga – the most followed Twitterer, with almost 33 million followers – gains followers faster than Twitter adds new accounts.
12. The USA’s 141.8 million accounts represent 27.4% of all Twitter users.
13. 50% of Twitter users are using the social network via mobile.
14. 2012 brought an 800% increase in top TV show tweets.
15. Over the span of 16 days, the London Olympics generated 150 million tweets.
16. There were 13.7 million football-related tweets during the 2012 Super Bowl, 1 million of which appeared in the game’s final 5 minutes.
17. While the average religious leader can expect one retweet for every 500 followers, the average musician only sees one retweet for every 30,000 followers.
18. 64% of consumers have made a purchase decision based on social content.
19. 91% of 18-34 year olds using social media are talking about brands.
20. 60% of U.S. smartphone owners now visit their favorite social networking sites on a daily basis, up from 54% in 2011.
21. 46% of U.S. social media users now access platforms such as Twitter and Facebook via their mobile phone, up 9% – almost one-quarter overall – from 2011.
22. 31% of the average smartphone owner’s Internet time is spent social networking – close to twice as much as email.
23. Infographics added to Stumbleupon generate 746% more pageviews than other kinds of content.
24. There are 181,354 people on Twitter who use the term “social media” in their bio.
25. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Germany, Turkey, South Africa, Canada, Argentina and Egypt.
26. With more than 3 million active Twitter users, Saudi Arabia, with a 300% year-on-year growth rate, ranks #1 in the world as the fastest-growing Twitter nation.
27. 16% of U.S. Internet users are on Twitter.
28. The average Twitter user has 126 followers.
29. The average business has 14,709 Twitter followers.
30. There are more devices connected to the internet than there are people on the entire planet.
31. 340 million tweets are sent each and every day.
32. During the “Castle in the Sky” TV screening there were 25,088 tweets per second, the most ever.
33. The most followed brand on Twitter is YouTube with 19 million followers.
34. 60% of Twitter users are female.
35. On average, Twitter users spend 21 minutes monthly on Twitter.
36. 40% of registered Twitter users have never sent a single tweet.
37. 92% of retweets are based on interesting content.
38. Only 26% are due to the inclusion of “please RT!” in the tweet.
39. Between 2008 and 2011, there was a 5,000% increase in the number of employees at Twitter.
40. The official Twitter account for Sweden is run by a different citizen every week.
41. McDonalds employs 10 people to run their Twitter account.
42. Everyword is a Twitter account created by Adam Parrish in December 2007 to share every word in the English language on Twitter. Since then, this account has tweeted 84k+ words.
43. @RealTimeWWII, a Twitter accounted created by Oxford history graduate Alwyn Collinson, narrates World War II on Twitter in real time; all the tweets are manually written, with no script used.
44. Infographics shared on Twitter get 832% more retweets than images and articles.
45. Twitter is available in more than 25 languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu.
46. As of the end of 2012, Twitter has more than 200 million active users.
47. Twitter is now worth more than $11 billion.
48. 16% of customers use Facebook, Twitter and the other major social networks to interact with businesses.
49. 75%, or three out of four, heads of state are utilizing Twitter.
50. That’s a 78% increase in the number of heads of state and national governments on Twitter from 2011. Which means Twitter is taking over the world. And we’re ok with that.
There you have it! Share your favorites in the comments.
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Let's hop into a time machine and go back to the England of yore!
If this were a movie, no matter when we got out of the machine, we could walk up to people and start talking. It could be medieval times or the age of King Arthur's round table, and they'd just say, "Who art thou, varlet?" and we'd reply with something like, "We, uh, would-eth like-eth some beer-eth," and we'd all party. Yeah, no.
I mean, of course they have to do that in movies, because we need to understand them. But this is reality. We're going to hear what they really talked like. Ready? Buckle up!
Shakespearean England
First stop: the early 1600s. The time of Shakespeare! Of course the English of Shakespeare and the King James Bible may seem flowery, but it's basically just an older version of what we speak now. In fact, it's what linguists call Early Modern English. But the way they spoke it was not quite what we probably expect — or what you hear in the movies. Do you imagine some Queen's English accent? Or perhaps Cockney for the lower classes? Guess what: the way they spoke it would sound to us more like a mix of Irish and pirate. Here, listen to Ben Crystal (son of linguist David Crystal) perform a sonnet in the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time:
Medieval England
Next stop: the 1300s. That's when Geoffrey Chaucer lived. Do you remember the Canterbury Tales? Here's how it starts:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour
You can probably sort out what's being said, generally. It has a few differences here and there, but with a little help and attention you can figure it out. But could you carry on a conversation in it? Could you even understand it if you heard it? Here's how it sounded, as read by Diane Jones:
Let's take the time machine back just another century — still in the Middle English period — and have a listen to a song from that time, as sung by the lovely ensemble Anonymous 4:
Here's a bit of the text (the þ characters are how we used to write th):
Edi beo þu hevene quene folkes frovre and engles blis, moder unwemmed and maiden clene swich in world non oþer nis.
Do you reckon you could just walk into an inn and order up some meat pie and ale in a place where they spoke this version of English?
But wait, there's more. A lot more. So far, we're still after English lost most of its heavy noun inflections and complex verbal conjugations — and changed a lot of its words. We can thank invaders for that: French in the south (starting in 1066) and Scandinavians in the north (starting in the mid-800s but having more influence later on). Before they got to it, English was a whole other thing…
Old English
Old English is a bit of a misleading name. It's not understandable at all to modern English speakers; you'd have an easier time learning Dutch or Danish. Some people prefer to call it Anglo-Saxon, since it's the language that was brought over by the Angles and Saxons, invaders from northern Germany who took over Britain in the 600s.
The most famous bit of literature from the Old English period is Beowulf. I'm sure we all know the beginning of Beowulf, right? No? Well, if you don't, here it is:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
We're not with Bill and Ted anymore! Come on, step out of the time machine and let's listen to the words recited by Benjamin Bagby, who sounds like he grew up then:
Nice of them to give subtitles! Now get back into the machine. We're going to the 400s and 500s, to the time of King Arthur (if he existed).
Arthurian Britain
Did King Arthur speak Old English? Noooo. Do you remember that I said the Angles and Saxons took over Britain in the 600s? Arthurian Britain was before the Germanic invaders came and made the place England (Angle-land). What Arthur and his knights of the round table, and all the other people around then and there, would have been speaking was something we now call Brythonic or Brittonic: a Celtic language. Completely unlike modern English.
So obviously you're not going to get that pint of beer, because you're not going to be able to ask for it. And these people suddenly don't look so welcoming. So we scram back into the machine and put it in forward gear… But uh-oh. It doesn't go back to modern English. It follows the people who spoke what they spoke in King Arthur's time. The Britons.
Brittonic didn't stop existing when the Anglo-Saxons invaded, you see. Anglo-Saxon didn't simply replace it. The people who spoke it retreated, some to Wales, some to Cornwall, some a little farther. Over the centuries, the language of the ones who retreated to Wales became modern Welsh, in which Llanfairpwllgwyngyll means "Parish of St. Mary in White Hazel Hollow." The language of those who retreated to Cornwall became Cornish, which was quite nearly wiped out in recent centuries, but is having a bit of a revival.
But our time machine is following the ones who kept the name of the Britons. They retreated across the English Channel — to a part of France that came to be named after them: Bretagne, or, in English, Brittany. The Celtic language spoken there, Breton, is descended from Brittonic, the language of King Arthur (with some French influence, of course). Listen to the Breton singer Nolwenn Leroy singing a Breton song about three young sailors (tri martolod yaouank):
Here are some of the lyrics (minus the repeats):
Tri martolod yaouank i vonet da veajiñ Gant 'n avel bet kaset betek an Douar Nevez E-kichen mein ar veilh o deus mouilhet o eorioù Hag e-barzh ar veilh-se e oa ur servijourez
It's about three sailors who were blown far off course. We and our time machine — and our language — know something about that now…A woman who endured constant on-the-job sexual harassment before being unceremoniously fired when she complained deserved “moral damages” from her former employer, Ontario’s top court ruled Wednesday. The decision affirmed a lower court’s $60,000 award to Melissa Doyle against Zochem Inc. for the manner in which she was fired.
Ontario's top court has ruled that Brampton-based Zochem Inc. must pay $60,000 in "moral damages" to a former employee who complained of constant sexual harassment on the job. ( Dreamstime )
In addition, the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered the zinc-oxide producer based in Brampton, Ont., to pay Doyle another $40,000 to cover her legal costs given that its conduct in pursuing the appeal was a “continuation of its oppressive conduct” toward her. In May last year, then-Superior Court justice John Belleghem awarded Doyle general damages equal to 10 months’ salary, $25,000 for sexual harassment, and the $60,000 in moral damages. Zochem appealed only the moral damages award, arguing $20,000 would have been appropriate. Among other things, the company claimed that Belleghem had considered factors irrelevant to the firing. The Appeal Court, however, saw it otherwise.
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“Although the trial judge considered both factors that were relevant and irrelevant to an award of moral damages, the award was nonetheless justified,” the Appeal Court said in its decision. “The termination was cold and brusque (and) there is evidence of untruthful, misleading or unduly insensitive conduct.” Court records show that Doyle had worked for Zochem for nine years — one of about 50 employees. At the time of her termination, she was the only woman working at the plant, where she was supervisor and health and safety co-ordinator. Evidence at trial was that the maintenance manager, Bill Rogers, repeatedly harassed her. Among other things, Rogers would stare at her breasts and pretend to take a photograph of them, court records show. At a meeting in July 2011, Doyle raised safety concerns. What she didn’t know was that the company had already decided it was going to fire her — despite having insisted just days earlier that her job was safe. Rogers, however, did know of the company’s plans to axe her. He used the meeting to demean Doyle in front of others, prompting her to flee in tears, court records show. Doyle, who was 44 years old at the time, complained about the sexual harassment to the assistant general manager, Stephanie Wrench, who fired her days later, court records show.
In his decision last May, Belleghem found Wrench’s response to the sexual harassment complaint was “insensitive to the point of verging on cruel.” He also noted a human resources consultant suggested to Doyle that the harassment complaint was damaging to Rogers’ reputation. “This was like rubbing salt into a wound,” Belleghem wrote. “She was being asked to sign off any rights she may have had arising out of her years of harassment, and at the same time, if she chose to do so, add to her pain by doing something to reinstate the reputation of her harasser.”
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In rejecting Zochem’s appeal, the court noted that it has long been legally established that an employer must act in good faith in dismissing an employee. Where it is unfair or unduly insensitive, it may have to pay what are now known as moral damages. Zochem had previously been ordered to pay Doyle $424,584 in legal costs.
Read more about:Since the rocks in the probe's landing basin aren't mixed with debris, the rover was able to gather pure samples resembling the composition of the moon's volcanic bedrock beneath the lunar surface. Various ground teams of researchers have determined that it's quite rich in titanium dioxide and the mineral olivine. They say this proves that moon rocks aren't all the same and are much more diverse and complex than we thought, since the Apollo samples had a different mineral makeup.
Bradley L. Jolliff, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis which helped analyze Yutu's data, explains that the results are significant because "The diversity tells us that the Moon's upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth's. And correlating chemistry with age, we can see how the Moon's volcanism changed over time." Considering it's believed that the moon formed from a piece of our planet that flew out when it collided with a Mars-sized celestial body, the data could shed more light on the Earth's past, as well.
[Image credit: CNSA/CCTV]
Update: While there are reports as recent as September that Yutu is still alive and kicking, the data used for this study was sent back back to Earth sometime ago. We apologize for the confusion.Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) has privately assured President Obama that House Republicans will not attack him if he makes a proposal to reform entitlement spending, according to sources familiar with the offer.
Moreover, Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE has personally promised Obama that he will stand side by side with him to weather the strong political backlash expected from any proposal to cut entitlement costs.
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So far, Obama has not taken Boehner up on the deal, as Democratic strategists have warned the White House not to cut payments from the Social Security trust fund or to reopen the acrimonious debate over healthcare.
Social Security reform has been prominent in behind-the-scenes talks about entitlement spending because it is relatively easy to reduce its cost projections — at least, compared to the complex morass of healthcare policy reform.
Social Security has been known traditionally as the “third rail” of politics, because grappling with the issue is considered as deadly as touching an electrified subway rail.
President George W. Bush saw his post-election political capital plummet in 2005 after Democrats led by Sen. Max Baucus Max Sieben BaucusOvernight Defense: McCain honored in Capitol ceremony | Mattis extends border deployment | Trump to embark on four-country trip after midterms Congress gives McCain the highest honor Judge boots Green Party from Montana ballot in boost to Tester MORE (D-Mont.) excoriated his administration’s proposal to divert a portion of Social Security revenues into private retirement accounts.
Boehner has promised that Republicans will not exploit entitlement reform for political gain if Obama shows leadership on curbing the cost of Social Security and other mandatory spending programs, according to sources familiar with the offer.
Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, declined to comment. “The Speaker does not discuss his private conversations with the president of the United States.”
Earlier this year, during his State of the Union address, Obama called on Congress to put Social Security on solid financial footing, but stopped short of calling for a reduction in benefit payouts.
Sen. Tom Coburn Thomas (Tom) Allen CoburnThe Hill's Morning Report — Presented by PhRMA — Worries grow about political violence as midterms approach President Trump’s war on federal waste American patients face too many hurdles in regard to health-care access MORE (R-Okla.), who is in the midst of negotiating a deficit-reduction package with a bipartisan group of senators, said Republicans would not bite Obama for endorsing entitlement reforms.
“He’s been told by the Speaker that if he stands up to do that, the Speaker will stand up with him,” Coburn said. “The Speaker will go out there with him and say we’ve got to do these things.”
Coburn is in talks with five other senators — two Republicans and three Democrats — to craft a deficit-reduction plan that might include reforms to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (Ky.) said entitlement reform won’t happen this year unless Obama takes a leading role on the issue.
“With regard to our long-term unfunded liabilities — the entitlements — we are waiting for presidential leadership,” McConnell said. “We know, and we’ll say again, that entitlement reform will not be done except on a bipartisan basis with presidential leadership.”
The president might be concerned about getting vilified by his own party and its allies.
Labor unions and liberal advocacy groups have waged a blistering lobbying campaign directed at the White House to steer the president away from reform proposals that would cut benefits.
Vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2012, such as Sens. Sherrod Brown Sherrod Campbell BrownWorse than nothing's been done since the massive Equifax hack Dems face internal battle over budget On The Money: Dems set Tuesday vote on Trump's emergency declaration | Most Republicans expected to back Trump | Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown drama | Powell heading before Congress MORE (Ohio) and Debbie Stabenow Deborah (Debbie) Ann StabenowLand conservation tax incentives should inspire charitable giving, not loopholes Four names emerge for UN position: report Democrats brush off GOP 'trolling' over Green New Deal MORE (Mich.), have also seized on the issue as a political life preserver, warning of staunch opposition if Obama and Republicans hatch a deal to reduce Social Security costs.
Brown and Stabenow signed a letter this week lobbying colleagues to support legislation to establish a 60-vote procedural hurdle for any proposal that “would reduce Social Security benefits.”
The last time Congress acted to address a looming shortfall in Social Security — raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 — was in 1983.
“Today, Social Security is strong and faces no such crisis,” the senators wrote. “The Social Security Administration has estimated that Social Security will be able to pay 100 percent of promised benefits to every eligible American for the next 26 years.
“After that, if nothing is done, there will still be enough funding to pay 78 percent of promised benefits,” they added.
But a senior GOP aide said that if Congress does not act to reform the entitlement, it would ensure that workers under the age of 40 would see a 22 percent reduction in benefits.
Democratic pollsters have conducted surveys showing that a strong majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents oppose reductions in Social Security benefits.
Negotiators on Capitol Hill think Social Security would be fairly easy to reform from a policy standpoint, but warn the political dangers make the prospect extremely difficult.
Obama’s fiscal commission last year sketched out a plan for curbing Social Security’s costs that won support from three Democratic members of Congress.
It recommended raising the Social Security retirement age to 68 by 2050 and to 69 by 2075. It also proposed lowering cost-of-living adjustments for beneficiaries and subjecting a higher percentage of earnings to payroll taxes.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinKids confront Feinstein over Green New Deal Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Overnight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run MORE (Ill.), members of the commission, voted for the proposal. So did then-Rep. John Spratt (S.C.), the former Democratic chairman of the House Budget panel.
Liberal and labor groups that oppose raising the retirement age argue that a one-year increase would amount to a 6 percent to 7 percent cut in benefits. Liberal lawmakers also argue that it’s easy for policymakers working desk jobs in Washington to call for an increase of the retirement age, but that it’s a daunting prospect for butchers, landscapers, construction workers and others who labor in physically arduous jobs.
Conrad said recently that Social Security reforms should be considered separately from a broader deficit reduction package. He said the nation’s healthcare entitlement programs — such as Medicare and Medicaid — should be examined for further reform and savings.
Coburn has balked at the prospect of taking up Social Security on a separate track, predicting that it will not be reformed if removed from a broader package.A blue-ribbon advisory group that was killed by the Harper government is issuing a final plea for a national price on carbon.
The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy was created 24 years ago by former prime minister Brian Mulroney as he embraced the concept of sustainable development. But after a series of reports that challenged the current government's policies, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty cut off its funding in last March's budget.
The roundtable's final report, to be released Thursday, is the last in a series on climate change and is entitled Embracing the Low-Carbon Economy, something that the group suggests the Harper government has failed to do at the expense of Canada's future prosperity.
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"We just hope this will inspire action from all sectors of society," Robert Slater, the agency's interim chairman, said in an interview.
"There are huge opportunities for Canada to achieve in a low-carbon economy. But the costs in not acting are actually quite expensive."
Mr. Slater conceded the Conservative government is unlikely to embrace most of the roundtable's recommendations, but said it may cherry-pick the best ones. He added the report will still be relevant when reality of climate change creates greater political pressure on governments to act.
The government-appointed roundtable is hardly a hotbed of environmental radicalism. Its members include former Conservative MP Robert Mills, who retired in 2008; former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister Pauline Browes, who served under Mr. Mulroney and Kim Campbell, and Richard Prokopanko, head of government relations for Rio Tinto Alcan Inc.
In its most contentious stance, the roundtable reiterated its call for a national carbon price. The Conservatives have hammered the New Democratic Party for its support of a plan that caps greenhouse-gas emissions and allows companies to trade credits, calling it a "job-destroying carbon tax."
The Conservatives launched the attack despite the fact that Mr. Harper once endorsed a cap-and-trade policy. The difference, they say, is that the NDP plan would raise $20-billion a year in government revenues, while their program did not propose a windfall for government. However, Mr. Harper has rejected not only the NDP version, but any suggestion of a national price on carbon, including calls from leading business groups.
The roundtable does not take a position on the exact design of such a policy, but said market prices need to account for the full-cost of production and use of energy, including the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change.
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"A price on carbon is fundamental to achieving the required efficiency gains and innovative drive to support low-carbon growth," the report said.
With such a price and other policies, Canada could be a leader in a future low-carbon economy, even as it continues to exploit unconventional resources like oil sands and hard-to-tap shale gas, it concluded. Without those policies, the country will find itself desperately trying to reduce emissions that have grown too quickly, and potentially having to write off oil-and-gas and electricity assets that are no longer viable.Bill Maher picked a fight with the country’s undecided voters on Friday.
The “Real Time” host questioned how it was even possible that there’d been “no breaking point” for those still considering voting for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump on Nov. 8.
“For me, the great sadness is knowing that even if Trump doesn’t become president, we live in a country where half the people think he should be,” the comedian said.
He then launched into a lengthy monologue, in which he laid out just some of the issues Trump has created ― but which still won’t apparently deter people from casting their ballots for him next month.
The great sadness is even if Trump doesn't become president, we live in a country where half the people think he should be. #AmericanIdiots pic.twitter.com/mzMxP6WYKK — Bill Maher (@billmaher) October 15, 2016
The comedian later claimed to know the real reason as to why the brash businessman would win at least 20 states, despite his repugnant actions and comments before and throughout the campaign. “A full 80 percent [of Americans] think Ramadan is those noodles college kids eat,” Maher quipped, in reference to what he’s previously called a “stupid country.”
Check it out in the clip above.S80L production first started in February 2009
A spokesman for Volvo Cars has told just-auto that the firm's contract with CFA - Changan Ford Automotive - has ended. Responding to a question regarding S80L production at CFA's Chongqing plant, VCG's man also confirmed that production of the extended wheelbase sedan ceased in late 2015.
In other news, there is also confirmation that Volvo's Daqing plant will be the location for Chinese build of the S90. A long wheelbase 'S90L' derivative is yet to be announced but it seems likely that such a model is in the pipeline. The car might be revealed on 25 April, the first press day of the 2016 Beijing motor show.
As for the S80, it is still being built at Torslanda "but [production] will be phased over to the new S90 during the spring of this year", Volvo's spokesman added.We’ll keep track of the day’s international signings here…
The Dodgers announced the signings of four 17-year-olds from the Dominican Republic (via Twitter): outfielders Deivy Castillo and Ariel Sandoval, shortstop Ravel Hernandez, and right-hander Miguel Urena. Dylan Hernandez of the L.A. Times tweeted the age and positions of each player.
announced the signings of four 17-year-olds from the Dominican Republic (via Twitter): outfielders and, shortstop |
he said.
This mirrors Acxiom CEO Scott Howe’s anticipation that the hundreds of thousands of cookies existing today will consolidate into “mega-cookies” developed by the media outlets and exchanges.
This is where Buchalter anticipates MediaMath’s ConnectedID will prove valuable. “The demand side will require technology that can bridge these signals – often from competing companies – to unify marketing efforts and enable holistic measurement across the entire digital media landscape,” he said.Image copyright Cramlington Learning Village Image caption Cramlington Learning Village became an academy in 2011 under rules allowing schools rated as outstanding to convert to academies
An academy school rated "outstanding" two years ago has been put into special measures by education inspectors.
Cramlington Learning Village in Northumberland has failed its latest Ofsted inspection, the BBC has learned.
The school said the Ofsted report was "inaccurate" and that it had "serious concerns" about the inspection process.
Ofsted said its reports were quality assured, but that it would be willing to discuss any "concerns" directly with the school.
The school was given the highest rating, "outstanding", in 2013 and in its previous three reports. Ofsted has yet to comment.
The latest inspection gave the overall school the lowest "inadequate" ranking, with the sixth form ranked good, the BBC understands.
'Perplexed and baffled'
In a statement, the school said the report was "disappointing".
Staff and governors believed the report painted a "highly inaccurate" picture of life at the school, it said.
Inspectors had deemed the school had "fallen short" of outstanding status, "however, we have 70% of the same students, the same head teacher and largely the same senior leadership team and governing body as we had at our 2013 inspection", a spokesperson said.
NASUWT teaching union regional organiser Simon Kennedy said: "I think the leadership and the members of staff at Cramlington will be perplexed and baffled how they can go from consistently being an outstanding school to being one where Ofsted grades them as a 'four'."
The school challenged the report's findings but was unable to change the ranking, the BBC understands.
A spokesman for Ofsted said: "Our judgements are always based on evidence and our inspection reports are quality assured. If a school has any concerns, then we will talk to them."
Academy schools are not controlled by the local authority but receive funding direct from government and sometimes through sponsors.ORGANISERS OF A rally being organised for outside the Dáil next Tuesday are hoping for a large turn-out, and they’re encouraging those taking part to “bring your colourful and imaginative banners and placards”.
Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the massive demonstrations that followed the announcement of the 2008 Emergency Budget, which included both pensioners and students, the protest is being arranged by representative group The Irish Senior Citizens Parliament.
Some of the most controversial measures announced on Tuesday as part of Budget 2014 will impact older people hardest: the lowering of the qualifying threshold for medical cards, the increase in the prescription charge to €2.50 and the scrapping of the bereavement grant.
SIPTU is also lending its support to the protest effort, which takes place outside the gates of the Dáil at 1pm on Tuesday.
According to the chairman of the union’s Retired Staff Countil, Frank Gannon, “Older people have been accused by media commentators of not having been hit by the austerity measures introduced by the current Government.
“The fact is they have been hit by cuts that include those to Home Help care packages, respite care grants, the fuel support scheme, rising drug costs and soaring energy bills.
“The loss of the death grant could drive vulnerable people into the hands of money lenders; increased prescription charges could see those with multiple illnesses having to make choices about what drugs to take and the lowering of the income threshold for medical cards means an estimated 35,000 people will lose their cards.”
Some 15,000 older people and around 10,000 students took part in a rally outside the gates of Leinster House on 22 October 2008.A Nokia brand photographer uploaded a video to Vimeo yesterday that shows off some of the brand’s newest smartphones. As Evan Blass from VentureBeat points out, the 30-second clip depicts the Nokia 3 and 5 with two other unrecognizable devices. One of them even features a dual-camera setup. Although the video has since been taken down, Blass tweeted a copy:
This will surely get pulled at some point, so I'll mirror it here [source: https://t.co/37yp63CAeC] pic.twitter.com/GktpXnt4pS — Evan Blass (@evleaks) May 16, 2017
The two devices on the left (pictured in the photo above), are the unidentified phones. Blass points out that the dual-camera device might be the Nokia 9, which is expected to be a new flagship device. With the video being pulled, we can only assume HMD Global, the Finnish company that licensed the rights to produce Nokia phones, didn’t want us to see this footage just yet, but the fact that it exists in the first place means these phones might not be too far off.Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the two most disliked presidential nominees in modern American history. That was true at the beginning of this campaign, and, as we sprint toward Election Day, it’s still true now. But equating Clinton’s and Trump’s popularity problems misses a meaningful part of the story. Sure, they both have terrible favorability ratings compared to past presidential candidates, but Clinton has consistently been more popular than Trump, and we’re now at the point in the campaign when that difference suggests Clinton has a clear advantage.
Here’s a 10-poll rolling average of each candidate’s net favorability rating — the percentage of voters who have a favorable opinion of them minus the share who have an unfavorable opinion — since June, when Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The trend in Trump’s and Clinton’s net favorability ratings tracks with the horse-race polls and the overall trajectory of the race. Trump’s likability improved right around the time of the Republican National Convention in mid-July, closing in on Clinton’s. Clinton’s edge in favorability expanded after the Democratic National Convention. And things slowly tightened after that. Yet, unlike the horse race, Trump has never truly moved to within striking distance of Clinton’s net favorability rating except for that brief moment after the GOP convention.
Why has Clinton maintained a greater edge in net favorability than the horse-race numbers? The gap might suggest she has more latent support that she isn’t currently capturing but could on Election Day. There’s also evidence of that upside when you compare two-way surveys (just Clinton vs. Trump) to four-way polls (which include Gary Johnson and Jill Stein). Clinton does better when Johnson and Stein voters are forced to choose between the two major party candidates.
That upside is one reason to keep an eye on the candidates’ favorability ratings. Especially now. Take a look at the average net favorability of the candidates in the final two weeks of September in elections since 1980.
NET FAVORABILITY RATINGS IN LATE SEPT. YEAR WINNER DEMOCRAT REPUBLICAN DIFFERENCE WINNER PARTY 1980 Ronald Reagan -10.5 +6.0 R _ +16.5 R 1984 Ronald Reagan -9.0 +14.0 R _ +23.0 R 1988 George H. W. Bush +11.8 +17.4 R __ +5.6 R 1992 Bill Clinton +11.4 -9.0 D _ +20.4 D 1996 Bill Clinton +18.7 +3.1 D _ +15.6 D 2000 George W. Bush +23.2 +24.4 R __ +1.2 R 2004 George W. Bush -0.4 +10.6 R _ +11.0 R 2008 Barack Obama +17.0 +12.4 D __ +4.6 D 2012 Barack Obama +6.5 -5.4 D _ +11.9 D 2016 — -13.8 -23.6 D __ +9.8 — The candidate with better favorables tends to win Average of polls in final two weeks of September before the election Source: Huffington Post/Pollster.com, RealClearPolitics and Roper Archive
A few things stick out. First, as I said at the outset, Clinton and Trump remain very much disliked relative to previous candidates. Jimmy Carter in 1980 was the only candidate before 2016 who had a net favorability of -10 percentage points or worse. Now, both Clinton and Trump fall into that category, and Trump’s is below -20 points.
Second, the difference in popularity between the candidates right now is fairly predictive of the November result. You can see this more clearly in the chart below, plotting the average difference in net favorability ratings of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees in the final two weeks of the September before the election and the final result.
In every election, the candidate who was leading in net favorability ratings in late September won the Electoral College and the election. The campaign with the closest favorability margin, 2000, also featured the closest final result. This year, the net favorability differences aren’t anywhere near as small. Since mid-September, Clinton’s net favorability rating is 10 percentage points better than Trump’s — similar to the edges George W. Bush had in 2004 and Barack Obama had in 2008. Bush and Obama both won small but solid victories.
Indeed, if you were going to project the 2016 election using a simple linear regression based on the difference between candidates’ net favorability ratings, you’d have Clinton winning by a little over 4 percentage points. That’s slightly larger than the 3.1-point margin the FiveThirtyEight polls-only model currently forecasts. Again that suggests that Clinton may have some upside potential our model may not be showing.
Of course, it could also be that the unusually large share of voters who don’t like either candidate makes these numbers less meaningful than usual. And even if the 2016 campaign isn’t operating on a different set of rules, net favorability at this point in the campaign is not a perfect predictor of the final result. Bill Clinton, for example, beat George H.W. Bush in 1992, but by a smaller margin than their net favorability rating difference implied. Further, as my colleague Nate Silver pointed out four years ago, we can’t be sure why favorability ratings correlate with the election results — the relationship might be the result of confounding variables. It could be, for example, that some set of other factors, such as underlying economic conditions, determines both how voters view the candidates and which one they cast a ballot for. If that’s the case, then net favorability may not tell us anything the horse-race polls aren’t already.
My guess, however, is that Clinton’s being better liked than Trump matters. Clinton has been better liked throughout this campaign, and elections are ultimately choices. Right now, the polls reflect that, and it’s why Clinton is ahead of Trump even if voters aren’t thrilled with their choices.
The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast covers the twists and turns of the election each week. Subscribe on iTunes or listen online.MOSCOW (Reuters) - A fire in a Moscow printing plant killed 17 people on Saturday, officials said, and a representative of the Kyrgyz diaspora in Russia said all the dead were members of its community.
“The incident happened when people were changing shifts at the printing house. It is very hard for us,” Abdygany Shakirov, the Kyrgyz representative told Reuters.
Around 500,000 citizens of the impoverished former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan are working in Russia. The two countries belong to a Russian-dominated customs union.
The Investigative Committee, which reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, said a criminal inquiry had been launched into the deaths of 16 of the victims of the blaze.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in his Twitter feed that one more person died later in a hospital.
Ilya Denisov, an Emergencies Ministry official, told Rossiya-24 TV station a malfunctioning lamp caused the fire.
Lax fire safety standards are often blamed for fatal workplace blazes in Russia. In January, 12 people died in a fire in a Moscow clothing factory.Molly's Game (2017)
Molly’s Game slunk under the radar this Christmas season as the first film directed by Aaron Sorkin. While I am not experienced with work he contributed to previously as a writer ( Social Network and Moneyball to name two ), his directing holds great promise for future films. This theatrical adaptation summarizes the memoir written by Molly Bloom, a strong skier on her way to the Olympics who’s life is suddenly shifted into high stakes poker games for the rich and the dirty alike.
I want to start by saying that I love dialog heavy films and I enjoy a quick witted battle of the minds between two characters. The writing in Molly’s Game really plays to this concept, pitting the dynamic talents of Jessica Chastain as sharp business-woman, Molly Bloom, and Idris Elba, as straightforward lawyer, Charlie Jaffey. The connection between these two leads channels into an intriguing battle of right and wrong and carries the story where it drags. The result pokes gentle holes in the concept of what is considered a good role-model or simply what defines a good person.
However, Molly’s Game suffers from subtle pain points such as weak pacing and lack of music. Aaron Sorkin uses a traditional plot structure that starts in the present and then transitions back and forth in time to intertwine important events in Molly Bloom’s life. This structure is solid, but the timehops undermine the pacing. While the viewer is begging for more backstory, they are left gasping for air from the complicated and uneventful dialog of the present. The flashback poker scenes are thrilling, showing off the full spectrum of emotions experienced in poker, accented by some fantastic comedic one liners. Moments in the present express the stifling air of Molly’s current situation, but supportive music would have served these heavy scenes where there tend to be strange gaps in dialog, breaking the pacing and the viewer’s train of thought.
When a film does so many basic components well, it’s easy to poke holes in its few flaws. Being able to centralize all of my criticisms into just a lack of music and pacing proves how much Molly’s Game did right. It’s a film set on taking you through Molly’s story and exploring her motivations. When a story is heavily dialog focused, the pacing has to be tight and concise, otherwise you will lose your viewer. My reason for the lower rating is the end of the film didn’t have the emotional weight I needed it to have. It wasn’t supported enough by the events in the story and if the sections had been rearranged and more tightly connected, it would have been such a powerful moment.
If your sights are set at the theater this winter season, this film is intriguing and worth the view. Especially if you actually know how to play poker and need to escape family for a bit.DASH4 - April 28, 2012
Form a team with a few of your friends and be part of an amazing game that is sweeping the nation! From fictitious graveyards to s'mores designed in morse code to music clips containing a hidden message, anything is possible to encounter when playing in the DASH puzzle hunt.
A puzzle hunt, a unique type of treasure hunt, is a fun, interactive, outdoor event in which teams of players race to find and solve creative puzzles hidden in different locations.
DASH (Different Area—Same Hunt) is a puzzle hunt event that happens simultaneously across multiple cities across the United States. The inaugural DASH in September 2009 spanned 8 cities. DASH 4 is currently being planned in 13 participating cities.
Creating the hunt is a collaborative effort of puzzle enthusiast volunteers across the country. Some cities contribute a puzzle to the event, and each event uses all the puzzles from the contributing cities.
Participating Cities
What if I've never played in a puzzle hunt before?
You'd be surprised at how easy it is to start solving. DASH is a great opportunity for first time puzzle hunters. The goal is for everyone to have fun, so you'll get all the help and hints you want! Just to make sure you're not totally lost, we recommend looking at past puzzles so you get an idea of what to expect:
I have more questions about puzzle hunts in general.
(Note: These clues were designed for teams of four to solve.)
Read our DASH Puzzle Hunt FAQ!That bloody great thing’d come up there and stand up on its back legs and gnaw something like that, you know. I used to line the sights up and give them one round of ball, bang! Blow ‘em to nothing.
For most people, the phrase ‘First World War’ conjures up images of deep, waterlogged trenches and mud-spattered soldiers. But what was trench life really like? In this episode, those who survived it describe their experiences.
The trenches could be a shock to those who knew little about them in advance. Walter Hare of the West Yorkshire Regiment first went into the front line in December 1916.
We moved to the right, I remember, got into a church yard – a cemetery – and then dropped down into a trench. And I couldn’t believe it; I was knee deep in mud for a start. I’d never been told about the Somme and the mud on the Somme, it was all new to me. Well we sloshed down this communication trench and we passed a support line and then we went further up and got to what was the front line.
And then that was the first we knew about trench warfare – we were told we hadn’t to show our heads above the parapet because there were snipers and they would get us if we did, you see, so we had to be careful. It was a bit of a shock because I could hear shells exploding and rifles and machine guns going, and I thought, ‘Well, I shan’t be here above five minutes.’ It depressed you a bit; just I’d not been warned about it, you see, I’d no idea what it was like.
By the end of 1914, lines of trenches snaked across the Western Front, stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier. They varied in quality and sophistication, but British private Walter Spencer described a typical construction.
We had duckboards chiefly in the firing line, not much in the communication trenches because the communication trenches were generally fairly good. Well we had sandbags on the top of the trench between us and the enemy to stop the fire, of course. Very little wire netting; there was barbed wire out in the front of the trenches, usually about 20 yards in front of the front line trench. Generally speaking – it varied a little – but it would be somewhere about 2 yards wide and it was erected on posts as far as possible, or was just left out what we called stranded in kind of circles.
Those manning the trenches would modify them according to their own needs, and even add some personal touches, as William Holmes of the London Regiment remembered.
Every trench was originally built by soldiers with sandbags which were, I suppose, about 18 inches long and about a good foot wide. They were filled with ordinary soil and tied and put one on top of the other to make a wall, if a wall was wanted, or any other construction that wanted to be big enough to take a sentry looking over. They’d make a little platform right from the ground upwards, you see.
And the funny thing was, what we used to laugh about, was at the end of… the beginning of every long trench was a name of a famous London street, every one had it. And if you come to a place where you turned round you had to call it Piccadilly Circus or something like that. But they all had their names, all the trenches did.
Charles Ward of the Middlesex Regiment commented on the necessity of adapting trenches to local conditions.
Trench system: in the front line you could have an ordinary trench, or if the ground was soggy you had, you built barricades of earth and rubble. And trenches could be all sorts of shapes and sizes according to how they’d originally been built and how they’d been knocked about by the enemy.
At intervals, dugouts were built into the trench walls, to provide cover and a place to rest. Victor Polhill explained how they were made.
To make these things, you cut a piece out of the trench about 3 foot wide and about 4 or 5 feet deep into the side of the trench. Put a piece of boarding or something on top and perhaps a piece of something that might keep the wet out, and then piled the earth on top of that and in front you left a piece of blanket or something, so that the front could be excluded from the wind.
And also the, if you had a candle in there at night time, the enemy wouldn’t notice it, the light in there. So at night time, the first thing you did when you got in this little bivvy place was to light your candle and you suddenly felt much warmer than you did outside; it made an enormous difference, the light.
Trench systems were built elsewhere besides France and Belgium, but were by no means standardized across all fronts. For British private Harold Boughton, the trenches in Gallipoli were inferior to the others he served in.
The trenches were most, oh horrible things to be in and, as I say, very often you had nothing at the back at all. And of course, when they started shelling these things that we’d built up in the front, they were soon knocked to pieces and all hands in building them up again to get some protection.
There were no dugouts, great big dugouts, as there were in France, you just had holes in the side of the trench if you were lucky, or just built up some of this rock and then put some corrugated iron if you could scrounge any over the top of it to get any shelter. And as for sleeping, well you just lay in the bottom of the trench or on a little firestep that you might have been able to make, that was the only place where you got any rest.
There were differences, too, between the trenches built by each nation’s front-line troops. Harold Oxley, of the Middlesex Regiment, compared British, French and German trenches.
Taking the French trenches first, we found when we took over the French trenches in the Kemmel area they were very much deeper than ours, but not kept in the cleanliness and order one would expect to find from taking over from a similar, what shall we say, infantryman to another infantryman – they weren’t in a similar condition to ours.
They were dirty and the latrines at the back weren’t in a similar condition to ours as regards keeping clean. The German difference was that they would be reinforced with a kind of wattle fencing – wattle construction – the breastworks would be reinforced with those. But you didn’t find it with the British trenches, they’d simply be sandbagged.
While serving with the South Lancashire Regiment on the Western Front, Ted Rimmer was able to see how superior the German dugouts were.
We were in the advance to the Hindenburg Line, talking about dugouts, and we got to the Hindenburg Line and you ought to have seen dugouts they had. They were like hotel rooms, they were all fitted out with special pumps and everything – tables and everything there, you know, not like ours! Ours were just simply dugout earth and sort of, what you slept on was a wire netting mattress, just wire netting in our dugouts, they were deep big dugouts. But they were marvellous their dugouts, they had tables and all that and laid out with stuff on them!
Open to the elements and dug deep into the ground, trenches often became a muddy quagmire. British NCO James Payne recalled one of the problems this caused.
There were sandbags criss-crossed which the French had built, and you put your foot down and you got trapped, and you couldn’t get out. And we’d got one man, Mills, he was 6’ 4” and he was one of our old friends and he said ‘Sarge, I can’t move!’ So we got hold of him, pulled him out, left his shoes and his trousers in the trench and then we walked him back to headquarters and got him another pair of trousers. And that’s how it went on the whole time we were in that trench.
Daily routine in the trenches varied, but was often uneventful. James Pratt served with the Gordon Highlanders on the Western Front in 1915.
The average day in the ordinary bit of the trenches was just by the way doing nothing! Except perhaps filling a few sandbags to strengthen a bit of the parapet of the trench. But of course there had to be always somebody on sentry go all the time, on each section of the trench. Apart from that, trench life was extremely dull. You simply slept and wrote letters, except when you were on that sort of duty.
For French NCO G. Fenetrier, trench life was similarly monotonous.
Our life was this: from the beginning of the day until the night, we were eating – sometimes some bread, chocolate, cheese – and smoking, firing at the Germans.Sometimes we received a few bombs. And that was the life.
Meal times were an important part of a soldier’s day. Ernest Jones, who served in Salonika, recalled how food was issued to the large numbers of front line troops.
Sometimes you’d go down if they’d bring it to the end of the trench, you see, because there were different communication trenches coming in, you see, and you’d go to the end and help to carry the things and then the orderly man would distribute them, you see.
As you carried it along, whatever the meal was or anything of that, the orderly man did the dishing out. Except at night when we had hot soup at 12 o’clock, that was in the winter – midnight – we had hot soup in the winter. Pea soup, always pea soup, and it was always cold. But it was hot when you drank it because there was so much pepper in it!
Harold Mayhall of the Durham Light Infantry didn’t have the best memories of his Western Front diet.
Oh, that’s a sore point: rations were very poor. The rations when you went up in the trenches and you couldn’t get rations up! You’d try to brew tea and you couldn’t, it was always cold and probably the water was all tasted of petrol because it came up in petrol tins – which were never cleaned out properly – and the tea was half petrol and cold. The food, they were supposed to give you some bacon, well you were lucky if you got a piece of bacon it was all cold and greasy. I mean you couldn’t get any.
If you were out of the line they’d cook some bacon and you could, they’d let you have – you’d get a piece of bread and dip it in, that was that, or you could have a tiny bit of bacon without dipping your bread in, that was all you got. And the cooks, probably if a man was a chartered accountant they’d make him a cook or something like that because it was always square pegs in round holes, you know. They couldn’t cook; we used to say they couldn’t boil water without spoiling it or something. The food was terrible.
But Arthur Smith of the Royal Fusiliers enjoyed the food that the orderly handed out.
He divided it up between the officers, the officers’ servants and then the platoons.And then you would get possibly a tin of bully beef between the four or five of you. You might get some pork and beans which we, being new, liked very much. Not much pork, only a sliver of fat but lots of beans. But we, being new to it, loved them and gobbled it down marvellously. We thought that was wonderful.
There was often a shortage of fresh water.George Harbottle outlined the difficulties this caused.
Well I mean, just a question as to what your men fished out but occasionally you would get a petrol can of water. The water had a pretty smelly taste about it and often the shell-hole water was better than that. We generally managed to shave with a safety razor and often enough if you’d had some tea and there were the dregs of the tea was about all you had to – the warmest water you could get to use for lather.
As well as food and water, soldiers were given other very welcome rations – described by British private Bill Smedley.
Rum ration every morning, in an 18-pounder shell cap protector, the size of an egg cup. It was brass with a piece of wire on from an 18-pounder shell and that was your measure, about an egg cupful. They’d measure this out and you’d have to drink it while you was before him. But I used to keep, I couldn’t drink mine, it was too strong – ’cos I never drank – I used to keep mine for my tea.
Cigarette ration was I think 40 every fortnight, Flag cigarettes they were, Woodbine. I didn’t smoke many because I used to save mine and swap it for food with the chaps that really went mad for cigarettes, for a smoke. Oh there’s no doubt about it, very soothing a cigarette.
Sleeping in the trenches could be a challenge – as Charles Quinnell found out.
You slept by sitting on the firestep. You’d try and find a dry sandbag to sit on and you’d sit there with, you’d put your overcoat over your head and try and make a tent of it. And you’d huddle down under that just sitting down. But it was a very, very broken sleep.
Living in the unsanitary trenches, soldiers soon suffered from the effects of body lice. Percy Webb of the Dorsetshire Regiment remembered the first time he felt them.
I was in the trenches at Le Transloy, and I suddenly realised that I began to itch and swing my clothes round my body where I was, you know, trying to… and of course you’d just swung your clothes round your body and you’d scratch and scratch and scratch. And the men that had been out there longer than I had were used to it, you see.
Well they always said that the lice was more active on a new body, a fresh body, if you understand what I mean, than they were on people that’d had the lice for a long time! You see they were most destructive things, lice were. And I think that was one of the biggest humbugs of the British Army, lice in the trenches.
The troops shared the trenches with huge numbers of rats, attracted by dead bodies and food waste. James Harvey was one of many plagued by them.
Rats were common, very common, you didn’t dare leave a bit of food about or else there’d be swarms of rats round you. And all the time you didn’t attack them, they didn’t attack you. But on one occasion where we got a bayonet and stuck one; needless to say we got out of that place quick! There were thousands of rats, must’ve been thousands, the number I couldn’t count them – didn’t stop to count ’em! Didn’t matter what part of the line you was in, you’d got these rats. One of our men who was asleep, and had his forehead all bitten by them. Oh yes, he had to go into hospital special for it.
Thomas McIndoe had a solution to the vermin problem.
Always creating problems they were, they’d eat the outside of a man’s ration bag, his iron rations that was given to you to survive on if you didn’t get any grub anywhere. They’d be through the bag and the biscuits as well, they’d eat the lot. That bloody great thing’d come up there and stand up on its back legs and gnaw something like that, you know. I used to line the sights up and give them one round of ball, bang! Blow ’em to nothing.
Serving with the French Army, Ernest Karganoff found trench life as unpleasant as his British counterparts.
Then we were transferred to the front of Champagne where we had to suffer from rain, mud, louses and rats. The trenches were very poor, half destroyed. I remember that a part of the parapet was made of – beside the sacks of sand – of dead soldiers.Our canteen was rather far away, about three miles and we had to wait every evening for our meals, which came usually cold the only way we could warm it is to use a candle.
Unsurprisingly, the poor conditions often led to ill-health among the troops. William Collins, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, dealt with many instances of what became known as trench fever.
The men sitting in the line were not so well off as us, as we were, because we were on the move. But a man sitting in a trench is there and he has very limited movement and we had cases of men coming down with a temperature. And I noticed that the medical officer marked them all with the same letters – PUO: Pyrexia of unknown origin – that was just a fever, you see.
And they couldn’t attribute it to any particular source, but of course it was the conditions, no doubt, that caused it. The standard symptoms of a fever: they all had temperatures, they all had temperatures of around about a hundred. And of course they went down as casualties, to hospital.
Despite the hardships, trench life brought men together. William Holmes fondly recalled the comradeship that developed in his part of the line.
I can honestly say that nothing that was ever we were made to do ever gave us any feeling of resentment. We knew we were there to do that job and our patriotism, we were so fond of our country – everybody – and we were like a lot of brothers together. You wouldn’t think, although we were all come from different families and that and we’d hear all them talk about their families and that. But we were ourselves was just like a lot of brothers, all the time. We were just like a band of brothers.The Massachusetts Senate race just got more interesting: Elizabeth Warren, the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, hinted strongly that she might take on incumbent Republican Scott Brown.
In a blog post on Blue Mass Group, Ms. Warren, a Harvard law professor, wrote: “I spent years working against special interests and have the battle scars to show it – and I have no intention of stopping now. It is time for me to think hard about what role I can play next to help rebuild a middle class that has been hacked at, chipped at, and pulled at for more than a generation—and that that is under greater strain every day.”
Ms. Warren, who’s been the subject of speculation all summer, will announce her decision after Labor Day, according to a Massachusetts Democrat familiar with the matter.
So far the Democratic field is crowded, but no clear front-runner has emerged to challenge Mr. Brown.When I played with the Green Bay Packers in the mid-1990s, I watched Brett Favre take the NFL by storm with a receiving corps that featured several playmakers on the perimeter (Robert Brooks, Antonio Freeman and Andre Rison), including a dynamic 1-2 punch (Mark Chmura and Keith Jackson) at tight end that made it nearly impossible to defend the aerial attack.
The diversity created chaos for the Packers' opponents -- and it shaped my view of how elite receiving corps should be constructed to win a championship. The NFL of today is a pass-centric league, and the top squads feature a deep stable of pass-catchers with the kind of depth and versatility that brings to mind a quality basketball team.
Ideally, there should be a classic No. 1 receiver capable of running the entire route tree. This receiver excels at defeating double coverage while also displaying the toughness and clutch ability to deliver when the game is on the line. The complementary receiver, meanwhile, should be a speedster with the acceleration and burst to blow the top off of coverage; he should be great at running the vertical routes while also being a legitimate "catch-and-run" threat on quick throws and bubble screens. As he'll face a lot of one-on-one coverage, it's imperative that he has the playmaking skills to be able to punish the defense for overloading to stop the No. 1 receiver.
Watch "The Top 100 Players of 2014" every week at 9 p.m. ET on NFL Network as we count down to the top player in the NFL. "The Top 100 Players of 2014 Reactions" airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET.
The slot receiver doesn't need to be a blazer, but he should be quick enough to run away from nickel corners and linebackers between the hashes. Additionally, he must display the toughness to withstand the punishment that comes with venturing over the middle. Either a big-bodied pass-catcher or a jitterbug with remarkable stop-start quickness and exceptional hands will work in this role.
At tight end, I prefer a sizable athlete with exceptional length and ball skills. He should excel at the "post-up" game (the act of using his body to create space from defenders over the middle of the field); it makes sense that former basketball players are thriving between the hashes in the NFL. If the tight end is capable of playing away from the line, it's an added bonus, because it allows the offensive coordinator to incorporate some exotic formations to exploit mismatches on the edge. The presence of two tight ends with complementary skills makes an offense tough to stop with base and nickel defenses.
Given some time to study the tape and depth charts of every team in the NFL, I thought I would rank my top five receiving corps based on overall talent and diversity. While plenty of teams boast one elite receiver, just a handful of squads have multiple threats good enough to take over the game. Here is how my list shakes out:
1) Washington Redskins
The corps: DeSean Jackson, Pierre Garcon, Andre Roberts and Jordan Reed
Heading into the 2014 season, the pressure is squarely on the shoulders of new coach Jay Gruden and Robert Griffin III to maximize a talent-laden unit. The Redskins have assembled a group of pass-catchers with the size (Reed checks in at 6-foot-2 and 243 pounds), speed (Jackson), explosiveness (Garcon) and quickness (Roberts) to torment defensive coordinators around the NFL. While most rosters feature a number of playmakers on the perimeter, few teams can rival the production delivered by the crew in Washington.
Garcon, a seventh-year pro, amassed 1,346 receiving yards on |
, and its focus is on high quality, premium audio products that integrate the Internet of Things, or, in Yang's words, "audio products without compromise."
More on Forbes: These Truly Wireless Earbuds Won't Fall Out Of Your Ear
The first product -- the one that was launched on Kickstarter -- is the Liberty Plus (styled as "Liberty+"), a set of truly wireless earbuds. I've tested quite a few of these in the past year and while it's always amazing to hear audio coming from two untethered little nubs, the connection tends to be a bit hit and miss (so far, Apple's AirPods offer the most stable connection, but it achieved that by compromising on aesthetics with two elongated legs that stick out of the user's ear).
I tested a pre-production unit of the Liberty Plus today in a meeting with Anker, and I'm happy to report that they might have the best connection of any wireless earbuds I've tried so far. The Air by Crazybaby and AirPods, which I tried last week, had previously been the gold standard (I estimated the connection rate at 98 and 99% respectively), but the Liberty Plus achieved 100% during my hour of testing. I wore them indoors and outdoors. I walked a block with them with my phone in the back pocket. I even left my phone at the coffee shop with Yang and walked outside the store some 25 feet away, and the Liberty Plus stayed connected.
The connection is achieved because the Liberty Plus uses the newest Bluetooth 5.0 standard (which is so new the only other mainstream device out right now that uses it is the Samsung Galaxy S8), compared to the 4.2 on Crazybaby's Air and 4.0 on Bragi's Dash. It probably helps that the earbud is a bit bigger in size than other earbuds (affording more room for internal antennas and drivers).
Sound quality was good -- though the bass isn't as deep as on Crazybaby's Air -- and the fit was comfortable. The earbuds will work with Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa, according to Yang (that feature wasn't ready yet during my testing).
But the second best news (behind the superb connection) to consumers will be its battery life. The Liberty Plus offers -- according to Yang, since I didn't get to try it long enough -- three and half hours of battery life on a single charge, and the charging case can top up the earbuds a whopping 12 times (for a total battery life of close to 48 hours). That's significantly more than everyone else out there -- guess we shouldn't be surprised, considering Anker is the world's top third-party battery manufacturer.
The Liberty Plus also offers transparency mode, which allows me to hear my surroundings clearly with the earbuds on. This is a feature that I really like as it allows me to wear the earbuds while walking around the ridiculously-packed streets of Hong Kong without fear of getting hit by a car or a suitcase-lugging tourist.
The Liberty Plus has already far outstripped its goal on Kickstarter (it's raised $1.6 million so far from a goal of $50,000), and Yang says it'll be ready to ship by October. Right now, backers can get the earbuds for $99. After the campaign, they will retail for $149 and be available in stores worldwide.
Yang says Anker -- which currently has a staff of over 500 in Shenzhen -- will continue to produce its popular chargers and power banks, but the company will increasingly release premium, higher-end gadgets.
"I want to make a smart home product for every room," he says. Given the success of the Liberty Plus so far, that's not as ambitious a goal as it sounds.
More on Forbes: Apple AirPods Vs. Crazybaby AirOmar Mateen warned of the rampage on Facebook accounts thought to be associated with him, and searched for ‘Pulse’ and ‘shooting’ while still at the club
The Orlando gunman used Facebook during his deadly rampage, apparently seeking to gauge reaction in real time while also vowing more attacks, it emerged on Thursday, as Barack Obama flew in to the city to console families of the victims.
Omar Mateen went online and searched for the terms “Pulse Orlando” and “shooting”, according to a letter released by a Senate committee, even as his victims lay dead or dying in the gay nightclub.
The 29-year-old American Muslim also apparently posted “America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state..I pledge my alliance to [its leader] abu bakr al Baghdadi..may Allah accept me,” on one of at least five Facebook accounts thought to be associated with him.
According to the Senate committee’s letter, he then posted: “The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west” and “You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”
In a final message, Mateen apparently wrote: “In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa.”
Republican senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, quoted the posts in a letter to the Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking for help uncovering Mateen’s digital tracks. Johnson did not explain how the committee obtained the information about Mateen’s Facebook activity.
Johnson also wrote that his staff learned that in May Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists and on 4 June 2016, Mateen apparently searched “Baghdadi Speech”.
The senator added: “My staff has also learned that Mateen apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FBI searches, including searching for specific law enforcement offices.”
As club-goers desperately sent text messages to loved ones, Mateen is known to have pledged allegiance to Isis in a 911 phone call during the three-hour attack. However, the head of the CIA said on Thursday he has been “not able to uncover any link” between Mateen and the militant group.
Reinforcing four days’ worth of internal government assessments across multiple agencies and an FBI inquiry, director John Brennan contrasted the “lone wolf” killers in Orlando and San Bernardino last December with the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, which he told the Senate intelligence committee were “directed” by Isis leadership in Syria and Iraq.
Brennan described a spread-bet strategy by Isis as it loses territory in its Iraq and Syria strongholds. The group’s “terrorist capacity or global reach” remain undiminished by US-led advances on Isis-held cities like Manbij and Falluja, the latest developments in a war nearing its third year, and Brennan said the US should expect Isis to launch accelerating terrorist attacks worldwide, a reversion to its pre-2014 status quo.
“As the pressure mounts on Isil, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda,” Brennan testified, using the administration’s preferred acronym for Isis.
But Brennan indicated the shape of those attacks will vary. Isis is consolidating and “interconnecting” its foreign branches, particularly its “most dangerous” branch in Libya, and place operatives in western countries, chiefly in Europe. It will also “inspire attacks by sympathizers with no ties to the group”, which Brennan said taxes the security agencies’ ability to notice ahead of an attack.
America’s worst terrorist attack since 11 September 2001 began at 2am on Sunday and ended three hours later with Mateen being killed by a police Swat team. The FBI says it is still gathering evidence at Pulse and analysing mobile phone location data to piece together Mateen’s activities leading up to the massacre.
Orlando on Thursday awaited the arrival of Obama, who plans to meet victims’ families and doctors, paramedics and first responders and offer words of solace. Vice-President Joe Biden will accompany him.
Air Force One landed in Orlando at 12.45pm in bright sunshine. Obama descended the steps with Orlando congresswoman Corinne Brown and Florida senator Marco Rubio. They were greeted by officials including Biden, Governor Rick Scott of Florida and Orlando’s mayor, Buddy Dyer.
The speed with which Obama’s trip has been organised reflects the gravity of the tragedy. Last December, he made a stop in San Bernardino, California, on his way to holidaying in Hawaii, 16 days after the shooting there, but did not deliver remarks. He went to Charleston, South Carolina, nine days after a gunman killed nine people at an African American church.
The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said: “When the president makes a trip to another American city, we’ve got a week or so to plan it. In this case we’ve had about 48 hours to plan it.”
Earnest said Obama would tell Orlando’s residents “that they’re not alone, even as they endure what surely have been several dark nights”.
The president also intends to speak publicly during his visit “to make clear that the country stands with the people of Orlando, stands with the LGBT community in Orlando, as they grieve for their loss”, the spokesman said.As major American copyright holders continue their long war on file-sharing, the focus of the debate has increasingly shifted overseas. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun seizing the domain names of so-called rogue sites based overseas. And copyright interests are pushing for the passage of the PROTECT IP Act, which would draft various intermediaries, including DNS providers, into the fight against such sites.
In May, American law enforcement officials opened up yet another front in this war by seeking the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer. The 23-year-old British college student is currently working on his BS in interactive media and animation. Until last year, he ran a "link site" that helped users find free movies and TV shows, many of them infringing. American officials want to try him on charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy.
The extradition request is remarkable; O'Dwyer has no obvious connection to the United States. He hasn't set foot there since he was a small child, his servers were not located there, and it's not clear he has broken UK law. With his family's support, O'Dwyer is fighting extradition and seeking a trial in the United Kingdom instead.
The case is likely to become a new focal point in the ongoing global debate—one that exploded in the 1990s among legal scholars and has been raging ever since—over who has jurisdiction to try crimes committed wholly online. Extradition is normally reserved for the most serious crimes; critics doubt that operating a linking site qualifies. If O'Dwyer is extradited to the United States, it could set the precedent that website operators around the world are obligated to comply with American laws, even if they differ from the laws in their own country. If they don't, they could face US justice.
Free movies
We recently covered the legal battle over Hotfile, an online "cyberlocker" site that Hollywood studios have accused of facilitating massive illegal downloading of their movies. In their complaint, the studios said that Hotfile relies on "link sites" to "host, organize, and promote URL links" to its content.
O'Dwyer's site, TVshack, was allegedly such a link site. It served as a clearinghouse for users to share links to movies and television shows available for free—but not necessarily legal—download. It's no longer online, but cached copies suggest that most of the links were to Hollywood content like Toy Story 3, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and episodes of "Family Guy." Needless to say, these copies weren't authorized by the relevant copyright holders.
It was a profitable venture. As TVshack's traffic grew, O'Dwyer began selling advertising space on the site. Richard's mother Julia told Ars that she first became concerned when she learned how much money her son was making. "It was apparent that this income was becoming bigger and bigger," she said. "He wasn't that interested in generating an income, and I think he was getting a bit frightened."
A knock on the door
In late June 2010, the TVshack.net domain name was seized in a virtual sting by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a move made possible by the fact that all.com and.net domain names are registered through US companies. As usual, ICE redirected the TVshack domain to a banner indicating the domain name had been seized by the federal government. (ICE has previously noted that most of these requests for takedowns come from industry, and it works closely with groups like the MPAA.)
O'Dwyer didn't back down. Within days, he had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks.
The feds were not amused. In November 2010, British police showed up at O'Dwyer's house. Julia told Ars what happened next.
"They had two American guys with them, which Richard assumes were men from ICE," she said. "They questioned him about his website. It wasn't more than an hour." The police also seized two of Richard's computers.
"The ICE men shook his hand when they left," she said. "One of them said 'Don't worry, you won't have to go to America.'"
Julia says the men didn't ask him to take TVShack down, but he closed it himself. Nevertheless, the TVShack.cc domain was also (eventually) seized by ICE.
"A big shock"
Richard was asked to report to his local police station on May 23, 2011. "We got him a lawyer, and I arranged to go with him to the police station," Julia said. "We thought that he was going to either be charged with an offense in the UK or to be further questioned."
Instead, the O'Dwyers learned that the British investigation had been dropped. Instead, the US had requested Richard's extradition. "That was a big shock," Julia said. "Obviously, that had never entered our heads, that that's what would be happening on that day—or any other day, for that matter."
"I can't see how they can say that there is a connection" to the United States, she added. "He had no servers in America. He was never in America since he was 5 years old. It just seems like ICE are trying to make the rules to suit them."
Forcing Richard to stand trial in the United States would be a severe hardship for his family, Julia said. "It will cost £1500 at least to have a trip to America. And then you go all that way for an hour's visiting time in jail. It seems ridiculous. The threat of being extradited is like an extra punishment that you're given before you even get to any charges."
The rarity of extradition
So why is Richard being taken to America rather than being allowed to stand trial in the UK? The American law enforcement agencies behind the extradition request declined to comment on the case when we asked. But Erik Barnett, an assistant deputy director for ICE, has told the Guardian that the United States regards any website with a US-controlled domain like.net to be within its jurisdiction. Until now, ICE's campaign against these websites has been focused on domain name seizures, but O'Dwyer's case may represent the first escalation of that campaign to include the extradition of website owners.
The effort to extradite Richard is almost unprecedented. We could only find two examples of individuals extradited to the United States for computer crimes committed without ever setting foot here.
One of them, Gary McKinnon, was a UK citizen who was accused of hacking into Pentagon and NASA computer systems—a case which therefore had a much clearer US nexus. At last report, he was still in the UK fighting extradition. The other example is Australian resident Hew Griffiths, who was sent to the United States on warez charges in 2007 after a 3-year extradition fight. He served a total of 51 months in jail for his leadership role in the software cracking group DrinkOrDie.
Richard's mother also points to the case of Ryan Cleary, a 19-year-old Brit who was arrested in June 2011 for his alleged role in the LulzSec hacker group. "I wouldn't suggest that he should be extradited, because I wouldn't wish that on anyone," she said. But she noted that LulzSec has attacked numerous American targets, including the CIA. She wondered why her son is being extradited while Cleary is apparently being allowed to stand trial in the UK despite a much more direct connection to the United States.
The legality of linking
It's not clear whether O'Dwyer has even committed a crime under UK law. O'Dwyer is not accused of hosting infringing content himself. Instead, his site provided links to content hosted by other websites. In December, a British judge ruled in favor of TV-Links, a website that, like Tvshack, offered links to video content, some of it infringing.
What about the United States? Ars asked Daniel Gervais, a law professor at Vanderbilt, for comment. He pointed to the Supreme Court's 2005 Grokster decision, under which defendants can be held liable for "inducing" their users to infringe copyright. He said that if O'Dwyer was "linking multiple times to content that is entirely or almost essentially infringing," which it appears he was, then O'Dwyer likely faces "secondary liability" under copyright law.
However, he said, "it is so unusual to have this prosecuted under criminal statutes. Criminal copyright infringement is extremely rare. Typically we'd be looking at people who would manufacture or import pirate DVDs."
O'Dwyer's mother said that if Richard were found guilty in the UK, the maximum penalty for his actions would be just two years of prison, compared to five years in the United States.Editor’s Note: as previously promised, today marks the return of our Recommended Reading feature after a ten month hiatus. Truthfully, most of the early Recommended Reading posts were glorified link dumps designed to keep me writing while I was still struggling to figure out exactly what I was doing with this website; as such, they were never all that interesting or popular for the most part and eventually I just stopped posting them altogether.
I say “for the most part” because there was actually one post that readers found useful enough to reference and share; a collection of thirteen links all about Election Fraud designed to help absolute neophytes learn about the subject for themselves from a variety of sources. In light of this experience, I’ve decided to once again create a “mega” Recommended Reading post focused on a single issue that appears to be confusing a lot of people who only watch mainstream news – the objectively mind-numbing “Trump-Russia” conspiracy theory in all of it’s jingoistic glory.
Below you’ll find links to and descriptions of 33 fantastic articles or videos debunking important aspects of what has become known as “Russiagate.” These pieces have been carefully selected for clarity, informative value and to avoid rabid, partisan defense of the notably horrible Trump administration; you’ll find no love for Louise Mensch mad walls or ass-kissing blowhards like Sean Hannity here my friends. The links are roughly grouped together by topic and can be accessed by clicking on either the title of the piece or the image posted alongside each entry.
Note: many of these links have been referenced in previous articles here on this website:
Overviews & Media Mistakes
Key Democratic Officials Now Warning Base Not to Expect Evidence of Trump/Russia Collusion – this March 2017 piece by Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept is a pretty good overview of why the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory is rapidly unraveling as experts who’ve seen all of the evidence keep confirming there’s no conclusive proof of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This piece covers public statements by former acting CIA director Michael Morell and President Obama’s head of the DNI James Clapper in particular that strongly indicate this whole story is going precisely nowhere. Greenwald also examines the shifting media narrative around the scandal and identifies clear signs that large outlets may finally be realizing that the conspiracy has run its course. Although this article is a little bit on the longer side, its focus on recent developments make it ideal for sharing with people looking to quickly determine if there is any validity to Russiagate and get on with their lives.
Inside The Investigation To Get To The Bottom Of Russia’s Role In The Election – in the span of just under three months, Buzzfeed has gone from being one of the media outlets most aggressively pushing the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory (they published the infamous Steele dossier) to gently trying to talk Democrats down off the ledge; and the research that went into this piece is undoubtedly a big part of why. This article is full of fluff designed to minimize the political impact of publicly accusing a sitting president of working for a foreign power without much evidence but the key takeaway here is that even Democrats are starting to realize that this has gone too far – as evidenced by anonymous Dems on the House Intelligence Committee admitting “they don’t expect to find evidence of active, informed collusion between the Trump campaign and known Russian intelligence operatives.”
Something About This Russia Story Stinks – the late 2016 piece by Matt Taibbi asks why the American media is eager to rely on the secret assessments of intelligence agencies so soon after the heartbreaking failures of journalism that lead up to the disastrous Iraq War. The two most important things to note here is that while Taibbi supported an investigation into potential Russian interference with the 2016 US election, he also noted that much of the media’s shocking insistence that US intelligence agencies have definitively proven Russia messed with the election don’t make sense in light of the available evidence. Taibbi was also one of the first mainstream reporters to point out that America’s tepid response to these allegations casts doubt on their veracity and it’s hard to disagree with his assessment even months later – if US Intelligence really could prove Russia had “hacked” the US government/election, it’s difficult to believe their response wouldn’t be more significant than expelling a few dozen diplomats and complaining to the press.
Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media – in March 2017, Matt Taibbi returned to the question of the Trump-Russia scandal and notes that even months later there is still “no evidence of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and the government of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” The rest of the essay then focuses on warning both the Democratic party and leading journalists about the dangers of pushing “an extraordinarily complex tale that derives much of its power from suppositions and assumptions” while “betting their professional and political capital on the promise of future disclosures that may not come.” Taibbi concludes by asking the question that undoubtedly keeps even the most ardent Russiagate supporter awake at night; “what if there’s nothing else to find?” Please note that at one point in this piece, Matt flatly states that “the case that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee now appears fairly solid;” apparently because “even Donald Trump thinks so.” As you’ll see in the links under Problems with Russian Hacking Evidence below, I do not agree with this assessment in the slightest – but the rest of Matt’s article is pretty spot on in my opinion.
The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation – while I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Michael Tracey’s social media management techniques and it’s important to note that including one of his articles here is not to be construed as a public endorsement in any way, this article remains the most damning indictment of the media/political hack spin cycle that fuels the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory scandal. In thirteen brief bullet points, Tracey maps out the step by step process political operatives and mainstream media flacks have used to repackage and broadcast essentially minor revelations as breaking, ironclad evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government time and time again. If you’ve found yourself thinking that the Trump is a Manchurian Candidate theory simply has to be true because so many media outlets are talking about it, you absolutely must read this article before going any further.
It is Time For the Democrats to Drop the Trump-Russia Connection – this March 2017 long form essay by Brandon Sutton over at Progressive Army discusses why the Trump-Russia scandal hasn’t been the “silver bullet” Democratic party operatives have hoped for and explores why this story has so enraptured the click-hungry, mainstream media. Sutton’s larger point that liberals (and by extension the Dem party) would be wise to abandon the conspiracy theories and focus on horrifying problems the Trump administration is helping to exacerbate underpins this scathing indictment of the mainstream opposition to Trump and it’s refusal to focus on issues that actually resonate with voters. This piece is a good choice for readers who want to understand the whole Trump-Russia scandal but only have time to read one article.
Trump’s Critics Are Letting The Bigger Russia Story Slide – as I mentioned previously, Buzzfeed has recently found itself backpedaling on Trump-Russia scandal allegations faster than a Kurt Eichenwald retraction notice and this March 2017 piece by Miriam Elder is a great example of that phenomenon. While I don’t think the evidence supports this author’s conclusion that Russia “hacked the US, in its drive to sow chaos in a country it sees as its rival” it’s awful hard to disagree with her statement that “when meeting an ambassador is a problem, we’re in trouble.” Elder’s admission that there probably won’t be direct evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with the Russian government forthcoming is ultimately more important than her unsupported declaration that the evidence already available is enough to justify accusing Russia of interfering in the election here.
Beware The False Temptations Of The Russia Story – the third and final article in our Buzzfeed “back down” trifecta is a charmless little hunk of trash composed of roughly ninety percent spin, written in March 2017 by Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith. While it certainly takes some effort to chew through Smith’s attempts to lean on the now thoroughly discredited “Steel dossier” and I can’t agree with his unsupported opinion that there is already enough evidence to justify accusing the Russian government of interfering in the 2016 US election (as you’ll see in the section below) – his decision to call some liberal conspiracy theorists in the media “the left’s new version of Glenn Beck” is both accurate and quite telling in light of Buzzfeed’s dramatic about-face on this issue.
Democrats’ Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S. – it is important to remember that while the Trump-Russia conspiracy scandal undoubtedly kicked into high gear in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s stunning election loss, the seeds of this madness were an active part of the Democratic party’s campaign strategy in 2016 and indeed, the history of American politics since the start of the cold war. This brilliant long form essay by the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald represents the definitive historical account of the Democrat party’s new habit of smearing anyone who gets in their way as a Kremlin puppet during the 2016 election and previous, historical attempts by reactionary Republicans to push the same narrative. After reading this months-old article, I honestly believe it is utterly impossible to see the ongoing Trump-Russia conspiracy theory as anything besides a logical extension of the Clinton campaign’s election strategy this past fall.
Is Russiagate a Conspiracy Theory? – this lengthy, March 2017 transcript of a Politico interview with noted Putin critic Masha Gessen touches on a number of subjects surrounding US-Russian relations, how Trump and Vladimir Putin are similar as leaders in strikingly bad ways and why it’s important to take Trump’s most frightening promises at face value. More importantly however, Gessen spends the middle of the interview pointing out that the Trump-Russia conspiracy represents a huge crutch for an American establishment looking to blame the rise of Trump on anyone but themselves and the objectively corrosive effect doing so has had on actually resisting the damage his government is doing to the American political sphere. Although the interview is quite long, a sound file was included for your listening pleasure at the time I posted this article.
Russiagate and the Democratic Party are for Chumps – while it takes roughly half the article to actually come up, this March 2017 Op-Ed by Paul Street touches on additional comments made by Masha Gessen to explain the political consequences of Russiagate. The interesting twist here is that Street examines the conspiracy not as a mistake so much as a purposeful strategy to drive populist/leftist issues to the margins on behalf of corporate, mainstream elements in the Democratic party.
If Russia Hacked Podesta, Then Russia Knew Hillary Used A Private Server to Email Obama – Over at Huffington Post, author HA Goodman asks how Russia could have resisted hacking Hillary Clinton’s (at times) non-encrypted, private email server if they already had access to John Podesta’s emails/system; unless of course Russia had hacked neither and the entire Trump-Russia scandal was an excuse to cover-up the Democratic party’s failure to beat a reality TV star fascist in the 2016 US Presidential election. This article is also one of the first posts to mention that the DNC refused to comply with the FBI’s request to examine their servers as part of it’s investigation; an important detail that is all too rarely mentioned in articles supporting the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory.
A Disaster In The Making: The Long-Term Consequences Of Russia Hysteria – recent TYT Network addition Michael Tracy looks at the stunning array of very real negative consequences relentlessly pushing Trump-Russia hysteria has already had for the media, the Democratic Party and the ability to conduct actual politics in America. This exceptionally well-sourced essay absolutely demolishes the idea that the Trump-Russia conspiracy has value even if it’s not true simply because anything that weakens the Trump administration in the short term is justifiable; while also drawing attention to the very real possibility such behavior could push a whackjob like Trump to placate critics by getting tough on Russia – with potentially disastrous results for the entire world.
Everything Is Definitely Russia, Or So It Seems – this March 2017 long form piece by Beth Lynch on Progressive Army explores the obvious McCarthyite aspects of the Trump-Russia scandal and discusses how the conspiracy is being used by mainstream Democrats as a cudgel to silence criticism from the left. The author also touches on the sobering reality that the Democratic party has adopted traditional neoconservative tactics in the wake of it’s 2016 election loss. By looking at both the technical evidence used to support the Trump-Russia theory and examining the ways in which the whole story has been politicized, Lynch presents a comprehensive and notably compelling argument that the real goal here is to “completely delegitimize anyone who challenges the narrative they (Democrats) started after losing the election.”
If Russia Today is Moscow’s propaganda arm, it’s not very good at its job – as the evidence for the “Trump is Putin’s Manchurian Candidate” conspiracy theory has begun to unravel, there has been an obvious, concerted effort by the Democratic party and their media surrogates to shift public focus on the scandal towards little-watched, Russian state-sponsored news network Russia Today. This is of course ridiculous because thousands of news networks the world over report on US politics without enduring similar accusations but more importantly, RT’s infinitesimal viewing audience would make influencing the US election virtually impossible – as detailed in this January WaPo article by Amanda Erickson.
Abby Martin Responds to Exploitation by NY Times – as part of these attempts to cast blame for the 2016 US election results on Russia Today, mainstream American news outlets like the NY Times have consistently labored to portray RT as an utterly dominated Kremlin mouthpiece in a “cartoonish, totalitarian fashion.” Not so fast says former Breaking the Set host Abby Martin who refutes false claims by the Times about her previous employment at RT and accuses the paper of “working to push a false perspective being promoted by US government officials and agencies.”
Problems with Russian Hacking Evidence
From Russia, with Panic – this excellent long form essay by Yasha Levine takes a look at not only the “Russians hacked America” narrative but also it’s similarities to and possible origins from the 2008 Georgia-Russian war over South Ossetia; the familiar cast of characters involved and pattern of relying on private cybersecurity firms alone makes for fascinating reading. Of particular importance however is the second half of the essay in which Levine absolutely demolishes CrowdStrike’s technical evidence and makes a pretty good argument that the company was hired with the intent to blame the attacks on Russia as quickly as possible. Finally, Levine also closes out the article with some harsh words for public cybersecurity experts who so readily backed up CrowdStrike’s story based on thin, even laughable “evidence.”
Here’s the Public Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC — It’s Not Enough – this December 2016 report at The Intercept sees Sam Biddle take an exhaustive look at all of the available technical evidence that the Russian government was behind the “hack” of the DNC and determines that it’s simply not enough “to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.” By carefully dissecting each piece of evidence in reasonably plain terms, Biddle exposes holes in the Trump-Russia theory that you could drive a truck through and although some may be inclined to dispute this article as outdated, it’s important to remember that virtually no additional technical evidence has emerged to support the claims made in both the CrowdStrike & ODNI reports since. This is far and away the best online layman’s summary of why there isn’t enough evidence to definitively say the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee. While the author concedes that it is indeed possible that the government has additional evidence to back up these accusations, Biddle rightfully notes “the U.S. intelligence community must make its evidence against Russia public if they want us to believe their claims” – based both on the dismal track record of US intelligence reports and the overwhelming severity of the theoretical charges involved.
Why I Still Don’t Buy the Russian Hacking Story – this short essay by Leonid Bershidsky over at Bloomberg View was published in late December 2016 and represents one of the first looks at the extremely sketchy evidence connecting whoever hacked the DNC and reported hacking of a Ukraine artillery app; the evidence on which CrowdStrike (and US Intel) largely based their assessment that the Russian government had hacked the DNC. In addition to questioning the sheer number of losses reported, Bershidsky asks how the existence of a compromised app on a Russian language, Ukrainian military forum is sufficient evidence that Russia “hacked” Ukraine’s artillery and questions how likely it is that Ukrainian officers are getting their targeting app on a random internet forum. Although he could not have known it at the time, Bershidsky’s article looks startlingly prophetic in light of news that both the Ukrainian military and International Institute for Strategic Studies are now disputing CrowdStrike’s Ukraine report and findings (see below.)
The GRU-Ukraine Artillery Hack That May Never Have Happened – this short but scathing January 2017 article by cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr also examines problems with CrowdStrike’s Ukrainian artillery app claims but includes some interesting technical details that fundamentally expose the report (and thus the ODNI report based on it) as objectively false. As Carr notes in his conclusion, it is simply not reasonable to assume “the GRU developed a variant of X-Agent to infect an Android mobile app in order to geolocate and destroy Ukraine’s D-30 howitzers” if “to do this, they chose an artillery app which had no way to send or receive data, and wrote malware for it that didn’t ask for GPS position information.” If Carr can so easily demonstrate that the CrowdStrike report is obviously wrong about the Ukraine artillery app; what exactly has the media being doing with this story the past two plus months? The answer is of course, absolutely nothing. Finally, don’t miss Carr’s followup article “Crowdstrike Needs To Address The Harm It Caused Ukraine.”
Think Tank: Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data – this March 2017 VOA News report by Pete Cobus and Oleksiy Kuzmenko updates the Russian “hacking” story by revealing even more problems with the CrowdStrike report at the center of US Intel claims that Russian actors hacked the Democratic National Committee. Both the Ukraine’s military and the International Institute for Strategic Studies are disputing the data Crowdstrike used to connect the DNC “hack” to the reported hacking of a Ukrainian artillery app; a central component in CrowdStrike’s claims that the suspected DNC intrusion could only be the work of the Russian government. Officials in Ukraine deny the app was ever compromised and the IISS says CrowdStrike used its figures from a routine assessment to “prove” Ukraine military losses erroneously. Although they’re hardly being reported, these damning allegations deal another serious blow to the only known shred of technical evidence in the ODNI report (that accuses Russia of hacking the DNC) assembled by US intelligence agencies in January 2017.
There Is Still No Hard Evidence For “Russian Hacking” – this Op-Ed by Michael Tracey was published on January 6th 2017 in the immediate aftermath of the surprisingly fact-light ODNI report and has primarily been included here to help prove that there has been almost no new evidence to support the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory in quite some time. Tracey also questions why the US government would spend so much time talking about obscure media outlet RT News and theorizes that it may be a diversion from the fact that solid evidence to prove either that Russian hacked the DNC, or that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government, simply may not exist
Evidence of Russian Election Hacking Is Inconclusive – this short, but excellent essay focuses on technical reasons why CrowdStrike & the US Government are going too far when they say the “hack” of the DNC can be attributed to the Russian government. Key topics include pointing out that the supposedly “signature” malware used is available for sale on the open market, how IP addresses can be spoofed/why anonymous Tor nodes don’t prove anything and a robust discussion of the differences between a “hack” and a “leak.” Finally, author Trent Lapinski talks about why it’s a very bad idea to trust the American deep state and what the government’s motivation for releasing all of this disinformation might really be.
Videos & Audio Discussions about the Trump-Russia Conspiracy
Lefties Have Come Unhinged Over Russia | Jordan Chariton Interview – the simple truth is that I could have picked any one of the dozens of excellent video discussions Jimmy Dore from The Young Turks has produced about the ongoing Trump-Russia scandal/hysteria; I honestly believe that anyone looking to understand why this conspiracy theory is all political theater could just put Dore’s videos on autoplay for half a day and end up with a much more accurate picture of the “Trump works for Putin” story than anyone watching MSNBC would have. Unfortunately, due to space concerns in this already long article I was forced to restrict myself to four – first up is Jimmy’s fascinating, eleven minute discussion with fellow TYT alum Jordan Chariton about why liberals in America have lost their goddamn mind over Russian conspiracy theories.
CNN CAUGHT Reporting Fake News On Russian Hack – one of the best things about Jimmy Dore’s show is his regular focus on catching media liars in the act and the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory has provided ample opportunity for Dore to show off his talents. In this |
-middle attack, where a connection will covertly intercept, collect and pass forward information between two parties. Instead, attackers can just send packets of data to the two targets with spoofed credentials.
“Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that the attack is extremely effective and reliable. Given any two arbitrary hosts, it takes only 10 seconds to successfully infer whether they are communicating,” the team wrote in a white paper. “If there is a connection, subsequently, it takes also only tens of seconds to infer the TCP sequence numbers used on the connection. To demonstrate the impact, we perform case studies on a wide range of applications.”
Linux flaw puts millions of PCs, Android smart devices at riskhttps://t.co/AiOHutMjfYpic.twitter.com/8Zv92p9OYD — RT America (@RT_America) January 20, 2016
Because Linux runs in the backend on a majority of servers as well as on Android devices, an enormous number of users might be left vulnerable. Even those using the much-vaunted anonymizing software Tor could have their privacy compromised 90 percent of the time in an average time of about 50 seconds.
"In general, we believe that a [denial-of-service or] DoS attack against Tor connections can have a devastating impact on both the availability of the service as a whole and the privacy guarantees that it can provide," the researchers said.
The team notes that because only version 3.6 or later of the Linux kernel has the flaw, systems running older software are not affected. They distributed a patch to fix the vulnerability, but they note a large number of individuals and networks will still be left exposed to miscreants, since the exploit only requires one unpatched party for the attack to work.Welcome to another summer of SSBMRank. Players, commentators, and figureheads were surveyed for who they thought were the best players of the first half of 2015. We finally delve into the Top 5.
2. Leffen – (637 pts)
Profile Name: William Hjelte Team: Team Solo Mid Main(s): Fox Area: Sweden 2014 SSBMRank 6 Social Media lffn @TSM_Leffen
Summary
It’s been quite a journey for Leffen who was called a “god-slayer” as early as 2014. In 2015, he’s climbed several mountains. He won his first major at BEAST 5, defeating Mango and Armada. At Apex, he beat Mew2King and became the first ever player to defeat the “5 gods” and also shares the title for “most money won from a single money match.” His early successes were met with some struggles in the spring season, where he failed to make Top 8 at Press Start, losing to players such as SFAT and HugS. After the disappointing performance, he came back and took the summer by storm, winning 4 out of 5 events, including CEO 2015. He’s been rapidly improving in his weaker matchups, demonstrating a complete mastery against Marth by dominating Mew2King at Super Smash Con with two consecutive Fox vs. Marth victories on Final Destination – something never achieved by a Fox ever.
Tournament Results
Super Major Tournament Results 3rd 1st 5th
Major Tournament Results 1st 3rd 3rd 5th 9th 2nd 1st 1st
2015 Set Data vs Big 6
Armada Hungrybox Mango Mew2King PPMD Total Leffen 7-6 2-2 3-4 5-1 0-1 17-14 (55%)
*Includes Super Smash Con
Leffen’s Win Percentage by Stage Against Big 6 (2015)
Other SSBMRank Summer 2015 Pages: 1,2,3,4,5,6-10,11-15,16-20,21-25'Elementary School Kids In Science Class Using A Microscope' [Shutterstock]
Kansas officials hope to dismiss a lawsuit over the state’s new science standards for schools.
The standards were adopted by the Kansas State Board of Education in June. The group Citizens for Objective Public Education, Inc. (COPE) filed a lawsuit against the state in September, claiming the standards “will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview” because students will be taught about evolution.
Attorneys for the State Board of Education, its 10 members, the Department of Education and Commissioner Diane DeBacker filed a motion to the dismiss the lawsuit on Thursday. They said COPE and the parents it represents lack standing.
In a memo in support of the motion to dismiss, state officials also denied the new science standards violated of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
“The Standards do not advance or inhibit religion. Nor do they endorse religion or excessively entangle the State with religion. This lawsuit, however, risks injecting Plaintiffs’ personal religious beliefs into the Standards. The U.S. Supreme Court has already rejected similar attempts in other contexts.”
They also denied that “teaching science or other secular topics is tantamount to teaching atheism.”
State officials wrote that some of COPE’s allegations were “difficult to understand.” The group “baldly allege[s] that ‘the use of the [scientific] Orthodoxy to restrict the kinds of explanations permitted in public schools about the natural world infringes on the speech rights of Plaintiffs'” but fails to state how the standards restrict their speech.
“Plaintiffs have failed to plead the most basic elements of a Free Speech Clause claim. The Court should dismiss Plaintiffs’ Free Speech Clause claim on this basis alone,” they wrote.
[‘Elementary School Kids In Science Class Using A Microscope’ via Shutterstock]The good news: Disney’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is an enormous hit, with about $155 million in domestic ticket sales for its opening weekend. That will likely propel the year’s box-office sales, as our Anthony D’Alessandro points out, to an $11 billion-plus record.
Less good: Even big movies like this year’s Star Wars entry are working harder to make an impression on the growing North American audience.
Or think of it this way. Movies swim in an ever-larger pool of potential ticket-buyers. So each year, a film must swallow a slightly higher number of sales to match the share consumed by comparable predecessors.
Occasionally, a film breaks out and becomes an audience-eating monster. In 2015, for instance, Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens sold about 28.5 million tickets in the North American market, to set an opening weekend record, according to charts compiled by Boxofficemojo.com. That means about 8 percent of the combined U. S.-Canada population, then roughly 358 million, saw the movie when it opened. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, by comparison, sold about 18.2 million tickets in the same market, which is probably over 360 million people this year. So the new film was seen by around 5.1 percent of the viewers, a share that is about 36 percent lower than that of its predecessor.
That Rogue One is smaller than The Force Awakens isn’t news. Disney has spent the better part of a year dousing any expectation that the spin-off would match the parent.
But audience share calculations get more interesting when you reach back a decade or two, to look at the performance of blockbusters past. In terms of opening weekend-ticket sales, for instance, Rogue One clearly edged DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek 2, which had 17.4 million domestic ticket sales when it opened in 2004. In the Boxofficemojo ranking, Rogue One ranked 17th, while Shrek 2 placed 21st in terms of opening weekend tickets sold. But Shrek 2 reached about 5.4 percent of a smaller population; so it loomed a little larger for the audience.
In 2006, Disney reached about 6.3 percent of the North American population with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which had about 20.7 million in opening weekend ticket sales. The film’s share was almost 24 percent higher than that of Rogue One. Similar is the gap between Rogue One and Sony’s Spider-Man, which had about 19.8 million ticket sales when it opened in 2002. That represented around 6 percent of the combined population, a share 18 percent higher than was posted by Rogue One this weekend.
Other films that reached a higher percentage of the population than Rogue One on opening weekend included The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Shrek The Third, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, all of which had lower dollar receipts at the box-office when they opened.Authors:
Maged Al-Madhaji
Asil Sidahmed
Farea Al-Muslimi Maged Al-MadhajiAsil SidahmedFarea Al-Muslimi Published By:
Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies In Partnership With:
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
SaferWorld
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Download Arabic version
Preamble:
On the dawn of March 26th, 2015, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm, an internationally backed military campaign against the Houthis, a Zaidi Shi’a led rebel group, and forces allied to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen. The operation has given rise to new roles for new, non-Yemeni actors in the country, leading to an unprecedented regionalization of Yemen’s conflict.
The Saudi military intervention, invoking what has since been dubbed the “Salman Doctrine,” along with growing Iranian support to the Houthis and the increasing role of Oman in leading reconciliation and mediation efforts, show some critical changes of the politics and roles of regional states, which will likely determine the course of the Yemeni crisis and future of the country.
Even though the active roles of such nation’s are far from new to Yemen, the growth and changes in involvement from states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Oman necessitate a call for analysis: there is a need to more fully consider the new and emerging roles of the regional countries within the Yemen crisis, the reasons for their changing policies, and the impact they are having on the dynamics within Yemen. Additionally, this brief will explore potential peace-making opportunities that could easily be lost in the flames of the ongoing war in Yemen—and the regional conflict—and, accordingly, make suggestions that could bring Yemen closer to a regionally backed political solution.
This policy brief is the first of a series of policy briefs issued by The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and in cooperation with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES).
Decisive Storm appears to be an attempt by the kingdom to regain its dominance over Yemen while demonstrating more power in the region in general
Changing Role of Regional Actors toward Yemen:
For decades, Saudi Arabia dominated Yemen’s political landscape through its financial backing of a network of tribal and political parties and leaders. Their influence begun to dwindle in 2011 after the Arab Spring transferred some of their networks of influence to Qatar and Iran. By then, it became impossible for Saudi to maintain their traditional patronage system in Yemen: 2011’s uprising effectively shook the foundations of Yemen’s political structure.
The key manifestation of these changes has been the rise of the Houthis as a powerful political group. Widely seen through the prism of their friendly relations with Iran, the Houthis’ growing interest further increased the Islamic Republic’s involvement and spheres of influence in Yemen, leading some analysts to go as far as to characterize the conflict in Yemen as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
When analyzed through the lens of a struggle for control between Saudi and Iran, Decisive Storm appears to be an attempt by the kingdom to regain its dominance over Yemen while demonstrating more power in the region in general. Saudi Arabia has traditionally been wary of directly intervening—a wariness that was only deepened following a 2009 intervention against the Houthis along the Saudi border with Sa’ada, which proved to be a significant challenge for the Saudis—and has largely worked indirectly, through tribal and political proxies.
Hezbollah, provided training, financial and political support and played a big role paving the road between Tehran and Sa’ada.
Operation Decisive Storm marked a dramatic shift from this policy—spurred by Saudi anxieties over perceptions of a deepening Iranian presence in Yemen. These anxieties were particularly pushed by three events—the inauguration of direct Tehran to Sana’a flights, the Houthis’ decision to hold military exercises near the Saudi border and their decision to launch airstrikes against President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi Presidential palace in Aden—which lead the Saudis to believe that they had no choice but to directly intervene.
In 2011, Iran took advantage of the weakening central grip of the government in Sana’a and increased its support for the Houthis. This was largely a matter of convenience: Yemen represented an easy, low cost opportunity for Iran to pressure its Saudi rivals, while offering a new forum for the expansion of Iran’s economic and political interests. Iran’s regional ally, Hezbollah, provided training, financial and political support and played a big role paving the road between Tehran and Sa’ada. But it wasn’t just about the Houthis: Iran also recruited leftists and political groups who were left behind by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-brokered power transfer deal that removed Saleh from power, particularly in the south. But regardless of the expansion, Iran still spends far less on the Houthis compared to what it spends on allies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—even since the start of the war. That being said, Iran’s role has deepened since the launch of Operation Decisive Storm: in the face of increasing isolation, the Houthis have been forced to turn to Iran—their only clear international ally—rendering its role even more important than it was before.
This calls into question the viability of Saudi aims of eliminating Iran’s role in Yemen. Owing at least in part to its sustainable, comparatively low-cost strategy, it would appear that—barring some grand bargain between the Iranians and their Saudi Rival—that Iran’s influence in Yemen is here to stay.
Iran still spends far less on the Houthis compared to what it spends on allies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—even since the start of the war.
How would the Conflict Repercussions Be Reflected on Yemen?
The Saudi-led war on Yemen has had a dramatic effect on Yemen, leaving the country overcome by a storm of humanitarian, economic and societal repercussions.
It is the humanitarian repercussions, perhaps, that are most dramatic. The war has effectively shut off internal and external shipping and distribution routes, leading to fuel and food shortages and leaving an estimated 80% of Yemenis in need of humanitarian assistance. The breakdown of health care systems in some parts of the country—particularly the conflict-wracked southern port of Aden—has led to the resurgence of deadly diseases like dengue fever. And the fighting itself has left over 1500 civilians dead, according to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates.
Even if the war was to end tomorrow, Yemen’s economy would take years to recover. The nation’s already fragile infrastructure has been battered, foreign investors have nearly completely pulled out, while even prominent Yemeni business families have largely done the same. Blockade on imports have further strangled the Yemeni economy, having a trickledown effect on key importers, traders and those who depend on the goods themselves.
Even if the war was to end tomorrow, Yemen’s economy would take years to recover.
Equally dramatic, however, have been the societal fissures in the country. The fighting has left Yemen split on sectarian and geographic lines. The fighting in the south of the country has deepened longstanding tensions between the north and the formerly independent south, calling into question the continued viability of Yemeni unity and demanding the right to self-determination. To an even greater extent, the regionalization of the conflict has fueled an unprecedented rise of sectarian sentiment in Yemen, one that has been echoed by media channels which have simplistically—and dangerously—cast the Houthis and Yemenis who support them as heretical, “Safavid” tools of foreign powers. These factors have been epitomized by the growth of Al Qaeda in south Yemen: Al Qaeda, taking a staunchly sectarian tone, has positioned itself as the “protector” of Yemen’s Sunnis, broadening its support and going as far as to take effective control of the eastern port of Mukalla.
Beyond the deepening of these issues, the continuation of the conflict would inevitably deepen the regional involvement in the country, opening it up to new parties. Qatar, to a certain point, has been an increasing player in Yemen’s politics and, despite siding with Saudi Arabia in the current conflict, maintains its own networks of alliances in Yemen. In addition to state actors, there is also the risk of increasing activity by non-state actors. Most notably, Yemen has become home to an increasingly active branch of the Islamic State (IS) group, which has managed to steal recruits from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula AQAP while launching a series of devastating attacks targeting mosques in Sana’a.
On the surface, regardless, there remains an overall Yemeni and international understanding that there needs to be a political resolution to the conflict. That being said, there remains no political resolution on the horizon, as no party is willing to make the necessary concessions. Most significantly, there has yet to be strong pressure against any party by its regional supporters to push for peace and compromises; indeed, at the moment, both Tehran and Riyadh are fueling their proxies in Yemen more than actually pressuring them to stop fighting.
Beyond the deepening of these issues, the continuation of the conflict would inevitably deepen the regional involvement in the country, opening it up to new parties.
Exploring Peace Opportunities
While Yemen appears to be careening towards the precipice, there still remain opportunities to end the war and prevent the repetition of a Syria scenario. As the conflict deepens, it remains all the more crucial for international actors to pursue these opportunities, in addition to using the deteriorating humanitarian and political situation in Yemen to pressure the warring parties to come to the negotiating table. The supposedly current ceasefire in Yemen as the result of the current negotiations should not only be taken to deliver aid food. More importantly, it should be taken as a golden (perhaps last) chance of creating a sustainable peace in Yemen. If the current chance evaporates in the air, it is more difficult to imagine doors for peace anytime soon in Yemen.
Oman should be utilized as a mediator
Oman has long played a quiet, if productive, role in Yemen and that role has been deepened by this conflict. Having managed to maintain positive relations with all key sides—internal and external—in Yemen’s ongoing conflict, Oman has proven a remarkably well-placed mediator, particularly considering that it was the sole GCC nation not to join Decisive Storm. More than a 100 days after the war started in Yemen, it has become evident that the road to peace in Yemen goes through Oman. As Oman continues to take a different negotiation facilitation role between different local and external actors, it can use its influence to support current peace efforts of the UN Envoy. After all, Oman has a vested interest in the situation in Yemen, its neighbor to the west, and is deeply concerned with maintaining some modicum of peace in the country to prevent conflict from spilling over into its borders.
The supposedly current ceasefire in Yemen as the result of the current negotiations should not only be taken to deliver aid food.
The constitution should form the new deals
The only legitimate document in Yemen now is the constitution from before GCC deal was imposed. The constitution must therefore form the basis of any new political deals. The Peace and National Partnership agreement also shouldn’t be ignored. The outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference must be taken into consideration and implemented, even though flexibly. This is of special importance when it comes to the division of regions, which has been a sticking point for the Houthis. Similarly, the new constitution draft which was completed earlier this year and contributed to the outbreak of violence must be revised prior to being voted on in a referendum in the future. The mechanisms for such a revision must be included in any future deal.
Creating a common ground for negotiations
Before any steps forward, the current hostilities need to end. Finding a military common ground, such as a gradual withdrawal of Houthis from the south along with ending the shipping blockade would be a good start. In order for that to happen, Iran and the Saudis need to be convinced that the current war is not in their best interests—and Saudi Arabia must be given a face saving solution. For the Saudis, this largely falls in relation to their goals of “restoring Yemen’s legitimate government;” a consensus agreement allowing for Hadi’s exit—and the accession of Vice President Khaled Bahah to the presidency—would be able to provide for rhetorical fulfillment of the goal. The current nuclear deal happening with Iran can be the window for the international community to pressure Iranians who in turn can exert influence over the Houthis. The very same western actors have the ability to push Saudi Arabia towards accepting a peace.
has proven a remarkably well-placed mediator, particularly considering that it was the sole GCC nation not to join Decisive Storm.
The Yemeni government must go ahead with serious negotiations. Currently it refuses to enter negotiations unless Resolution 2216, which conditions Houthis to withdraw from cities, is fully implemented. Equally, the Houthis needs to hold up to their commitments under Peace and National Partnership Agreement, drafted in September of last year, which they have largely violated.
The former ruling party, GPC, can still be brought to the table and is not fully under the control of former president Saleh. When the coalition countries decided to go to war in Yemen, their political and non-violent tools were still not completely consumed. If they are convinced that there is a viable future for them, many of Saleh’s allies will actually defect from him.
The only legitimate document in Yemen now is the constitution from before GCC deal was imposed.
Regional countries, however, need to keep Yemen away from other regional proxy wars. For peace to exist in Yemen, it should not be used as a proxy for any other regional reasons by any regional power. To show that, they need to keep their connection with Yemen exclusive to state channels and representations. When regional countries reach that conviction, then the architecture of a new transition deal in Yemen can be determined, being sure to avoid the mistakes of the previous GCC deal, specifically with regards to maintaining a realistic time frame stressing inclusivity, and not neglecting non-political and issues like the economy, developmental projects and foreign aid. One of the main issues made the GCC initiative ultimately collapse was that it was not accompanied with a quick economic and aid Plan. Needless to say that any political deal that doesn’t make economy and aid delivery its priority before addressing any political issue will ultimately fail, again.
About the Sana’a Center:
The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies is an independent think-tank that seeks to foster change through knowledge production with a focus on Yemen and the surrounding region. The Center’s publications and programs, offered in both Arabic and English, cover political, social, economic and security related developments, aiming to impact policy locally, regionally, and internationally.Product Description
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It comes from Game 4 between the Wizards and the Atlanta Hawks, in which Washington star John Wall sat out with a wrist injury, and wore this number:
Ned Dishman/NBAE/Getty Images
Loud, yes. But hey, it's the NBA, where we've come to expect such a thing. Bold is beautiful, so live and let live -- oh wait.
What was he thinking? https://t.co/bu2jUwrrx9 — JR Smith (@TheRealJRSmith) May 11, 2015
Insert blushing, bulging-eyed emoji here.
Now, we're no fashion experts. So we're just going to leave this here and let you decide whether the Cavs sharpshooter has any room to speak.
H/T For the WinParis Jackson Therapeutic Boarding School In Utah?
Paris Jackson, daughter of the King of Pop Michael Jackson has been silenced—and possibly has become yet another victim of the “Illuminati.” We say this in quotes because in our eyes he was murdered and we don’t know by who but we do know she, herself has called the situation out using the words “they,” and “them.” Famously, her father has left a lot of signs that he was being controlled. Indeed, Latoya and Janet Jackson both said that he was being controlled, that they were responsible for it, though never saying who they are. In his song They Don’t Care About Us, Michael sings about Them and that they don’t care about us. Due to its release being just after the L.A. Riots, it’s normally put into that context. However, if all of this is true, it could be that this song is warning us ahead of time, telling us that those in charge don’t really care about us. In the music video for this song, there is one scene where you do see an eye painted on a wall, which adds to the suspicion considering the association of the Illuminati and the all-seeing eye.
It is believed that Michael Jackson was murdered by the Illuminati because of his influence and the fact that he no longer supported the Illuminati’s cause and was therefore, no longer useful. He being prescribed a drug that is rarely seen outside of hospital settings, and at deadly dosage, adds to this belief. Paris Jackson, his only daughter, also spoke out more directly against the Illuminati. With over 1 million followers on Twitter, she frequently posted pictures of Illuminati symbolism, warning us that they are in control. On June 5th, 2013 Paris Jackson attempted suicide. She overdosed on Motrin and cut her wrist with a meat cleaver. She was rushed to the hospital and barely survived. Previous to the attempt, she had been tweeting only song lyrics, particularly sad ones. The day before her attempt she had tweeted “yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away now it looks as though they’re here to stay” Which is a beautiful lyric from Yesterday by The Beatles. This was the last tweet from Paris, and it seems that all previous tweets from her have been deleted, despite her twitter saying she’s had hundreds of tweets.
The Illuminati have been suspected to control Hollywood for years, a secret society that hides behind curtains, The silent people in the background that pull the strings modifying and controlling your behavior. Many celebrities have talked about the ways that the “Illuminati,” have helped them with their career. Talking about how they become possessed on stage and they even have handlers. Michael Jackson has attempted to warn the public about corruption and what really went on behind the scenes. But the public just couldn’t understand his message. And his sister, Janet Jackson has spoken out about the subject stating that they “keep everybody at bay, they keep everybody away, by controlling him, control his thoughts” and continued “giving orders and not letting anyone near security.” She even went on to state that phones weren’t allowed in the house. [Video]
During another interview Michael was doing, he became very uneasy, stating:
“ My album is number one all over the world, America is the only one because I don’t want to say too much, it’s conspiracy, yeah, I don’t want to say much, I’m done, I don’t want to say much because I’m hurting, I’m hurting.” And even Oprah had the opportunity to interview Michael and during the interview, it seemed Michael was talking about possession. laughing about how he is “slave to the rhythm,” and then the alarm in his home went off. Almost as if saying to Michael that he better stop talking.
Janet Jackson has always believed that this was murder, in another interview Janet opened up about who she thought murdered her brother, when asked if she thought this was murder she confirmed, stating:
“Absolutely, absolutely, I said it in the beginning, I believe it to this day, you must remember Michael told me repeatedly that they were going to kill him and he was going to die. “ And when asked and who did it, she stayed silent. And in another interview about the death of her brother she stated “ They murdered my brother, and they know who they are it’s not just Dr. Murray I promise you that. it’s more people involved and they know exactly who they are we will let you I’m going to let you know exactly what’s happening and what’s going on.” Dr. Murray was blamed for the death of Michael Jackson—people were attacking him left and right saying he deserves the death penalty, Janet did not agree stating:
“ The Dr. that you’re looking at, that you see there was the fall guy. that’s what the was he was the fall guy.” A fall guy to take the blame because someone behind the scenes are pulling some strings to get their way. “There are people in the back rounds. “ Michael told me repeated that, they were going to kill him that he was going to die, and he would say that, and when I heard my mother scream he’s dead, immediately I said who did it, I didn’t say what for, what of, what happened, who did it, because he repeatedly said that.
After Paris Jackson’s suicide attempt, she was sent to The Diamond Ranch Academy in a secluded area in southern Utah. In fact, it is only outside of a popular polygamist town. It’s an academy that claims it’s for troubled kids and they offer therapy to help them. While Paris might be troubled, there seems to be a lot more to the academy than what we see. According to DRA Survivors[ this website ], the Diamond Ranch Academy is abusive to its students. There are plenty of testimonials that claim that the academy is extraordinarily abusive to its students.
In addition to everything, the Diamond Ranch Academy seems to employ professionals who are not so professional. According to this article, the majority of the people employed at the Diamond Ranch Academy do not hold the necessary accreditation or licenses to be working in a therapeutic fashion. The Diamond Ranch Academy was made for troubled children. Indeed, Paris Jackson was sent there because of her attempt on her life, to help her psychologically and give her much needed therapy. While most people wouldn’t disagree with thinking she needs professional help, Diamond Ranch Academy does not provide this sort of help, as they employ pseudo-professionals. For example, Dennis Mitchell, the Diamond Ranch Academy’s Medical Director, is neither a medical doctor nor mental health professional licensed in Utah. Another case, one of their therapists, Steven DeMille, supposedly earned his degree in 2010 through the University of Phoenix. And according to this document, the University of Phoenix does not have the accreditation to provide degrees in Psychology.
And DRA students have been speaking out online because of the pain they have suffered. One former student confirmed how terrible DRA really is—they attended the “boarding school,” in the year 2009, stating:
“I personally attended diamond ranch academy back in ‘09, I was 14 when my mom sent me. I was just super upset over a divorce nothing to serious. I spent almost 11 months there with being in “homeless.” And student reviews have stated that “homeless,” is where they put their new students, making them do hard labor and it’s speculated that they are also malnourished during this time. They continued to explain the how being at DRA affected their life stating, “ I was abused have permanent damage from that place both physically and mentally. One thing I have noticed not only the deaths always talked about(while at diamond ranch), but the deaths that come after being there. I have personally lost 3 friends from DRA and find it interesting and possibly worth looking into, the way they died happened to be the exact same all 3 of them.” If even a little bit of this speculation is true, we’re disgusted. And there are more than just one student speaking out against DRA, stating:
“In the first level called “homeless” we weren’t allowed any rights. We had to raise our hand for everything. I got in trouble a couple of times because I put on lip chap without asking. We had to sit cross legged for hours on the cement working on silly projects. We were given oats (water and oatmeal) and fruit for breakfast. For lunch we had rice and lentils and dinner was rice and lentils. We were given a 4L Milk jug that was filled up with tap water daily that we were forced to drink, yet we could only go to the outhouse a few times a day when they felt like taking us. I know of 4 girls that had urinated themselves because a staff member wouldn’t allow them to use the washroom. If you didn’t do what you were told you had to do “energy release”. This is where Ricky Dias could make you run up and down a field for 3 hours in the scorching hot sun with no water. I remember Ricky Dias yelling at a girl for not getting out of the shower on time the night before. He told this girl that if it happened again tonight he would: “Rip her out of the shower by her hair naked.” And the fact that they treat these “problem,” children in this way is scary. This isn’t how you help children heal. Scaring, abusing and torturing them doesn’t mentally stable anyone for that matter. All that it seems happens from this type of abuse is PTSD. You can read even more testimonials at Heal Online, where some have been brave enough to share their testimonies and some have been taken down, due to fear.
Additionally, through the same website, we have a list of all police calls and their reason. While some of these are not necessarily remarkable or surprising, there are some incredibly shocking calls listed. 3 calls say the reason for the call was Rape, and two others were simply noted as Sex Offense. There are several reports of assault and Child Abuse/Neglect. Although this is simply speculation as we do not have the police reports, this is shocking information. With the addition of past students claiming that the Diamond Ranch Academy is abusive, it really appears like this Diamond Ranch Academy is NOT somewhere where you would want to trust with helping your troubled child with their problems. There are many other places around Utah without this incredibly negative history, but Paris was sent to the one that appears to be involved in so much controversy with its continuous reports of child abuse.
The sad part is December of last year—2014 Paris stated that she felt better and didn’t want to go to DRA again. She wanted to be at home but according to a report from Daily Mail, stating:
“Paris Jackson, 15, doesn’t want to return to boarding school in Utah, Radar has reported.The troubled teen spent the Christmas Holidays with her brother, Prince Michael, 16, half-brother Blanket, 11, and natural mother Debbie Rowe, in Hawaii and California, and now doesn’t want to return to her $14,000-per-month therapeutic private school, where she is recovering from an apparent suicide attempt last June. Paris – daughter of late singer Michael Jackson – is now said to be at loggerheads with her legal guardian Katherine Jackson, 83, over returning to the school. “ And you can read the full report on DailyMail.
Why won’t the Jackson family listen to Paris? She would know first hand what happens in the facility—from the outside we can only assume and take into account the alumni students that have a testimony against DRA. If Michael Jackson was here today it doesn’t seem likely that he would ever put Paris in a “boarding school,” like this one. And we’re positive if she told her father she didn’t want to go back he would believe and trust her. When it comes to teaching your children discipline—this school just feels like a cop out and a way to get out a break from parenting.
When looking for more information about the Academy, we looked it up on Google Maps and found an interesting symbol on a truck sitting just outside of the academy.
Make of that what you will, but the all seeing eye and the pyramid are the two biggest symbols related to the Illuminati and it is very curious to see it just sitting there outside of the academy. There’s a few additional information about Paris that we discovered while searching for more information about her. Despite being the “Princess of Pop”, being interviewed several times about her father on Ellen, Oprah, and other programs, and being cast in a movie, it appears that some editors at Wikipedia have determined that her Wikipedia page should be deleted. You can view the information from the way back machine or likely previous versions on Wikipedia. This information about Paris was not on Michael Jackson’s page, which is the page that you’re redirected to when trying to find hers. According to the notes on Wikipedia, it was because she’s not well known enough. Over one million followers on twitter, her relation to the pop star, and upcoming film (maybe) were not enough for them.
It’s hard to believe that the daughter of Michael Jackson ‘isn’t well-known enough,” for a wiki page when she used to have and she’s been on Ellen discussing her acting career, movie plans and how she wants to be successful in her life. Just being the daughter of The King of Pop should be enough to land her a wiki page. There are so many people who have Wiki pages and all they did was get married or starred in a commercial. Isn’t there something just a little fishy about the whole story? Why was she on Ellen and super excited for her acting career and then thrown into this seemingly, terrible and haunting “legal,” prison?
Do you think that if Michael Jackson |
able to change the stimuli that create stress, such as heavy workloads, they can change how they respond to that stimuli. “There’s no way your job will be getting any easier anytime soon,” he said, to rueful nods from the audience, “so you need to change you.”
Blendon said he was surprised that so much media attention gets paid to “stressed-out” business executives, when low-income people reported such high levels of daily stress. Schubert added that “having control and agency are important. It can be hard to change conditions of poverty” for individuals, and this perceived lack of control only intensifies stress.
From the audience, NPR’s medical and science reporter Richard Knox asked how the medical profession can better address stress. Riff noted that “our training [as doctors] doesn’t provide us with the knowledge, and there’s no pill to prescribe [for stress].”
Fricchione concluded with a call to action. “We need to embed into medical analysis [of all patients] a measure of stress and develop a treatment plan based on the research,” he said. “It will take time, but I believe this will flow into medical educationTwitpic The Latest: Protesters have thrown light bulbs full of ammonia at police officers on Oxford Street, according to the Metropolitan Police Force's twitter feed.
It appears the majority if the violence is around London's Oxford Street shopping area, which was a rumored target for more aggressive protesters.
The Met says two significant violent events have occurred away from the main protest route.
The latest from Sky News is that 500 protesters have attacked an HSBC bank branch in Central London.
The Ritz Hotel, in Mayfair, has also been attacked by protesters, according to Sky.
Earlier:
Plixi Hundreds of thousands of people are out in the streets of London today protesting government budget cuts. Early estimates had it around 250,000, but now there are suggestions it could be 400,000.
Thus far, protests have been nothing like those in London earlier this year, where students invaded buildings and attacked Prince Charles' car.
The protest route stretches from Hyde Park, past Parliament, and down the Thames, according to the Guardian. It involves a wide section of people opposed to government policy, not just student protesters like previous events.
Twitpic These protest come just days after Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne released his latest budget, which called for more austerity cuts.
While the government has been cutting public spending, the UK has been experiencing high inflation and low growth, which is now dampening the ability of those cuts to trim the deficit.
Don't miss: Niall Ferguson's complete and definitive guide to sovereign debt crises >Mr. Lefebvre said the seeds were supplied by a British company, Thompson & Morgan. Although the link between the seeds and the illness had not been definitively established, he called on French retailers to pull the company’s seeds for fenugreek, mustard and arugula from shelves.
In a statement Saturday, Thompson & Morgan said it had not received any reports of problems with its seeds. “We note that the French outbreak was localized to a specific event, which would indicate to us that something local in the Bordeaux area, or the way the product has been handled and grown, is responsible for the incident rather than our seeds,” the statement said.
The company said it was cooperating with British health authorities as they looked into the matter.
The company also distributes seeds in the United States.
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The German outbreak began in early May and has sickened more than 3,800 people, nearly 900 of them with a serious complication involving acute kidney failure. Nearly all the cases involved people who lived or had traveled in Germany.
German authorities have blamed the outbreak on bean sprouts grown by a German commercial sprouter, which shut down on June 5. American health experts said the French outbreak was worrisome because it suggested that the ultimate source of the deadly bacteria — a rare and highly virulent E. coli strain known as O104:H4 — had not been found and contained.
“If there’s no linear connection from the first outbreak, then the simplest and the most ominous explanation is there’s an upstream source and that’s very concerning because that stuff could still be being distributed,” said Dr. Phillip Tarr, a professor of microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Dr. Tarr said it was still too early to draw firm conclusions about the cause of the latest round of illnesses. He said it was possible, although unlikely, that someone sickened in the earlier outbreak had prepared food served at the event in France and so passed on the infection.
“Traceback here is absolutely critical because that killer organism could be sitting around viable and not contained,” he said.
William E. Keene, a senior epidemiologist at the Oregon Public Health Division, said it was urgent to find out if the seeds used by the German grower had come from the same source as the seeds linked to the French cases.
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At least five of the French cases involved kidney failure, and tests on two of those people showed they were infected with the O104:H4 strain. The eight people infected in the Bègles area were adults, age 31 to 78. In addition, two children were sickened in another town and they were presumed also to have E. coli infections, although it was not clear if they had the same strain.We've written previously about the game Evony, for which we received a number of spam comments last July. We've also written about Bruce Everiss, the UK blogger who runs the site Bruce On Games, and the threat by Evony, LLC, a Delaware corporation which claims to be the maker or owner of the game, to sue Bruce for libel. That threat has now come to pass.
Despite indications that, at the time Bruce began posting about Evony, stung by the same spam comments that hit us, Evony was owned by a Chinese gold-farming company known as UMGE, the suit against Mister Everiss is being pressed in New South Wales, Australia of all places. When we wrote about the situation earlier, we speculated as to whether Australian libel or defamation laws are even more lax than those prevailing in the United Kingdom, which is notorious for its plaintiff friendliness.
We have short attention spans, and let the matter go. But today Bruce Everiss returned to our humble site, posting a link asking for help against Evony, LLC. (Whether you wish to help him or not is up to you.) But Evony, LLC's press release about the suit raises a few concerns. Who actually owns Evony, the game, and who on earth is Benjamin Gifford?
We think that computer and videogames are a trivial hobby, of little importance in the grand scheme of things, but consider free speech, potential legal forum abuse, and corporate quashing of potentially legitimate criticism to be very important indeed. In virtually all press coverage of this story, about a corporation suing a blogger who criticized its product, this quote from Benjamin Gifford, a director of Evony, LLC, has appeared:
Mr. Everiss' attempts to spread his patently false charges to others in the online community cannot be allowed to go unanswered," said Benjamin Gifford, vice development director for the legal IP strategic division for Evony LLC. "In the digital age in which we now live, online journalists and bloggers – and the traditional media outlets that may rely upon them as sources – must strive for a higher standard of integrity and accuracy. Mr. Everiss' complete disregard for even the most basic tenets of journalistic responsibility have left our company no alternative but to take these legal actions. We hope now, in facing the full light of day before the Supreme Court, that Mr. Everiss will finally come clean and clear the record.
Like Bruce Everiss, we thought that Evony, the game, was owned by UMGE, a Chinese company that specializes in selling "virtual gold" to players of World of Warcraft and similar games, rather than Evony, LLC, which has been described elsewhere as a Delaware corporation. Chinese "gold farmers" are notorious internet spammers, one of Mister Everiss's principal complaints about Evony. And as it turns out, at the time Everiss made his allegedly defamatory statements about Evony, the game, Evony, LLC, the American corporation which now claims to own the game, didn't even exist. Everiss's allegedly defamatory statements were made on July 10, 2009.
According to the records of the Delaware Secretary of State, Evony, LLC wasn't a corporation on July 10, 2009. The corporation was formed on July 22, 2009.
Now, it may be pure coincidence that Evony, LLC, an American corporation, formed twelve days after Bruce Everiss allegedly defamed Evony, the game. Products change hands and new owners form corporations all the time.
Or it may not be a coincidence. Delaware is the forum of choice for incorporation around the world for a reason. Its laws are notoriously friendly to corporations that really have nothing to do with Delaware, and getting records or discovery from a Delaware corporation can be very difficult indeed. In an Australian court, doing so might be even more difficult, as that would require transnational court orders, prohibitively expensive for a hypothetical defendant in the United Kingdom who might be required to retain lawyers in Australia and Delaware if he wished to know who was really suing him.
And then comes the question of why this Delaware corporation has a vice director, Benjamin Gifford, who appears to be jointly employed by Evony, LLC, and another, sort of murky entity, known as Assist Strategic Business Solutions, which has a mailing address at PO Box 126, Miranda, NSW, Australia, 2228.
According to his Linkedin profile (no longer available but cached here), Benjamin Gifford, in the greater Sidney Australia area, is indeed the "Vice Development Director" of Evony, LLC, the Delaware corporation formed twelve days after Bruce Everiss allegedly defamed Evony the game.
And if one searches Google for "Benjamin Gifford" and Evony, one finds Benjamin Gifford's Facebook page.
Note that Benjamin Gifford's "services" include Assist Strategic Business Solutions Pty Limited. According to Facebook, again, Assist Strategic Business Solutions has exactly one fan, and that fan is Benjamin Gifford.
So we'll take it as read that Benjamin Gifford works for Evony, LLC, the Delaware corporation, in computer games, and Assist Strategic Business Solutions, also in computer games. Except that Assist Strategic Business Solutions isn't a computer gaming company. It's a … well, I'm not sure what it is.
And I'm not sure what Benjamin Gifford does. He certainly doesn't seem to have a background in computer and videogame development.
While a military background in problem-solving may be as valued in the gaming industry as proficiency in, say, PERL or Visual Basic, most game industry job postings tend toward the second category. Although Assist Business Solutions is very close to Evony's law firm and its principal lawyer, Dean Groundwater. Just down the road, in fact:
So that may explain why Evony, LLC, which incorporated a world away twelve days after Bruce Everiss allegedly defamed its product, chose to sue Everiss in New South Wales, rather than Delaware, or the United Kingdom, or China for that matter. The game was purchased by Australians from … somebody … not a Chinese "gold farming" and spamming operation, nosirree.
Except, wait, Assist Business Solutions, and Benjamin Gifford, were working with something called Evony, LLC before the corporation ever formed.
Now, I'm no cynic, and only a cynic would suggest this, and so I'm not suggesting it: But a cynic might assume that the real owners of Evony, the game that according to Bruce Everiss advertises itself through tasteless breast shots and spam, chose to sue Bruce Everiss in Australia on the advice of Benjamin Gifford, a consultant employed to help the company develop its tasteless marketing and to quash criticism from journalists and bloggers like Bruce Everiss. Of course, I don't suggest that. And I don't suggest that Evony, LLC, which formed twelve days after Everiss's alleged defamation, has nothing to do with Delaware, or Australia, and that the sole purpose of this suit is to bankrupt Everiss by requiring him to fly around the world in order to defend himself from baseless allegations of libel and defamation by Evony's real owners, who pardon me, may not speak English so well, wherever they may be.
I don't suggest that at all.
Update: On the spam front, this depicts the top results from a Twitter search for Evony conducted at 2:15 pm, Eastern time, today:
That link, by the way, does not point to this post. I wouldn't enter it into my browser for all the tea in China.
Last 5 posts by Patrick Non-WhiteStory highlights Iranian military official: We will use "suitable equipment" to punish any attack
Israel test-fires a rocket propulsion system
The events come amid speculation in Israel about possible military plans
Iran issued a warning to Israel on Wednesday, with a top military figure saying Iran will "punish" any threat.
"The United States is fully aware that a military attack by the Zionist regime on Iran will not only cause tremendous damage to that regime, but it will also inflict serious damage to the U.S.," said Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, commander of the joint chiefs of staff, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.
"We, as the military, take every threat, however distant and improbable, as very real, and are fully prepared to use suitable equipment to punish any kind of mistake," he added, according to a CNN translation of his remarks.
Another semi-official Iranian news agency, ISNA, published a story in English quoting Firouzabadi as saying, "The U.S. officials know that Zionist regime's military attack against Iran will inflict heavy damages to the U.S. seriously as well as Zionist regime."
The Israeli Ministry of Defense said Wednesday that Israel "carried out the test-firing of a rocket propulsion system from the Palmachim military base. This had been planned by the Defense Establishment a long time ago and was carried out as scheduled."
"This is an impressive technological achievement and an important step in Israel's advances in the realms of missiles and space," said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
The comments from Iran and the Israeli missile test come as a very public debate is taking place in Israel about the possibility of a military strike on the Islamic republic.
Last week, Israel's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published a report that suggested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak both supported a strike against Iran's nuclear program.
That story was followed up Wednesday by a report in the Israeli daily Haaretz that Netanyahu was lobbying members of his cabinet to support a military strike against Iran despite the various difficulties inherent in such an operation. The paper attributed the information to a senior Israeli official, but did not disclose identity of their source.
Israeli and U.S. officials have expressed concerns that Iran is building nuclear weapons, despite Tehran's insistence that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes.
The publication of the two reports in the Israeli media brought criticism from cabinet members.
"A public debate about this is nothing less than a scandal. I don't think we've ever had anything like it," Dan Meridor, deputy prime minister and intelligence minister, told the Israeli newspaper Maariv. "The public elected a government to make decisions about things like this in secret. The public's right to know does not include the debate about classified matters like this."
Speaking to Israeli radio, Benny Begin, a minister without portfolio, called the public debate about Iran "a crazy free-for-all" and criticized former Israeli intelligence officials for speaking too openly about government deliberations on Iran.
The prime minister's office would not comment on the newspaper reports and referred reporters to comments he made about Iran on Monday.
"Regional powers who have control in the Middle East will try to ensure they have greater influence on the new regimes -- influence that will not always support us or be of benefit to us, to say the least," Netanyahu said to Israeli legislators during the opening session of the Knesset.
"One of these regional forces is Iran, which continues its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. A nuclear Iran would pose a dire threat on the Middle East and on the entire world. And of course, it poses a grave, direct threat on us too... We operate and will continue to operate intensely and determinately against those who threaten the security of the state of Israel and its citizens."CAIRO (Reuters) - South Sudan, already recognised by Israel, will forge relations with the Jewish state and hopes to help bring peace to the Middle East, the new state’s vice president said in remarks received on Friday.
Riek Machar, speaking to Alhurra television after the UN General Assembly in New York admitted South Sudan to the United Nations on Thursday, said that most of his country’s neighbours had diplomatic relations with Israel.
“Therefore we will have relations with all the Arab and Muslim countries and even with Israel...” Machar said in Arabic, according to a transcript in English sent to Reuters on Friday.
“As a matter of fact, we look forward to playing a role in solving the existing issues in the Arab world, even the issues between Israel and the Arab countries.”
“We fully understand the issues in the Arab world, particularly the Palestinian issue and the right to have a Palestinian state,” he added.
South Sudan, most of whose people follow Christian and traditional African beliefs, became independent on Saturday in line with a January referendum that was the culmination of a 2005 peace deal ending decades of civil war with the north.
Israel recognised South Sudan on Sunday, offering the new state economic help after it seceded from the mainly Arab and Muslim north — which has no relations with the Jewish state.
Machar said Israel’s recognition of South Sudan followed Juba’s recognition by Arab countries including north Sudan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
“We need international peace. We will have relations with all Arab countries. Israel initiated relations with us. This is not a strange development,” he added.The maker of ad-blocking browser Brave has raised $4.5m to expand its effort to let users voluntarily send bitcoin micropayments to their favorite websites in exchange for an ad-free experience.
When Brave Software first unveiled a version of the browser earlier this year, members of the media signed what has been called a cease-and-desist letter addressed to Brave. Signed by some of the biggest publishers in the world, the letter described what they perceived as the browser’s “blatantly illegal” blocking of their ad revenue.
Since then, the company’s founder has been engaging with those media outlets one-on-one in an effort to explain that Brave isn’t meant just to prevent Internet users from having their data mined, but to give media organizations a way to recover revenue from those who are already blocking ads.
In conversation with CoinDesk, Brave Software founder and CEO Brendan Eich said he intends to use the money to double the company’s employees from 10 to 20 people and continue to help bridge the gap between content creators and users.
Eich said:
“We want win-win for users and publishers. We put users first, but we want publishers to earn a better share than what they receive with traditional ad blocking.”
Participating in the round are Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
With a total of $7m now raised, the San Francisco-based firm plans to invest the money in adding new features to the platform and hiring additional staff with a special focus on quality assurance as part of its growth strategy.
The value proposition
Dan Morehead, CEO of Pantera Capital, which invested $1m in this most recent round, told CoinDesk it is exactly this ability to navigate the space between content creators and consumers that first “resonated” with his firm.
Morehead points to a history of seemingly dominant browsers including Netscape and Internet Explorer being disrupted by innovative new services as evidence of the place he sees Brave filling in the market today.
In Brave’s case, that innovation is a business model that empowers users by protecting their identity and gives media companies a way to generate the revenue.
“Right now you have the two extremes. The annoying ad and subscription models and the annoying ad blocking,” said Morehead, adding:
“Brave is this middle ground between the crazy ad system we currently have and where all ads are blocked and no content is produced.”
Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin
Brave is currently partnering with wallet providers BitGo and Coinbase to provide bitcoin wallets and purchasing tools and Eich says he hopes to partner in the future with wallet provider Blockchain.info.
But he added that while support for diverse wallets is a high priority, Brave has no plans to add support for ethereum or its new cryptocurrency cousin, Ethereum Classic.
“We’re just sticking with bitcoin because we need something frictionless under the hood,” he said.
He concluded:
“We’re still excited about using bitcoin.”
Going forward, Eich says one of the company’s top priorities will be to design identity-protection services that do a better job of preventing identifiable information from “leaking through” where marketers can access it.
Brave is currently available for download for iOS and Android mobile devices and several desktop platforms. The version currently available is a developer version, with a 1.0 release scheduled for September 2016.
Disclaimer: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Brave.
Advertising image via ShutterstockWARSAW, Poland — The Lithuanian Ministry of Defence has confirmed plans to acquire the Network Centric Air Defence System (NASAMS) from Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace with the aim to boost the country's air defense capabilities.
"Yes, we can confirm that Lithuania plans to assign some €100 million to acquire the NASAMS," Laimonas Brazaitis, a spokesperson for the ministry, told Defense News. "This is all the information we can provide at the moment since the negotiation process of the procurement is underway."
The latest development follows an earlier statement by the country's Defence Minister Juozas Olekas, who told local news agency BNS that his ministry planned to purchase the NASAMS for two Lithuanian military units.
The planned procurement, worth an estimated US $112.5 million, could allow the Lithuanian Armed Forces to become the system’s fifth operator in Europe. The NASAMS "is in operational use in Norway, Spain, USA, the Netherlands, Finland, one undisclosed customer, and in production for Oman," according to Kongsberg.
Kongsberg teamed up with Raytheon in the United States to develop the NASAMS. The air defense system is capable of targeting aircraft, UAVs and cruise missiles, and it can handle up to 72 simultaneous multiple engagements, according to data from its manufacturer.
Since Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have been mulling to establish a joint medium-range air defense system to protect their skies.This is the heart-stopping moment a father looks to the sky and prays his family survive before they leaping from a burning building in Russia.
A fire had broke out in their apartment in the five-storey block in the town of Strunino near Moscow, and the family were forced to flee.
A crowd of around 20 men gathered below the apartment building and urged the family to jump and they would catch them.
Scroll down for video
A father appears on the balcony of his burning apartment after being forced to flee the engulfing flames
Before jumping down to the bystanders on the ground, the father crosses his chest and looks to the sky and prays
First to jump was the family's youngest child, a toddler named Zhenyu, who gripped her blanket before falling though the smoke.
After she landed safely a second older child followed, before footage captured the children's mother Elena launching herself from the balcony to the bystanders waiting below.
Then it was the turn of the father Vitaly to jump and he is seen steadying himself on the window's edge.
After saying a prayer, the father then launches himself off the side of the building to escape the flames
As he reaches the ground, a group of bystanders are on hand to catch him and break his fall
He then crosses his heart twice and looks to the sky and prays that he and his family will survive.
The father then bends down and jumps from the balcony and he is succesfully caught by the bystanders.
The clip then ends with the father being helped to his feet and smoke continues to pour from the flat.
It is still unknown what caused the fire and the father is still recovering in hospital from his injuries.
Earlier the family's mother Elena was also forced to jump from her burning apartment after her children
The mother is caught by the bystanders. It is still unknown what caused the fire and the family are recovering in hospital
The mother, Elena, told Russian news website Newinform: 'My husband realised that we were not locked out.
'Everything in the apartment was in the black smoke, and we strongly choked. And I have a child with heart disease who is 11 months old.While some may wish to abolish the Electoral College due to its occasional (albeit twice in the last three first-term elections) conflict with the popular vote, I suggest that the popular vote itself – or at least the counting of it – is more the heart of the “problem.”
All but two states award all electors to whichever candidate gets the most votes, following a trend started in the 19th century.
The result in Florida was that more than 4.9 million votes for Clinton and others were effectively discarded. Trump’s margin was just over one percent, yet he was awarded all 29 electors. The “lost votes” outnumber the total votes cast in 43 other states and the District of Columbia.
This cannot be deemed fair, or in concert with the Founding Fathers’ ideals by anyone who looks at the data objectively.
Inasmuch as this system is used only for the president (the veep is just along for the ride these days), and the Electoral College merely formalizes the outcome in the states, two alternatives seem more useful and equitable.
Story continues below Go Beyond the Two-Sided Narrative! Get IVN’s weekly round-up of news and information for independent-minded voters in your inbox. Thanks for signing up! An unknown error occured :( Please try again later First Name* Last Name* Email Address* I accept IVN's terms and conditions? Sign Up
First, and best I believe, would be direct election by popular vote without regard to state borders. Exactly the system used within the states to elect their U.S. senators.
Second choice would be to allocate electors proportionately. This form would have awarded 259 votes to Clinton, 248 to Trump, and 31 among the others, a result that would have given a voice to serious third-party candidates. Had it been in place this time, it is likely that those candidates would have garnered a much greater share and created a motivation for the major parties to consider their views and constituents.
An ancillary effect would be that candidates, no longer able to either ignore states their opponent would most likely win, or take for granted those solidly in their column, would be compelled (behooved?) to campaign everywhere, meet all of the citizens and make the case for being everyone’s president rather than merely a red or blue one.
Citizens of every state can and should work to fix this issue by seeking the repeal of the statutes that created it. It might not be possible to accomplish it before the 2020 campaign begins but it can be done before we vote again.
This can be fixed. Contact your state legislators today.There are a growing number of business schools that now accept both the GMAT and the GRE -- HBS, GSB, Booth, Wharton, and Tuck, to name a few (click here for the full list).
Many students ask, which should I take?
Amazing at math? Take the GMAT. The quantitative portion of the GMAT covers a broader set of mathematical topics and offers more complicated problems than the GRE. Additionally, in the GRE you can use a calculator--not so for the GMAT. However, because those who take the GMAT (namely, business school students) score higher than those who take the GRE (general graduate school students), it is harder to get a high percentile math score on the GMAT than on the GRE. For example, a scaled GMAT quantitative score of 51 (i.e. no wrong answers) puts you in the 97th percentile and a score of 50 (only one wrong) puts you in the 87th percentile. On the GRE, a perfect quantitative score or one off would both put you in the 97th percentile.
Bad with time pressure? Take the GRE. In the GRE you are given a certain time allotment per section (30 minutes for 20 Verbal Reasoning questions or 35 minutes for 20 Quantitative Reasoning questions) and you are free to go back and forth answering questions within a section. The GRE even has a function that allows you to "flag" questions that you would like to return to. This allows you to calmly budget your time according to the difficulty of the questions and not waste your time on one impossible one. The GMAT on the other hand only presents one question at a time. You can't go back or advance to the next question until you answer the current one. The test does this because the difficulty of later questions depends upon how well you answer earlier ones. People who stress out on standardized testing may spend the GMAT fretting about each question they get and second-guessing their previous answers if they see an easier question later in the test.
Not a native English speaker? It depends. The GRE has a very heavy emphasis on vocabulary. Even native english speakers have to build up decks of flashcards to study the arcane words that the test loves to use. The GMAT emphasizes grammar logic. Pick your poison.
Bad at test taking in general? Take the GRE. Some business schools, usually the ones who are fighting to maintain or move up the MBA rankings (e.g. Wharton, Columbia, and Yale), place more emphasis on the average GMAT score of their incoming class, since publications such as U.S. News & World Report and The Economist use that statistic in their annual rankings of business schools. If you are going to get an equivalently low score on your standardized test, it is better to do so in the GRE since that statistic is not as closely tracked and a school may have less hesitancy in admitting you for fear that you will bring down that average.
Not 100% sure about business school? Or want to do a Joint Degree Program? Take the GRE. The GRE will get you into any graduate school, and leaves you some optionality. However, certain joint programs (such as the JD-MBA at Kellogg) require you to take the GMAT, so do your research.
100% sure about business school? Take the GMAT. If you feel you're equally equipped to take both the GRE and the GMAT, and you're serious about business school, take the GMAT. It can signal to the Adcom that you're serious about business school, and can even qualify you for some merit-based scholarships. However, if you know the GRE plays to your strengths, go ahead and take it. Your score matters!
At the end of the day, our advice is to take the test where you can score highest. Take practice tests to figure out which is best for you.In December 2012 a loose collection of anti-capitalist student organizations, inspired by the experience of the Maple Spring, came together with the goal of building a Canada-wide anti-capitalist student organization. Between December 2012 and now, we have experienced many successes. We succeeded in unifying around a political line that emphasized class struggle within the student movement. We spread that perspective across all of Canada. We built new sections of our organization, and expanded existing ones. We initiated, and won, political campaigns. We synthesized our experiences.
We are now prepared to announce the completion of this project – the establishment of the pan-Canadian Revolutionary Student Movement!
We know based on our experiences that the militant, revolutionary movement we need won’t be built by bureaucrats in student unions tied to the capitalist political parties, or by staying within the bounds of what the ruling class deems to be “acceptable”. We should not be afraid to break with tired, old models of activism. These are the very forces that have worked against building the student movement for years now, and it’s time to leave them behind! We need to unite together around a political line that emphasizes direct action, militancy, democracy, and combative unionism.
Capitalism cannot be fixed or improved. Far from being a ticket into middle class comfort, education under capitalism is increasingly just the means by which massive debt is yoked around the necks of working class youth. At best, under capitalism the education system either trains workers with the skills needed by capitalists, or consolidates the children of the capitalist class – the ruling class of tomorrow. Education, which should be liberating, is not. To be blunt, we can’t afford to fuck around any longer. We need a movement that is not afraid to organize, mobilize, and fight. This is the movement we’re building.
But what does the RSM actually do? RSM organizers were very active during the 2012 strike across Quebec, including within our student associations and in the demonstration at Victoriaville. We unified anti-capitalist students in both Quebec and the rest of Canada in order to spread the lessons of the 2012 strike across the country; our members in the rest of Canada were active in building solidarity for the 2012 strike. We organized across the province of Ontario to boycott the sham provincial elections. This summer, at the Montreal Student Movement Convention, we led the charge among radical students and succeeded in having the convention denounce the bureaucratic lobbyists in the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) and the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ). At Algonquin College we have successfully campaigned for affordable public transit for students. These are just a few of the successes that have informed our experiences.
More recently, with the spectre of a Spring 2015 strike hanging over our heads, in Quebec our forces are pushing harder than ever to make the upcoming student strike as large and as militant as possible. In English Canada we’re fighting to make truly democratic General Assemblies a reality on as many campuses as possible. In fact, the RSM at uOttawa has already been successful in this effort, and is forging ahead with a plan for a one-day strike in the Spring of 2015 – the first of its kind in English Canada!
At our most recent Conference we successfully unified our political perspective on a solid foundation which is revolutionary and anti-capitalist. Furthermore, we ratified an organizational constitution for the pan-Canadian RSM. These milestones represent a convergence of the last two years’ work as well as a jumping-off point for the years to come. In the two years leading up to this milestone, the RSM has emerged as the most militant, most active, and largest organization of anti-capitalist students and youth in the country. We have been able to engage in work and build contacts with radical students in every single region in Canada. In the years to come we will continue on this path, advancing the class struggle, winning fights for working-class students on campuses, and putting those struggles in the service of the broader working-class movement.
But we can’t do this alone. While our perspective and activities have advanced significantly over the past two years, we are far from perfect. We seek to unite with all anti-capitalist students across the country, either individual or groups, and build an organization that can truly shake society to its foundations – an organization that can make revolution. We call on all revolutionary students from across Canada to take part in this effort by joining their local RSM chapters, or by organizing chapters in schools or cities where they don’t yet exist. We call on all revolutionary student and youth organizations across Canada to engage with the RSM in building the Spring 2015 strike movement. You can get in contact with us by emailing info@mer-rsm.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Either we will destroy capitalism or capitalism will destroy us. Living conditions for workers are continuing to deteriorate. Unemployment is rising, while good jobs are disappearing. Austerity is an ever-present reality for increasing numbers of people. Another round of imperialist wars has been launched against Iraq, Syria, the Ukraine, and Afghanistan. Colonialism continues to ravage indigenous populations across Canada. The environmental crisis worsens. Now more than ever we have a chance, and the responsibility, to make history. Let’s not miss our chance.Before Obamacare launched, conservative outlets warned that the law would collapse as insurers shunned the overpriced, overregulated insurance exchanges. "More Insurers Drop Out Of Exchanges," warned Fox Business. "Three Major Insurers Flee California's Obamacare Exchange," said HotAir.com. "The President's health care law has almost completely failed to increase insurance market competition," wrote the Heritage Foundation.
It continued after the law's launch. I remember, a month or two after HealthCare.gov opened (and crashed), being on a panel with a conservative writer who said that Obamacare might well enter a death spiral as insurers pull out of the marketplaces.
On Tuesday, the idea that insurers would flee Obamacare joined the long procession of Obamacare disasters that simply didn't happen. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell announced that in the 44 states where numbers were available, the number of companies offering plans in 2015 would increase by 25 percent. So, far from fleeing the exchanges, insurers are rushing into them. Competition is increasing.
This news is not, as I write this on Tuesday evening, being carried on the home pages of Fox Business, HotAir.com, or the Heritage Foundation. (In case you're wondering, the most recent Obamacare article on FoxBusiness.com is "Obamacare website still not secure?"; on Hot Air.com, it's "How many people are poised to lose 2014 Obamacare coverage?"; at Heritage, it's "Why you can't keep your plan under Obamacare, explained in 3 minutes.")
This is the problem in the debate about Obamacare. The two sides live in different informational universes. A few days ago, the New Republic's Danny Vinik tweeted a picture of the headlines he was receiving from the conservative YG Network:
That top headline, "More bad news for Obamacare exchange customers," quotes a New York Times report that "in many places |
20 yards from Philip Rivers to Keenan Allen followed by a 44-yard, screen-pass TD to Melvin Gordon. "We want to go out there and start the game a lot better than we did tonight," cornerback Jason McCourty said. San Diego quarterbacks Rivers and Kellen Clemens weren't sacked; the first-team pass rush didn't make any noise.
One reason to be concerned: Penalties weren't good, especially in the red zone. On the drive in which Henry scored, the Titans advanced the ball to the 1-yard line and moved back 15 yards because of unsportsmanlike conduct against Anthony Fasano. Ben Jones was called for holding on the next play. Taylor Lewan encountered a familiar nemesis, illegal hands to the face, but the call against him later in the second quarter was declined. Coach Mike Mularkey was unhappy with the penalties, but he seemed pleased the offense overcame them.
Kickoff return plan: The Titans' kickoff-return strategy is interesting. Henry lined up in front of Tre McBride. Kick short and the rookie can deliver a punishing return. Go deeper and you get a more conventional guy. The trouble is, the ball went to McBride, and Henry hardly looks comfortable as an up-back leading him.
Swing tackle: Left guard Quinton Spain was the only offensive line starter who didn't play all the way to the half. That's because he was on the field to start the third quarter as the second-team left tackle. Josue Matias has been the No. 2 left tackle, but he's dealing with a knee injury and didn't dress. He could need patella surgery. Another inexperienced guy, Will Poehls, is the second right tackle. So the Titans are searching for their No. 3 swing tackle.Syrian security forces killed four demonstrators on Friday in the southern city of Deraa as they took part in a peaceful protest demanding political freedom and an end to corruption in Syria, a human rights activist said.
Akram al-Jawabra, Houssam Abdelwali Ayash, Ayham al-Harri and a member of the Abu Aoun family were among several thousands who where chanting "God, Syria, Freedom" and anti-corruption slogans, accusing the family of President Bashar Assad of corruption, when they were shot dead by security forces who were reinforced with troops flown in by helicopters, the activist said.
Accusing Israel Syria: Israel behind anti-government rallies Roee Nahmias Hundreds take part in 'day of rage' demonstrations in Damascus, Deir ez-Zor and Halab; Syrian official says'many residents received inciting text messages originating in army base in Palestine Syria: Israel behind anti-government rallies
"Hundreds of protesters were wounded and many were snatched by the security force from the hospital where they had been taken and removed to an unknown location," he added.
Plain-clothes Syrian police broke up a protest after Friday prayers at the main mosque in central Damascus, dragging away at least two activists, AFP reporters witnessed.
"There is no God but God," a crowd inside the men's section of the Omayyed Mosque chanted in crescendo after Friday prayers at noon.
Dozens of security agents who had gathered outside the mosque during the prayers, pulled out batons as soon as the chants broke out and detained at least two people, beating one one who resisted and kicking him in the nose.
At least 200 people immediately rallied in a square outside the mosque, chanting support for President Bashar al-Assad and waving Syrian flags. Some carried portraits of his late father and predecessor Hafez al-Assad.
'No mass discontent'
Terrified families could be seen fleeing the square, with many children in tears.
It was unclear what sparked the chaos, but a Facebook group The Syrian Revolution 2011 had called for demonstrations after Friday prayers during a "Day of Dignity."
A video posted on the group's Facebook page showed a crowd of men inside the mosque chanting "there is no God but God," while a few calls of "freedom" could be heard before being drowned out.
Another video showed one man being dragged out of the mosque by other men who had attended the prayers.
Demonstration in Deraa
The Facebook group also posted a video of a rally outside a landmark mosque in the city of Homs, 150 kilometres (about 100 miles) north of Damascus, where dozens of protesters marched, chanting "God, Syria, freedom."
Another video aired on Facebook showed what it described as demonstrators in Deraa shouting slogans earlier in the day against Syrian tycoon Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of President Assad, who owns several large businesses.
"Makhlouf you thief," shouted dozens of demonstrators marching in the streets.
State television said some "infiltrators" in the town of Deraa caused "chaos and riots" and smashed cars and some property before they were chased off by riot police. It said a similar demonstration in the coastal town of Banyas was dispersed without incident.
Two other videos, allegedly from the coastal city of Banias, showed crowds, one with at least 100 people, chanting for freedom.
According to websites affiliated with the Syrian opposition, the number of people killed and wounded in Deraa is much higher than what was initially reported. "According to information obtained this evening, the death toll stands at 54," one website claimed.
It was further reported that Syrian families posted messages online calling on their sons who serve in the army to disobey their commanders' orders to open fire on demonstrators.
According to another report, a soccer game held in the remote eastern Syrian city of Dir a-Zur turned into an anti-government protest.
Members of Syria's ruling hierarchy have indicated that they believe they are immune from the uprisings sweeping the Arab world, but small nonviolent protests this week have challenged their authority for the first time in decades.
On Wednesday plain-clothed security forces wielding batons dispersed 150 demonstrators in central Damascus who had gathered outside the Interior Ministry to demand the release of political prisoners.
Assad, who succeeded his father 11 years ago, is also head of the Baath party, which has been in power since 1963, banning opposition and imposing the emergency law still in force.
He said in an interview published in January that Syria's ruling hierarchy was "very closely linked to the beliefs of the people" and that there was no mass discontent against the state.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has said Syria's authorities were among the worst violators of human rights in 2010, jailing lawyers, torturing opponents and using violence to repress ethnic Kurds.
Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, sent troops into the city of Hama in 1982 to finish off the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Around 30,000 people were killed and much of the old quarter of the city was razed to the ground.
Reuters, AP, AFP contributed to the reportProsecutors have been told that anyone indulging in "virtual mobbing" campaigns -- where a person encourages others to target and abuse users on Twitter or Facebook -- can now be charged under the Serious Crime Act 2007.
The CPS also wants to bring the hammer down on "doxxers," where someone shares personal information like an address or telephone number to promote harassment of the victim. The hashtag, often seen as a way to bring people together for good causes, also makes the list. Now, if a social media user creates a "derogatory" hashtag with the intention to humiliate someone, they too can be charged under the same act.
The CPS also announced specific guidance on hate crimes and violence against women and girls. If a social media user is found to be "baiting" a person online by "labelling them as sexually promiscuous," they will be charged. The same can be said of users who Photoshop or digitally alter images of people on Facebook, Twitter and other social apps with the intention to demean them.
"Social media can be used to educate, entertain and enlighten but there are also people who use it to bully, intimidate and harass," says Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders. "Ignorance is not a defence and perceived anonymity is not an escape. Those who commit these acts, or encourage others to do the same, can and will be prosecuted."
While the guidelines come into force today, they will be subject to a 13-week consultation. That consultation will include the subject of "sexting," which the CPS said today will not become a prosecutable offence for people under the age of 18. Sexting isn't considered to be in the public interest, as long as images aren't sent under duress or in cases involving "exploitation, grooming or bullying."Santa WebCam 2019!
See Santa Claus live
on his North Pole web cam!
How can you see Santa live at the North Pole?
emailSanta.com has three ways! The Santa Tracker tracks Santa every day of the year!
Santa's Webcam (this page!) shows Santa Claus live at the North Pole!
Snoop on Santa getting ready for the big night on the Christmas Eve Santa Snooper!
Santa Webcam Live from the North Pole
Connect to Santa Webcam / Pause Santa Webcam
Click the green button to see Santa live on the Santa webcam!
(You may have to tap it twice on some devices)
There's a lot of magic in Santa's Web cam, so make sure to use WiFi or something other than Data to connect.
(And please be patient - it's a long way to the North Pole!)
Santa Intros his Santa Webcam
div class="col-xs-12">
Here's what Santa has to say about his Christmas webcam:
It's my new webcam!
I think it's the bomb.
Now everyone can watch me
On emailSanta.com!
So why little sugarplums did I do it?
I thought people'd like to see my office...
up at the North Pole.
We have a wild and crazy party time...
Up here after all!
Why it's as crazy as a fruitcake in July!
Sometimes you even see
elves bouncing by!
Jumping Jingle Bells,
they like to play tricks on me
If you tune in,
you will soon see!
I do love my helpers though,
my reindeer helpers too
They love to fly by
and look in my window
To see what it is that I do
But they don't come in
the office of course
They'd get stuck in here
They're as big as a horse!
And all the children when they look at my webcam
Are going to think they're watching one great big party
A Christmas party that is!
Ho Ho Ho
Oh I do hope the children enjoy watching me,
And they don't tell anyone about how many cookies I sneak!
Now where is that button that turns off the sound?
That way I won't get into any more trouble!
Santa Webcam ~ The App ~
The Santa Webcam is available in the App Store! Just touch the App Store Graphic above or here to get it!
(Note: the Santa Webcam App only works on devices BEFORE iOS 11! Sorry!)
Twas the app before Christmas
and at the North Pole
Santa was checking
his Naughty / Nice scroll
The children were playing
their brand new ipads
Twas nice and so quiet
for the Moms and the Dads
When what to my wondering eyes
should appear
But Santa at home
with elves and reindeer
So mamma in her 'kerchief,
and I in my cap,
Decided to check out
Santa's new app
With a tap on my screen,
so lively and quick
I was connected to Santa,
to Jolly Saint Nick!
I could see what he was doing,
that jolly old elf.
And I laughed when I saw him,
in spite of myself.
He was munching on cookies
and playing with toys
He was checking his emails,
from good girls and boys
My children came running
to see my download.
The best Santa app
they’d ever been showed!
So dash away, dash away,
dash away all
Get the SantaWebcam app,
it’s a wonderful LOL!
Merry Christmas!
(Have those cheeky elves have been writing things again?!)As Radley Balko noted this morning, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is seeking federal permission to prevent residents of his city from using food stamps to buy soda or other sugar-sweetened beverages. The New York Times reports that "public health experts greeted Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal cautiously":
George Hacker, senior policy adviser for the health promotion project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said a more equitable approach might be to use educational campaigns to dissuade food-stamp users from buying sugared drinks. "The world would be better, I think, if people limited their purchases of sugared beverages," Mr. Hacker said. "However, there are a great many ethical reasons to consider why one would not want to stigmatize people on food stamps."
This concern about stigmatizing poor people should not be confused with a concern about imposing disproportionate burdens on them in the name of public health, because CSPI does support a sin tax on soda, a levy that hits people of modest means especially hard. As with cigarette taxes, another regressive public health intervention, the quasi-progressive justification is that punishing poor people for their consumption choices ultimately improves their lives by changing their behavior: The more the tax hurts them, the more it helps them. But the same logic also applies to the food stamp restrictions that Bloomberg wants, which have basically the same impact, making unhealthy choices harder to afford for the people who need the nudge most.
More on soda taxes here. I profiled CSPI in a 2003 Reason article that opened by describing CSPI founder Michael Jacobson's distaste for "liquid candy."White Racial Identity, Racial Mixture, and the "One Drop Rule"
by A.D. Powell
September-November 2004
writer for Interracial Voice
Presented at Fifth Union, June 18, 2004
In the days of the Third Reich, the Nazis imposed the "Nuremberg Laws"on German citizens. Assimilated German Jews were told that they were not German. It didn't matter that their language, culture and self-image were all proudly German. They now belonged to a separate and "inferior race." Nazi propaganda pictured all Jews as racially distinct from Germans, but the reality was that Jews were forced to wear symbols of identification – yellow Stars of David – so they would not be able to "pass" as German or "Aryan." People with either one Jewish parent or grandparent found themselves reclassified as mischlings or "mixed race." The biographies of German Jews and part-Jews frequently speak of "passing for Aryan" and the desirability of having Nordic as opposed to darker or more Semitic looks because the former facilitated the ability to "pass." Are we having a feeling of deja vu yet?
While most Americans have been carefully taught that the Nazis were crazy, evil, racist, etc., for "seeing" separate "races" in Europe when they didn't exist, we are never asked to see the similarity between the Nuremberg Laws that defined Jews and mischlings and our own legal and social traditions of racial classification – especially the myth that white people with a "taint" of Jewish – excuse me – Negro blood are not truly white but secret, "light-skinned" members of the "black race" who are only "passing for white." Just as German Jews were declared unworthy of the honor of being German, American laws, films, novels, television programs, etc., encourage Americans to accept the idea that even small amounts of "black blood" destroy all right to a European-American heritage and identity. The great difference is that, while the Nazis were avowed racists, today's American society is based on laws that enforce legal and social equality between the so-called "races." Indeed, the idea that otherwise white persons can be secret, hidden members of the black race, is promoted by many of the very people who pride themselves on fighting racism in others.
Documentary Genocide and "Lynching" Reputations
In its June 16, 1996 issue, the very liberal and prestigious The New Yorker magazine published an article by Harvard University Afro-American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in which he denounced the late, highly respected New York Times book critic and author, Anatole Broyard, as a "light-skinned black man" who had "passed for white." Entitled, "White Like Me: The True Lies of Anatole Broyard," Gates' article charged Broyard, who was of Louisiana Creole parentage, with "lying" about his "race" because he did not identify with blacks. The attack by Gates and The New Yorker was aimed not just at one man but at all Americans in a similar situation. It was an attack that Adolf Hitler and Walter Plecker would have enthusiastically supported. Broyard had brought the blood of the "inferior" Negro race into the "superior" white race and "polluted" the latter. But wait! Our mainstream American media don't believe in superior and inferior races. In our society, the ideals of racial equality and opposition to racism are trumpeted from the rooftops. What's going on here?
A recent major motion picture, The Human Stain (and the novel that preceded it), also solemnly warned the nation that strange, inferior creatures it called "light-skinned blacks" had implanted themselves into the white race. Like the German Jews who looked German, acted German, etc., but were NOT truly German, these strange creatures looked and acted white but were most unworthy of that honor. It sounds almost like one of those horror movies in which aliens take over human bodies in an attempt to walk among us do us harm. Miramax, the company that produced the film, sent special instructions to movie critics to make sure that all of them knew about so-called "passing for white" and would describe the otherwise white protagonist, called "Coleman Silk," as a "light-skinned black man" who was guilty of the heinous crime of claiming the "honor" of being white when he was tainted by the blood of the inferior black race – excuse me, we don't believe in that anymore. He tainted the white race with the blood of the blacks in whose equality Miramax and all the other mainstream movie critics claim to believe. Does this make sense? If a man tells you he's Irish and you later find out that he's also part-German, do you denounce him as a lying German who only "passed" for Irish? No, because Irish and Germans are considered biological and social equals. If our Irishman is part-German, you are not getting an inferior product. If our Irishman is part-Negro, he is no longer Irish because the Negro blood means you are getting an "inferior" person and not the "superior" person you thought he was. This makes sense if you're a racist who believes in white racial purity, but all these anti-passing accusations are made by people who claim to be against racism. Why is that?
The Human Stain was only the latest in a string of warnings about the white race being infiltrated by these alien, genetic freaks called "light-skinned blacks." While those Americans who lived through the pre-Civil Rights era when racism (not anti-racism) was politically correct are aware of the so-called "anti-miscegenation" laws that supposedly prevented Negro blood from entering the white race, most Americans probably learn this lesson from Hollywood. Constant television reruns of films such as the two versions of Imitation of Life, Pinky and various television programs present the horror movie scenario- the inferior, genetic freaks look like us but are not us.
American journalists who write about so-called "passing for white" solemnly inform the public that "one drop" of "black blood" makes you "black" in the United States of America. They admit that this idea is rooted in the presumed inferiority of the race in whose equality they claim to believe. However, unlike other racist practices from the pre-Civil Rights era, we are told that the "one drop rule" is something we should embrace rather than scorn. We are told that those who reject the racism of the "one drop rule" are worthy of our contempt. Why the contradiction? Why is the "one drop" myth the only racist rule that self-described anti-racists in the media and academia are fighting to preserve? Why id the only credible and powerful opposition to the proposed "multiracial option" for the U.S. Census, for example, come from NAACP, the National Council of La Raza and other so-called civil rights organizations? Why are certain questions and matter of fact never presented to the public when the topic of so-called "passing for white" comes up? Consider the following:
Hispanics and Arabs within the U.S. population show obvious signs of the supposedly dreaded "black blood." Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic are essentially mulatto nations. Nearly all Mexicans have some black ancestry from the African slaves who were brought to colonial Mexico and then assimilated into the Indian and mestizo populations. Why is there an "escape hatch" for Hispanics and Arabs when their Anglo and Creole counterparts are condemned as "light-skinned blacks"? Whites who are told by family members to consider themselves "black" are told that "society" or "whites" in general hate and despise the dreaded "black blood." But what racist worth his salt says that the "inferior" Negro blood is more than welcome into the white race as long as it comes speaking Spanish or Arabic?
Since it is acknowledged that the "one drop rule" is racist, why are we told to preserve it instead of eliminating it? Why aren't the people accused of "passing for white" hailed as heroes who defied racism instead of being subjected to character assassination and the kind of condemnation usually reserved for child molesters and serial killers?
Why are black American elites and black-identified mulattoes usually the most fanatical and enthusiastic supporters of the "one drop rule"? Indeed, could this racist myth even continue to exist in polite society if blacks turned against it?
Why is evidence against the "one drop rule" ignored? Why is the public never told that the antebellum Southern states legally permitted persons with one-fourth to one-eighth "Negro blood" into the white race, and could be even more lenient when the person or family was accepted by the local white community? Why are we not told that the "one drop rule" is not related to slavery but accompanied the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the eugenics movement? Why is the audience not told that no American is legally obligated to call himself "black" and the "one drop rule" depends almost totally on self-policing? Why are they lying to us?
While the Jews of Europe were punished with physical genocide for supposedly "polluting the "pure blood" of the "Aryan race," Anglo and Creole Americans of partial black ancestry are subjected to documentary genocide and the lynching of reputations. People are declared "black" because some paper or ancestral document has the telltale words "black," "Negro," "Colored," or "mulatto." Or, like Anatole Broyard, their reputations are blackened after they are dead and can't defend themselves.
The web sites Interracial Voice and The Multiracial Activist have spent several years challenging the idea of hypodescent. This is the doctrine that the offspring of mixed race unions should always identify with the ancestral group with the lowest social status and never with the higher status ancestry. In those years we have learned many things about "race" in the United States.
American Indian Ancestry and White Racial Identity
All white supremacists hold that white racial purity is essential for the survival of the white race. The support of so-called anti-racists for the "one drop rule" complements this idea perfectly. If a drop of black blood can truly make a white person black, who can blame whites who are opposed to interracial marriage? Bigotry becomes self-defense. Yet, even here there are contradictions. American Indian blood is considered harmless and compatible with white ancestry in a way that black blood is not. We started to ask why an American can say, "My grandmother is an Indian but I am white," when he cannot say "My grandmother is black but I am white" without his right to a white identity being challenged.
All our lives we have seen people such as the late Johnny Cash, Burt Reynolds, Loretta Lynn, Cher, etc., proudly proclaim their American Indian ancestry without this acknowledgment being taken as a repudiation of their white ancestry or right to a white identity. One of Johnny Cash's records, called Bitter Tears, is devoted to denouncing the wrongs done to American Indians by that favorite villain of politically correct American history, "The White Man." But somehow Johnny's whiteness was not compromised by this. According to the letter of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, most part-Indian whites would not be white, yet few Americans realize this. Why can't "black blood" be treated like American Indian blood? Why are Interracial Voice and The Multiracial Activist the only ones asking that question?
Have you noticed that, while Bell Curve type studies purporting to show the genetic inferiority of blacks appear with some regularity, no one produces studies purporting to show that American Indians are racially inferior to whites? Could this be because the wide acknowledgment of American Indian ancestry in whites protects American Indians from this kind of racial attack? There is no political profit in it. In the two version of the American movie, The Squawman, the American Indian wife of a British aristocrat is clearly presented as racially inferior, but their son is not. The son is even considered a worthy heir to his father's title and estates in England. Change the wife's race to "black" and try to imagine that ending.
White Honor, Dishonor, and the Severing of Interracial Family Ties
Sociologist Orlando Patterson, in his cross-cultural study of slavery, Slavery and Social Death, describes a slave as a person with no ancestors. Biologically, of course, everyone has ancestors. But the slave has no official family and no family rights and obligations within society. He is socially dead. In American history, describing a physically white person as nonwhite, especially Negro or black, was a perfect way for white elites to send a message to the white masses: Don't get too close to or friendly with blacks or mulattoes. Otherwise, you will lose your race, your honor, your whiteness, your very ancestry. You will become socially dead to other whites.
The producers of the 1934 version of Imitation of Life worried about how they were going to present the "passing for white" girl without evoking the specter of miscegenation. Clearly, some "pure white" had to mate with a Negro for the girl to exist. How could they avoid reminding the audience of that? It is no accident that, in Pinky, Imitation of Life, The Human Stain and other anti-passing melodramas, you almost never see any parents or ancestors who look like the accused passer. We are told that the absent father of the "passing" girl of Imitation of Life fame was a "real light-skinned colored man" since her docile black mammy would never be so bold and uppity as to mate with a real white man. The point is that we are meant to see the girl as a genetic freak. Whites did not produce her, we are told, and therefore have no family responsibility to her. We are also told that her spiritual descendant, Anatole Broyard, had no white ancestors since there were no "pure" whites among his immediate ancestors. The same could be said for most Latinos, but somehow their lack of white racial purity doesn't count.
What is a family. What is an ethnic group? What are the obligations of a family? The "one drop rule" and the anti-passing drama tell us that the "passer" has sacred obligations to his socially inferior black-identified relatives which should prevent his upward mobility, but his "pure" white relatives have no obligation to him. Officially, he doesn't have any white relatives or ancestors. The very term "light-skinned," which has been used to describe anyone from brown-skinned people to Nordic blonds, is used as a euphemism to avoid saying "white." We are taught that the "passer" is "light-skinned" but not "white." Why? Because the word "white" implies a connection to and family relationships with white people – something anti-miscegenation laws and racial classification statutes were designed to destroy.
As previously mentioned, black elites and black-identified mulattoes have internalized many of these racist beliefs that "whites" and "blacks" can never be part of the same family. Yet, the Southern mulatto elite, which traditionally considered themselves the "superior" members of the "inferior" race, have families that are very racially mixed. The "one drop rule" or myth allows them the emotional luxury of hating whites in general while prizing the physical characteristics that white ancestry bestows. Most of the anti-passing hysteria in the post Civil Rights era seems to come from this group. Their fanatical devotion to the "one drop rule" is also used as a moral shield by others who want to promote the "one drop" or hypodescent ideology that proclaimed blacks and mulattoes inferior in the first place.
Hating Whites and Loving White Genes: Black Support of the "One Drop Myth" and White Racial Purity
In 1999 The Washington Post published an emotional article by one of its so-called "black" reporters, Lonnae O'Neal Parker, in which the author described her trauma when she discovered that her first cousin, Kim, was white-identified. This shouldn't have been too surprising since Kim was born to and reared by a "pure" white mother, looks totally white, and has a "light-skinned" mulatto father who was not keen to identify with blacks.
O'Neal Parker's article became a nationwide sensation. The Seattle Times and other papers reprinted it and ABC Television's Nightline devoted an entire episode to it. O'Neal parker's highly irrational thesis was that Cousin Kim and all others in a similar situation have an obligation to repudiate their white ancestry and identify with blacks in order to make up for any wrongs done to blacks and black-identified mulattoes by whites in both the present and the distant past. In other words, the "one drop rule" is not presented to the public as a sign of black moral superiority instead of black biological inferiority. Cousin Kim supposedly chose the evil, racist whites over the innocent, pure-hearted blacks. This is also the way the "one drop" myth was justified in The Human Stain and the attacks on Anatole Broyard. O'Neal Parker, who is herself mulatto elite – not physically black but not as white as Kim – has no problem incorporating white genes into her family, but she does not want whites in it since whites are defined as the enemy Only in Interracial Voice and The Multiracial Activist could one find some suggestion that O'Neal Parker's racial views were – shall we say – not a picture of good mental health.
We find it very interesting that O'Neal Parker insists that Cousin Kim must refuse to be white because "whites" are the enemies of blacks. It was the white-owned Washington Post and other white media that promoted O-Neal Parker's venom and let it go unchallenged. They were the ones who gave her a forum. In The New York Times, black columnist Brent Staples performs a similar task ; his columns are used mainly to promote the "one drop rule" and denounce "passing for white." The "one drop" myth is promoted either through blacks or justified as a glorification of blacks.
Racial Kidnaping and Ethnic Rape
What do we mean by a glorification of blacks? At Interracial Voice we started using the terms racial kidnaping and ethnic rape to refer to the practice of claiming as "black" people who were not physically black and did not identify with blacks. Kidnaping and rape are appropriate analogies here because the victims are taken by force – clearly against their will. Anatole Broyard was such a victim. Here are some other major examples:
Michael Morris Healy, an Irish immigrant, arrived in the U.S. around 1815 and established a plantation near Macon, Georgia. He took a mulatto slave, Eliza Clark, as his common-law wife and the two produced 10 children. All of the surviving children were sent North to be educated and protected from slavery since Georgia made legal manumission almost impossible. They were baptized as Catholics and lived the rest of their lives as proud Irish Americans. James Augustine Healy became Bishop of Portland, Maine. Patrick Francis Healy became President of Georgetown University from 1873 to 1881. Michael Morris Healy, Jr. joined the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard) and became a celebrated sea captain, the sole representative of the U.S. Government in Alaska. Now, many decades after their deaths, these proud (and "white") Irish Americans are being widely promoted as "blacks." First "blacks" this and first "blacks" that, even though no one identified with blacks could have accomplished what they did. The U.S. Government named an ice cutter after Captain Healy, but only to honor blacks, not him. Indeed, for Captain Healy it is an insult rather than an "honor."
What is the point of this racial or ethnic kidnaping? Does it prove what blacks could accomplish? No! The Healys were biologically more white than black and, socially, they were white. What can the public conclude except that something is strangely unique, mystical and inferior about black genes? (See http://www.interracialvoice.com/powell8.html)
On November 30, 1944 Calvin Clark Davis of Bear Lake, Michigan died a hero's death in World War II as part of the U.S. Army Air Force. He was posthumously honored with several medals. However, the "honor" was tainted by the fact that Davis was described as a "black man" who "pretended to be white." Indeed, Davis' racial identity has received far more publicity than his military heroics. I wrote an article about Davis for Interracial Voice called "Pissing on the Grave of Heroes." Davis, we are told:
passed for white
lied about who he was
concealed his race
faked being white
Remember what I said about having no ancestors? Far from being honored for his military service, Davis is being publicly shamed and dishonored.
Another World War II hero "outed" for alleged "passing for white" was Pvt. Robert Brooks of Sadieville, Kentucky. He died heroically in the Philippines on December 8, 1941. His story appears in Studs Terkel's book on World War II, The Good War.
Here are other prominent examples of racial kidnaping or ethnic rape:
Jean Toomer, whose name is taught to schoolchildren and college students as the "black" author of a book of poetry and short stories called Cane, was in fact a multiracial Caucasian who rejected a false "black" identity and wrote extensively on why the U.S. racial classification system should be eliminated in favor of a common "American" identity.
, whose name is taught to schoolchildren and college students as the "black" author of a book of poetry and short stories called Cane, was in fact a multiracial Caucasian who rejected a false "black" identity and wrote extensively on why the U.S. racial classification system should be eliminated in favor of a common "American" identity. Alexander Dumas, the French author of the famed novel The Three Musketeers, is presented to American schoolchildren as "black" when he was really three-quarters white and in no way socially "black."
, the French author of the famed novel The Three Musketeers, is presented to American schoolchildren as "black" when he was really three-quarters white and in no way socially "black." Alexander Pushkin, the greatest of Russian poets and father of Russian literature, is frequently presented to schoolchildren as another famous "black" because of one African great-grandfather.
Why are all of these people described as "black" in American schools even though there are no physical or cultural standards to justify that description? Are they claimed as "black" because of a tacit fear that "black" genes cannot stand on their own? Is this a "liberal" version of the old racist canard that miscegenation "improves" the "Negro" race while "degrading" the white race?
The Lies that Sustain the Myth of "Passing for White"
When the "one drop myth" is reported in the mainstream media, no mention whatsoever is made of the evidence against it. Such evidence, if presented, never sees the light of day and is limited to a few people who take pains to study the subject. The American people are not allowed to consider the following:
If the "one drop rule" is real and enforced by whites, why is a glaring exception made for Hispanics and Arab-Americans? It does not take a genius to see both the physical and historical evidence that Hispanics and Arabs are nearly all "tainted" with the blood of what used to be America's official "inferior race."
Why aren't Americans told that antebellum definitions of "white" tended to be more liberal than 20th century definitions; people with one-fourth to one-eighth Negro blood were legally allowed into the white race. For example, Edison Hemings Jefferson, the former slave son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (and whose white descendants are the only Hemings descendants to pass a DNA test showing descent from the Jefferson line), was legally white once he was manumitted because the has at least seven-eights white. We should not be surprised that in both abolitionist and Republican Party literature, "white slaves" were frequently used to arouse the Northern white population against slavery. Why are these facts kept from the American people?
What are the real world standards for saying that someone is "black" and not "white"? Edison Hemings Jefferson is always described in the media as "light-skinned black" who only "passed for white," but his descendants are acknowledged as white without qualification. Where is the cutoff point? The only one I can see is that dead whites with a touch of the dreaded "tarbush" are "black" and those still living are 'white."
In the magazine American Heritage, a white woman named Jillian Sim announced that she had discovered that her great-grandmother was Anita Hemmings, a white mulatto or mixed white who graduated from Vassar College in the late 19th century was almost expelled for being "colored" when a wealthy and envious classmate decided to have her background investigated. Now Vassar proudly claims that Anita, who lived as white for the rest of her life |
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